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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#671

So smart for both Adobe and Figma. Figma posed a serious threat to Adobe and it makes sense for them to do it. The losers are all of us poor sods who were happy Figma customers. Just goes to show that if you want an outsized exit multiple the best way is to put a gun to a $100B company's head.

> So smart for both Adobe and Figma. Figma posed a serious threat to Adobe and it makes sense for them to do it. The losers are all of us poor sods who were happy Figma customers. It's utterly fucked up that "so smart for the companies: the losers are the customers" is baked into the system we use to transact culture.

Somehow, the dynamic where a company is an organization of humans to be used to further some human cause was reversed, so now humans are elements of a corporation to be used to further the cause of the corporation. We've gone from running companies in service of humans to running humans in service of companies.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#672

243 times their revenue? From what I can research: Figma took $332M in funding and has just $82M revenue for 2022. Adobe must be betting on Figma's 60% YOY growth and probably see them as existential threat.

It's 50x revenue.

Figma will make >$400m in 2022.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#673

Earlier 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…

I used to beta test for them. A few months back I took at look at the current version of Audition to see what I'd been missing out on since the days of CS6 nearly a decade ago. Three things have changed. It now includes one third-party plugin (that anyone could purchase) offering an alternative volume meter - the equivalent of a slightly different color histogram for photo/video software. It offers some new presets w…

CoolEdit! haven't heard that name in a while. Yeah, Adobe used to be ultra-respected, especially in the 90's as Photoshop took the world by storm. These days, as you can see, the response to "X acquired by Adobe" is met with universal disappointment (except by those who have Adobe stock, I guess).

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#674

So smart for both Adobe and Figma. Figma posed a serious threat to Adobe and it makes sense for them to do it. The losers are all of us poor sods who were happy Figma customers. Just goes to show that if you want an outsized exit multiple the best way is to put a gun to a $100B company's head.

Can someone plz enlighten me how Figma competes with Adobe? AFAIK Web/app designers use either Sketch or Figma, publishers use Illustrator and photographers use Photoshop/Lightroom. At least that's how it's been back in the day. Is that no longer the case?

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#675
post #379

This 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?

> Can't wait for the dominance of Photoshop to be ended by gimp

Hah, good joke, I've been hearing it for years now.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you tell what the market thinks about this decision when a company's stock price is a function of what is happening publicly at the company AND externally in the economy? How do you separate the 2 drivers?

Compare stocks with the highest correlated log returns. Anything that's economic should impact the correlated group the same, if it's company specific then that company will stand out. Most correlated with ADBE (all have > 0.8 correlation) that I see with there price change today are: ANSS (-0.77%) INTU (-1.94%) CRM (-1.73%) MSFT (-1.77%) ADSK (-2.61%) As you can see none of these stocks are experiencing anywhere nea…

Adobe posted earnings today.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#677
post #663

As 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.

Yep. Everybody has a price.

It's not that Figma was worth $20 billion.

It's that Adobe was likely seeing subscription revenue take hit from customers that realized there's no need for creative cloud subscription.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#678
post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They ruined Macromedia as well. Fireworks was a fantastic hybrid vector/bitmap editing tool perfect for web work.

This was already basically Sketch years and years before Sketch even existed. They killed it because Adobe as a company has a complete lack of vision and even understanding of the tools they own.

This is 100% right. Fireworks was Sketch with better bitmap/filter/styling support. Removing it was a cost saving move right as Sketch/Figma were coming to own UI design.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#679
post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but fundamentally exactly as anti-innovative." Would love to hear more about this thought. Disclaimer: figma employee.

When Adobe acquired Macromedia, they extinguished an entire paradigm of design tool: "design tools that create software." Back in the booming 90's, this paradigm was _the future_. Through that acquisition, Adobe shoe-horned the world into a paradigm of "hand-offs," and Figma's leadership (namely, Sho) doubled down on the "hand-off" vision. "Play Adobe games." The future for collaborating on software design & build lo…

This felt like a lot of words with little substance. What is the "hand-off" vision?

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#680
post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe's stock is down 17% on the news. So, it's bad for consumers. Bad for Adobe. Probably only good for the ego of a few executives and investment bankers.

17% is huge. That means the market values Adobe as worth 26B less than yesterday [0], which is more than the acquisition price of 20B. They also released quarterly earnings today, but those beat the market’s expectations. What’s going on? [0] market cap = 144B * 17% = 26B

There is a lot more to earnings than market expectations, mostly guidance. And it was fairly bad.

Also this is being reacted too negatively, they are paying a HUGE price for a company that only has a AAR of 400 million a year.

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