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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

bloomberg.com

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#281

Post by detritus »

jansan wrote: post #268
kderbyma wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try to avoid them like the plague. Affinity while not nearly as supported and feature rich....it doesn't stab and bleed me monthly for the privilege of bloatware...

How is Affinity Designer less feature rich? It has great features like corner rounding and interactive path offsetting that I cannot find in Figma? Also, Last time I looked Figma did not even allow skewing of objects.

Well, for a start, you can't set a stroke width less than 0.1mm, which may sound like a useless edge-case, but makes it useless as a single-point tool for designs to be sent to Lasers or CNC machines that run off a print driver.

Also, the workflow's quite clunky.

Still, I've bought it and Photo, just because I want them to one day better Illustrator and Photoshop.

- ed Sorry - 'less than 0.1pt', not 0.1mm. Samediff ultimately.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#282

Post by capableweb »

pembrook wrote: post #95
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?

It’s not free, but Sketch is a fantastic (also MacOS native) alternative.

I love Sketch but macOS is no longer the OS I spend the most times in, which is Linux and Windows. I'd love for Sketch to be cross-platform, I'd buy one license per year just to support them.

So my only option was Figma and now... Now what? Damn this sucks.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#283

Post by neilk »

_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…

Big company executives do not see the world the way you do.

Creative Cloud alone has at least 5x the users of Figma. I have no idea how to even calculate all the users of all Adobe products. I guarantee that a lot of people at Adobe see Figma as just adorable, but not really, you know, a product. Some people at Adobe get it and are hoping to revolutionize their company with new blood, but… they probably won’t succeed.

At big companies that have captured a large portion of the market, they are usually not interested in “disrupting” themselves. Steve Jobs was a rarity. There are far more attainable revenue and careers to be made optimizing the existing revenue streams.

If killing Figma entirely made Creative Cloud revenue go up by a few percentage points that would be worth it for them. Even if the acquisition has negative value the people who pioneered it have more influence in their company, and an achievement that advances their career narrative.

They may tell themselves they’re going to integrate Figma, and some people are going to definitely try, but if that doesn’t work out that’s probably fine.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#284

Post by apozem »

sxg wrote: post #92

I'm dismayed by this acquisition but glad to see the near-universal dislike towards Adobe in this thread. How can a $150B+ company exist with this much disdain for its business practices and products? I'm guessing Adobe's primary customer base is large corporations who don't care rather than individual users?

A product line can be useful, longstanding and industry-standard without being friendly, easy-to-use or cheap.

I don't love Photoshop's long startup times, huge RAM usage and non-native Mac UI, but I appreciate what it lets me do. And I'm not even, for example, a graphic designer working with other people who expect me to submit Adobe assets.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#285

Post by nobleach »

jansan wrote: post #254
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?

Figma's biggest strength is in UI design. Open illustration, while possible is not so great. (I still love Illustrator for this purpose, others may disagree or have other favorite tools). Figma allows UX/UI designers to speak a congruent language with UI developers. A design system or component library can be mutually understood. Things like, "we're using our 80% gray button here" can be very easily communicated. That's not at all impossible in other tools, Figma just takes it to a very nice level.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#286

Post by vitaflo »

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…

They basically did exactly this with XD and it started with some good ideas and then basically just fizzled out.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#287

Post by RunSet »

garyclarke27 wrote: post #63

It’s a shame that the competition authorities don’t seem to have any interest in these type of acquisitions which destroys competition and harms consumers. Same thing happened with Architecture software eg when Autocad bought Revit - end result is extortionately priced software that many architects cannot afford because they are paid so poorly. Same will happen for graphic designers.

> Same thing happened with Architecture software eg when Autocad bought Revit - end result is extortionately priced software that many architects cannot afford

I only hope Macromedia's story doesn't repeat itself: Adobe buying the superior offering just to take it off the market.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#288

Post by bradstewart »

zx2c4 wrote: post #102
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 too really loved Fireworks (and Dreamweaver) back in the Macromedia days. As a kid then, it was really very intuitive to do all sorts of odd creative projects easily. Riding on nostalgia fumes, I went searching for screenshots and in the process amusingly found: https://askubuntu.com/a/244128 - a Linux user still running Fireworks 8 in WINE. I'm almost tempted to try the same...

Those two pieces of software were undoubtedly the thing that got me into websites, which led to building computers, which led to my current career.

Incredible stuff.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#289

Post by denkquer »

CharlesW wrote: post #255
alberth wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

photopea.com

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#290

Post by esskay »

swyx wrote: post #218
tomaskafka wrote: post #134

> By bringing powerful capabilities from Adobe’s imaging, photography, illustration, video, 3D and font technologies into the Figma platform, we can benefit all customers involved in the product design process, from designers to product managers to developers. Figma’s community will ultimately have a continuous user experience across ideation, screen layout, interaction design and content editing, allowing product de…

for what its worth @zoink says they'll still be autonomous https://twitter.com/zoink/status/1570385560312909826 and he doesnt seem like the kinda guy to lie about it (even if this might change 1-3 years down the road)

I dare say they will be autonomous for a year. Then Adobe will want some ROI and start slapping creative cloud crap into it.

I'd imaging it'll be added to the CCX launcher pretty quickly and made the only way to download it. Thankfully because it's electron it shouldn't be too hard for a 3rd party client to be made.

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