Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B • Hacker News Board

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#181

Post by d3nj4l » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 1:03 PM UTC

yuchi wrote: post #143

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-feat…

Every time one of these "statements" happens I'm reminded of what Palmer Luckey said about Oculus when Facebook bought them, or what Jan Koum said about WhatsApp. How long before Dylan leaves to "spend time with family"?

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#182

Post by chickenchicken » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 1:04 PM UTC

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…

I loved fireworks. I had the first version on my laptop and it was slow but amazing.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#183

Post by _fn » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 1:04 PM UTC

Zealotux wrote: post #175

yuchi wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-feat…

>[ACQUISITOR] is deeply committed to keeping [STARTUP] operating autonomously and I will continue to serve as CEO, reporting to [NEW OVERLORD] You won't believe what happens next.

It’s like there’s some sort of playbook on this

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#184

Post by markdown » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 1:04 PM UTC

GordonS wrote: post #154

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…

I used Fireworks for years for web design stuff - it was simple to use, but fully featured, a real joy to use. As soon as Adbobe bought Macromedia, I knew they would shitcan it because of Photoshop and Illustrator. And I knew other nice Macromedia tools, like Dreamweaver, would have a similar fate. Such a shame, and buying a competitor just to kill it feels so wrong :( I'm not totally sure if Figma will suffer a simi…

> I used Fireworks for years for web design stuff

I still use it as my primary web/ui design tool and in fact am stuck on MacOS Mojave because I'd have to say goodbye to it forever if I upgraded.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#185

Post by achow » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 1:05 PM UTC

Oct 2020 Figma was valued at $2.05 billion.

Here's how the CEO of Figma went from a computer science intern to the head of a $2 billion company that's challenging Adobe for the love of designers across Silicon Valley - Oct 2020

https://www.businessinsider.com/figma-ceo-dylan-field-design...

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#186

Post by jrgd » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 1:06 PM UTC

wow great they will kill it in so many ways

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#187

Post by m12k » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 1:06 PM UTC

bauripalash wrote: post #132

bongobingo1 wrote: post #118

Adobe can't eat penpot! https://github.com/penpot/penpot https://penpot.app/ https://help.penpot.app/technical-guide/getting-started/#sta...

> Adobe can't eat penpot! That's the beauty of open source

It's kind of amazing to me that we've reached the point where using open source is not a matter of idealism, but rather risk management to guard against the threat of product regressions due to consumer-hostile takeovers.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#188

Post by rapnie » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 1:06 PM UTC

monax wrote: post #61

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although it’s still great software I’m stopping usage today because a) I refuse to support adobe and b) I’m confident the software will progressively get much worse, so any investment today is a waste of time I should spend finding and learning something else. Is there a blender of tools like this?

Penpot is foss afaik

MPL 2.0 licensed. See: https://github.com/penpot/penpot

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#189

Post by briandon » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 1:07 PM UTC

vldx wrote: post #110

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…

I was heavy user of Fireworks back in the day. Looking back — it had enormous influence over where I’m now today. I still can’t get over what Adobe did to it. It’s like Microsoft or some other behemoth buying JetBrains and then slowly killing it in favor of its own IDEs.

Microsoft bought GitHub years ago and announced the "sunsetting" of the Atom editor (a GitHub-company project) and its official ecosystem a few months ago. The archiving of Atom and all related projects will occur on Dec. 15th, 2022: https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#190

Post by ssrubin » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 1:07 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #139

crecker wrote: post #3

Ahh, Adobe.. they have earnings for billions and billions and they can not improve their software suites on performance..

Yeah, kind of wonder what would have happened had Adobe instead pulled a pair of engineers aside and said, "Hey, we want you two to create a Figma rival. You'll have no directives from up above, have all the freedom to write the app how you want. You can work where you want, when you want ... if you need more specific expertise on the team you can take who you like. The first version you roll out doesn't have to have…

My understanding, pieced together from conversations over the years with Adobe employees, is that they do try to do this, and they don’t have success with it. I have no idea if they’ve done something like this with a Figma-like goal, though.