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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

bloomberg.com

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#681

Post by qorrect »

andruby wrote: post #657
kolbe wrote: 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

They lowered their forecast.

Also just a horrible and desperate play.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#682

Post by ortusdux »

mortenjorck wrote: post #494
joshe wrote: 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…

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 find myself coming back to this Steve Jobs quote more and more:

"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.

So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.

They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."

Creatives build companies, and if you are not careful, sales will destroy them.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#683

Post by 8note »

neosat wrote: post #607
Lorin wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Agree. Macromedia products were amazing for their time. Dreamweaver, Flash (Creating flash apps including ActionScript), Fireworks with vector + bitmap, were all very cool until Adobe acquired them

I still see shockwave/director apps around. Still running off of CDs

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#684

Post by creativemonkeys »

Aperocky wrote: post #538
joshe wrote: 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?

Photopea has been pretty good at replacing Photoshop for my needs (non-designer).

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#686

Post by adventured »

isnhp wrote: post #663
bears-n-beets wrote: post #648

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.

Adobe got the money in the first place via skill. Photoshop has been the leading photo editing software for a generation. Hundreds of companies over decades, some with deep pockets, have tried to knock them off and have failed.

Figma didn't lose the money game, they sold out specifically to reap the money. The owners of Figma - where the profits tend to go in a business - are extracting at an epic scale. They sold out at a valuation far beyond anything sane. They won the money game big time.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#687

Post by knicholes »

_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…

I'm an Adobe employee, and I think that this is most likely what will happen. I think maybe the transition to web-first wasn't going as planned. I think that Adobe's going to move their features into Figma (integration with creative cloud assets, easy importing/exporting to other programs, collaboration workflows) and close out XD.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#688

Post by HellDunkel »

the_other wrote: post #631
hackitup7 wrote: post #458

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.

Something is broken if a company like Adobe can hold its customers hostage by subscription.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#689

Post by DoneWithAllThat »

noelsusman wrote: post #599
connor11528 wrote: post #537

According 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...

The FTC uses the Consumer Welfare Standard to decide antitrust cases, which means they have to show that a proposed merger would cause tangible harm to consumers. If "reducing competition" was the standard then all buyouts/mergers would be illegal since they all necessarily reduce competition.

Why did you elide the “substantially” clause?

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#690

Post by HellDunkel »

akrymski wrote: post #674
hackitup7 wrote: post #458

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?

People are moving away from designing in photoshop to figma in large numbers hence the 20bn.
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