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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#141

Post by javajosh »

lioeters wrote: post #55

I don't understand how this acquisition is not anti-competitive behavior. It was such a joy to see Figma's growth and technical innovation, and now it will just get eaten by the established power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc.#Anti-competitive_pr...

I don't think "the government" does anything unless someone complains. In this case, the process is to send a letter requesting a "Business Review" [1]. It's probably a "fill out this simple 30 page form, wait 2.5 years (max!) and then have your review request politely declined" situation, but I suppose it's foolish to complain before trying. It feels like one of those processes that costs lawyer money that another business would usually pay for; however it's not clear what business would pay for this - maybe a heavy user of Figma? But then even if you 'win' and stop the sale, doesn't that alienate you from the founders?

1 - https://www.justice.gov/atr/business-reviews

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#142

Post by scarface74 »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #125
nayroclade wrote: post #54

Many years ago, when Adobe bought Macromedia, they acquired a tool called Fireworks[1]. This was a combined bitmap and vector editor that was incredibly well-optimised for user-interface and web design, at a time when most designers were paying exorbitant license fees to do such work painfully and slowly in Photoshop and Illustrator. Fireworks was cheap, powerful, and hugely ahead of its time. Many of the features an…

Adobe’s direct competitor is Adobe XD, which launched with practically no features and was slowly developed only to dwindle to death as a rarely used cloud service, while everyone does the important work in Figma. The parent comment is spot-on. Antitrust legislation needs to be invoked to prevent this acquisition from happening.

It amazes me that people posting on a YC controlled board whose entire purpose for existing is to fund startups long enough to get an exit - statistically most likely through an acquisition by a bigger company - wants to stop acquisitions.

The funding environment for startups would be a lot worse if investors thought that the only way they could recoup their investments is through exits. Look how few of YC companies actually go public.

Even companies that do go public are often just surviving long enough to hopefully get acquired.

The founders at Figma chose to be acquired. It’s their product and their company.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#143

Post by yuchi »

yuchi wrote: post #18

If true, congratulations for Figma founders, and a bad day for designers that were looking for a way to escape from Adobe. I don’t think that in the long term this will give Figma as an ecosystem any benefit — unless Adobe will keep it separate from the main Creative Cloud. This reminds me of the Trello acquisition. As a loyal Figma user I’m pretty sceptical of the future. Hope to be wrong. UPDATE: Looks like it is i…

UPDATE n. 2: Dylan Field (CEO of Figma) has addressed these kind of concerns on their public disclore of the fact: https://www.figma.com/blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/

Citing him:

> Adobe is deeply committed to keeping Figma operating autonomously and I will continue to serve as CEO, reporting to David Wadhwani.

As others have said, there’s really a missing OSS version out there that can compete feature-by-feature with Sketch / Figma / XD. Layout engine capabilities are the biggest missing feature in competitors.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#144

Post by oooofigma »

nayroclade wrote: post #54

Many years ago, when Adobe bought Macromedia, they acquired a tool called Fireworks[1]. This was a combined bitmap and vector editor that was incredibly well-optimised for user-interface and web design, at a time when most designers were paying exorbitant license fees to do such work painfully and slowly in Photoshop and Illustrator. Fireworks was cheap, powerful, and hugely ahead of its time. Many of the features an…

Making 9 sliced graphics for the web is obsolete though.

That said Flash also supported a bunch of innovation for its time, and it too was obsoleted.

Maybe 9 slice graphic were already dead at Fireworks’ peak.

Figma is officially way more overrated than this stuff ever was.

Does anyone know a person who’s like, bonafide smart, using Figma? I feel like everyone I know who does “Figma” day to day is doing negative ROI shit. It’s like anti-R&D. It’s the ultimate bullshit job for non engineers.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#145

Post by scrollaway »

tomovo wrote: post #135
scrollaway wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is huge news for Sketch. Why, do they have an online editor yet? As a cto/admin/manager/hiring person: Sketch is worthless for me because I don't have a Mac. But because of that, my company does not use it: despite designers working on macOS, if I can't run it to look at their work and actively comment/collaborate with them, it's not a useful workflow. Therefore instead we hire people familiar with Figma (sadl…

They are hiring for people with WASM/Emscripten experience so I'd say there's something planned, even if only a more sophisticated viewer...

Let's hope. Sketch always seemed to be amazingly well-crafted software. I'd love an online version.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#149

Post by smilespray »

heyyeah wrote: post #20
addicted wrote: post #13

This is a blatant effort at maintaining a monopoly.

Adobe will be facing an existential crisis trying to maintain this monopoly vs AI generated content, AI augmented content generation tools and cheap image and layout apps.

Adobe should have died a decade ago.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#150

Post by replygirl »

shafyy wrote: post #74
nicoburns wrote: post #36

Oh hell no. Adobe is where software goes to die. Which is big shame because Figma has been great, and had serious potential to turn into the first WYSIWYG tool that would actually generate code you'd want to use. But Macromedia software was also great, and now it's mostly non-existent. I'd love for this to turn out different, but I have very low expectations.

On the flipside, this opens up the space for a new upstart with an innovative take on design tooling, just like how Figma came up.

with figma’s adoption as a standard, we gave up cyclical innovation for continuous improvement, and have a trade where technical skills are highly transferrable and highly teachable. the cost of bad stewardship of figma won’t just be the loss of a tool, it’ll be the breakdown of a whole layer of the digital design practice.

seeing that adoption of framer has been so poor they have to lean on web export as a selling point, i don’t think we’ll get another tool as powerful as figma that young designers are as willing to spend five years mastering and collectively adopt as a standard—-more likely the design tools ecosystem will look like the front-end frameworks ecosystem.

do you remember what it was like in the field ten years ago? even with promising upstart sketch in play, it was unlike anything i deal with today, and it sucked

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