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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

bloomberg.com

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#251

Post by chrisseaton »

LeftCorner wrote: post #180
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 still run a 22 year old copy Fireworks 4 because of Adobe's shenanigans. Just this morning I had to crop and resize a 1 MB image for display on a website and was able to do that in Fireworks in about 2 minutes resulting in 15k PNG and was on to my next task.

A basic image viewer included in your OS can probably do that - and a lot quicker than two minutes! How does Fireworks make it so slow to open, resize, and close?

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#252

Post by kristopolous »

_fat_santa wrote: post #230
pembrook wrote: post #22

I’d put the odds at about 95% that Adobe will ruin Figma with bloat, 14 different “Creative Cloud” background processes, and hostile pricing models within 5 years. This is huge news for Sketch. However, to be honest, this is the type of acquisition that should be blocked IMO. Adobe is literally acquiring a direct competitor here. To me the consumer harm is pretty clear. Instead of a more competent org (Figma) growing…

I'm betting they will leave it alone, at least for a while. I'm sure the C suite at adobe is not blind to their reputation and they know that if they start tacking on "Adobe" features to Figma, user growth will stall out. Everyone is referencing the Macromedia purchase but I would argue that it was a very different kind of purchase. With that Adobe spent $3.4B acquiring them, in Figma's case they paid $20B. I could s…

Oh sure they would. Have you ever dealt with the stupidity in the C-suite of a large corporation?

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#253

Post by gdubs »

Wild to me that they are getting bought for $20B yet didn't think they could make it through this macroeconomic environment. Or maybe just too hard to turn down that amount?

Figma is one of the most vibrant platforms I've seen in recent memory — genuinely it goes well for all involved, including the users.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#254

Post by jansan »

happytoexplain wrote: post #156

My heart plummeted when I read this headline. I've done UI design work in some capacity for 18 years, and have always dreamed of design software with the thoughtful UI and features of Figma. When I realized Figma was that software, it was like experiencing a miracle. Software like this doesn't exist . It was the first design software I paid for (yes, in 18 years). And now it's going to die. I almost feel like crying.

What is the great feature of Figma? I tried to use it for illustration and it did not feel great at all compared to software like Affinity Designer. How were you using it that it feels like such a great loss to you?

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#255

Post by CharlesW »

alberth wrote: post #140
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…

This is an online collaboration / network effect acquisition. Not a tech acquisition. (This is like Microsoft acquiring Github due to GitHub network effect) While I too loved Fireworks and Dreamweaver, neither one had the network effect that Figma does (granted, SaaS software in the late 90s / early 00s was rare). Even if Fireworks were to have flourished while at Adobe, it's not entirely clear they would have succes…

> This is an online collaboration / network effect acquisition. Not a tech acquisition.

One could also make the argument that it's an acqui-hire.

If one wanted to build a real Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere, etc. for the web, you'd want the Figma team. Nobody else understands how to build desktop-like experiences using the latest web technologies (Wasm, etc.) better.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#256

Post by skilled »

Okay, this is awesome - I literally had the thought of "Figma is so fucking awesome, what the hell would I do without it?" pop into my head multiple times today!

And now I know now why... Fuck! I mean, I am happy for the entire Figma team and everything they have accomplished, and everything they've given to the designer and the Internet-at-large community. But I fear this might be gradual end of it, hence my brainwaves going all crazy about it.

I signed up to Figma the day it was released, and it immediately became the tool I use for creating and editing vector graphics. Since then I have written well over 1,000 articles, and I can say with confidence that for 80% of those articles - all my visuals were created, edited or improved with Figma.

I have never spent a single dollar on the product. That was also one of my thoughts today - like holy shit, I can actually enjoy this fast interface, greater features, and insane amount of community resources for no cost?

Yeah, these guys did it right.

Let's see how the story unfolds.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#257

Post by atestu »

kylemh wrote: post #194
baggiponte wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree I don’t get why antitrust gave the okay to this…

can antitrust prevent public companies from acquiring private companies?

yes. Whether they're public or private doesn't change anything about how competitive they are.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#258

Post by shiftpgdn »

coldtea wrote: post #243
thomassmith65 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case people are too young to remember, Macromedia was well on its way to matching Adobe's application suite – except Macromedia apps had far better UX, better performance, and better integration with the web. There's a good case that Adobe would no longer exist today had Adobe not acquired Macromedia.

> except Macromedia apps had far better UX, better performance, and better integration with the web Lest we only remember the roses smelling side, Macromedia also made the pile of crap called Flash. And Both Fireworks and Dreamweaver had their fair share of bugs under Macromedia too.

Flash was an incredible accessible animation engine. There are dozens of “webtoons” that got their start as flash animations.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#260

Post by capableweb »

jansan wrote: post #207
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...

I am really curious: What features of Figma are not available in Penpot?

I just signed up to Penpot right now and gave it a look. Seems at least there are a few things that are not in Penpot but in Figma:

- "Components" implemented differently so requires you to hit "Update master component" before changes in instances are visible

- Auto layout doesn't seem to exists

Probably more stuff, since Penpot is relatively new and FOSS, while Figma is old by startup standards with huge investments and a large team behind it.

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