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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#401

Post by cortesoft »

tgv wrote: post #367
rchaud wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, if this was local software that you could buy once and keep forever, an event like this would not have felt so full of foreboding. On cloud-based web apps, there is no opt-out short of ceasing use of the program entirely. Don't want their new features? Too bad, we're going to roll them out anyway, and there is no turning back after that. I'm still puttering along just fine on a copy of Office 2010, so my opinion…

Well, I can't quite get my Word 5.1a to run anymore. It was the best version of Word to ever have lived. Unfortunately, it only runs on 68k and PPC macs (on the latter even under emulation, IIRC). Software has a limited lifetime, unfortunately. Bit rot may be metaphorical, but it does happen.

I still run Mac classic using SheepShaver, so there is always still a way.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#403

Post by bearmode »

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.

There is absolutely zero need to keep a 22 year old copy of fireworks around just to resize and crop an image. None.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#405

Post by Bilal_io »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #328
Bilal_io wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big win for the Figma team. Big loss for consumers who have benefitted from the competitive market. I really hope this incentives Krita, Ink, Gimp or other OSS to focus more on UI design features. I think there is a value for Adobe to add Figma to CC, Photoshop can fully focus on photo manipulation while Figma (perhaps merged with XD?) will be target UI designers.

> I really hope this incentives Krita, Ink, Gimp or other OSS to focus more on UI design features. A comment in another thread mentioned Penpot https://penpot.app/

Yeah I just saw a new post for the tool. It's currently #1

Never heard of it before, but I'll explore it.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#406

Post by globular-toast »

m12k wrote: post #187
bauripalash wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That has always been my selfish reason for using free/open source software. I agree with the principles of free software too, but even if I didn't I would be using it just so I can be in control of my own computing.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#407

Post by CuriousCosmic »

zippergz wrote: post #334
detritus wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same will happen for graphic designers. I'm not so sure about that, I know quite a few graphic designers who've either reverted to the pirating ways of their youthful years, many years ago - or have moved over to Affinity's offerings. The latter's still a bit rough around the edge - I can't work with Designer (I've been using Illustrator for too many decades to), but I've stopped paying for old rope and nixed my on…

The point is, if Affinity gets too good or competitive, Adobe will acquire them too.

This kinda highlights the real solution. Instead of investing in a product which will eventually get bought up by some monopoly and used to hold the users hostage, people should be donating to FOSS tools and/or paying for support contracts with FOSS companies.

Eventually the FOSS alternative becomes competitive and then outright better. It happened quickly in the SW space given that SWEs could dogfood the tools but it's slowly happening in almost every other industry as well. Blender is probably the best example while Krita (raster drawing), QGIS(GIS), Qflow(HDL synthesis tooling collection), FreeCAD(2D/3D CAD), KiCAD(EDA), Darktable(RAW editor, photography tooling) and Ardour (Audio mixer and nonlinear editor) are all catching up in their various spaces.

And there's a reasonable chance that some industries won't be able to develop their own FOSS tooling for whatever reason. In those cases it may be worthwhile for governments to step in and fund open source tooling (like the EU does) to protect their industries from the whims of a foreign company.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#408

Post by elliekelly »

kumarvvr wrote: post #104
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?

It exists because some of its products are productivity monsters and are enterprise staples.

I think one of the reasons I hate Adobe so much is that I genuinely like a lot of their software. They make great (if bloated) products but they make terrible managerial decisions. They’re one of the few companies I think are evil to the very core. They employ dark patterns at every turn. It’s not about providing a product or even a service to customers; it’s only about extracting as much money from every customer as they possibly can.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#410

Post by TimTheTinker »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #298
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?

For one, Photoshop & Illustrator have a significant history and feature advantage on most competitors. But for two: "How can a $150B+ company exist with this much disdain" -- Have you looked at Oracle lately?

How does Oracle staff its engineering department with such a bad reputation?

I once got an email from an Oracle recruiter, and I did not waste the opportunity to tell him how I feel about Oracle.

Do not make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Oracle or Larry Ellison.

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