Man, that is bad news for news for consumers. But also seems like Figma could have gotten more money? $20B is a _ton_ of money but it's the only real competitor in Adobe's space I think. Or at least the only threat.
Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#662This is probably the only tech acquisition that's ever made me sad. I just hate Adobe so much. The nightmare of their installer, the weird store with horrible designs popping up when you activate normal ui stuff, the difficulty in canceling a subscription, and the stasis in their product and ui. Oh and the sloppiness of Lightroom on mac with it's weird ui and that it didn't even import and manage photos well. I've be…
Only open and free software can defeat the likes of Adobe. Can't wait for the dominance of Photoshop to be ended by gimp and ffmpeg, I've found that they work fairly well for whatever editing I need. Maybe open source variety of Figma also exist?
The one thing I know about is Penpot see https://penpot.app/ which is by the team that designed Taiga.io - It's fully open-source and I think tries to solve some of the same problems but it's still in beta. I'm not much of a designer but yesterday started to teach myself Figma only to find this acquisition happening. I've resisted installing creative cloud for years and hearing various people's experiences with Adobe makes me feel like this was a wise decision.
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#663As a current software engineer at Adobe, I was really disappointed when I got the internal email announcing this this morning. It's reminiscent of Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior in the early 00s. Figma is the better product and Adobe knows it - but instead of using that to light a fire under them and work harder to create a better product, Adobe just used its deep pockets to make the problem go away. I was alre…
Adobe loses the game with their skill and use money to win it. Figma won the game with their skill but lose the money game.
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#664And now all of the Figma users are saying "Oh [crap]... now I need to find a new tool to use." When is the last time Adobe acquired something and it improved? They destroyed Fireworks and Dreamweaver when they acquired Macromedia (which they only did because they wanted Flash). At this point I'm tempted to swear off Adobe products entirely -- except that the combo of Lightroom and Photoshop are the industry standard…
Premiere and After Effects are also industry standards for video, Illustrator is the industry standard for illustrators, and I'm sure there's more I don't know about. As far as producing industry-standard products in the creative sphere, who is better than Adobe?
Davinci Resolve is quickly eating up Premiere/After Effects in VFX/film. Currently getting popular in small studios, but that's how it starts. Just like Blender is now a real competitor in 3D.
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#665Surprised to see all the "hate" for Adobe. They provide an awesome suite of products only $55 per month. I've had nothing but good experiences with them. Is it wrong to pay for software when you get a truckload of value out of it? No other creative software even comes close.
Paid endorsement?
No, I just use the software and like it. What's wrong with that?
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's a bit counterintuitive that something can be good for a company (or companies) AND bad for the customers of said company... shouldn't something that is bad for a customer of a company be bad for the company too?
Companies aren’t your friends. They exist to maximize what customers will pay in exchange for the minimum effort on their part.
what's truly been mind-boggling is how companies ARE made out of people... people who may well be your friends; and yet, what you said remains true, that the company wont be your friend.
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#667In light of this sad news– who's working on a NON-Adobe version to take its place?
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#668According to the FTC the law states that mergers are illegal when the effect "may be substantially to lessen competition or to tend to create a monopoly." Pretty positive this would lessen competition in design software and restablish Adobe as a monopoly. This merger should be blocked. https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
There is probably a triple-digit number of legitimate competitors out there.
For sure not triple digit legitimate competitors. To be legitimate competitor means some very mature software / service. I can think of Sketch and Adobe XD, maybe Balsamiq but not quite the same. What are these 100 extra well formed alternatives?
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#669Boo. How come the big American mega-companies are always allowed to buy out the upcoming competitors? I thought you guys were all about free-market? Although I guess that's what complete free-market does. Oh well. For sure prepare for price hike. But it'll be interesting to see what they'll do with the cutting-edge web app know-how they'll acquire from Figma.
How does this acquisition conflict with a free market? Figma isn't being forced to sell i.e. this isn't a hostile takeover. Figma is free to continue to compete. There's not a 100% clear antitrust case although the $20B buyout could be viewed as anticompetitive behavior (perhaps contradicting my previous statement).
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't think of any other company to which my relationship as a customer has swung so completely as Adobe. In the 2000s, their tools were unsurpassed, and I was happy to pay the premium prices they asked (though I'd skip versions to save money). When Creative Suite was discontinued, that was a pretty abrupt turn, as I had no interest in a subscription for software I only used for personal projects. And yet, I stayed…
> discovered it had gone subscription-only as well, meaning my entire photo library would now be trapped on my old laptop unless I paid a monthly fee forever. I empathize, but isn't all this the reason they would fork out so much for figma? I mean, people hated them for going subscription with the tools that used to be desktop, but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription. It's confus…
A lot of amateur photographers used Lightroom and were willing to pay a one off purchase price whereas a monthly cost for something you might hardly use in a month is too expensive. Figma has a high percentage of users who use it regularly as part of their paying jobs. It also has online features, which you expect to pay continuously for. Lightroom Classic had no online features.
I still use Lightroom 6, the last standalone version, so I haven’t found anything else with such good combination of library organisation & editing. But no way I’ll ever pay a monthly subscription for the current, slightly better version or the less capable cloud version.