Live data from Hacker News

Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

bloomberg.com

691–700 of 1001 posts

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#691

Surprised 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.

Figma doesn't come close - it blows Adobe out of the water. I don't need a "suite", I need to design software. Figma lets me do that for $15 per month, and, from experience, is miles ahead of Adobe XD.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#692
post #181
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UPDATE n. 2: Dylan Field (CEO of Figma) has addressed these kind of concerns on their public disclore of the fact: https://www.figma.com/blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/ Citing him: > Adobe is deeply committed to keeping Figma operating autonomously and I will continue to serve as CEO, reporting to David Wadhwani. As others have said, there’s really a missing OSS version out there that can compete feature-by-feat…

Every time one of these "statements" happens I'm reminded of what Palmer Luckey said about Oculus when Facebook bought them, or what Jan Koum said about WhatsApp. How long before Dylan leaves to "spend time with family"?

I hear "take time off for health" often.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#693

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 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 marketin…

Creatives also destroy companies. See NeXT or whatever the weird letter casing was.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#694

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.

You are right, thanks for pointing that out. I pulled up the wrong info. Indeed, $400M for 2022-impressive.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#695
post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ou…

They have not failed because they couldn’t get a great product out. They have failed because so many people are trained on Adobe products an just use those.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#696
post #20

This is a blatant effort at maintaining a monopoly.

Adobe will be facing an existential crisis trying to maintain this monopoly vs AI generated content, AI augmented content generation tools and cheap image and layout apps.

Adobe has an excellent team of machine learning experts who are very well aware of what's going on. I attend their ML lecture series regularly and see speakers from FB, Google, OpenAI, universities, etc, especially on recent advances in large language models and their application to zero-shot learning and text to image generation.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our university subscribes to Adobe Products Suit- when all of their functionality can be replicated with FOSS. They sent out a survey about this before they started the subscription and I answered negatively to that, to no avail. So that's where our tuition/grant/loan/savings money are going.

Unless some stuff has changed in the past few years gimp is not a suitable replacement for adobes products.

University students should be learning the craft, not the tool.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#698
post #169

And 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?

I prefer Affinity Designer a thousand times.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#699

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 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 marketin…

MS's Office collaborative cloudish stuff is a prime example of this.

I don't know how many times my team has ganged up on a document in Google Cloud and collaboratively banged it out. Likewise, I can only remember a couple times I've done it with Office and not ended up with n different copies of the doc that we had to manually merge back together, if we even could.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#700
post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an adobe subscription, I never heard of Figma. I am sure their product is great, but it is a niche product. Figma is not worth 20B as a standalone company. Adobe will integrate Figma’s technology into Adobe’s suite of products and will make it available to the masses. I say it is a good thing that Adobe is acquiring Figma. Change is hard; As a Figma consumer you are probably uncomfortable with the change, but…

> Never heard of Figma > Says it’s a niche product not worth $20B You’re definitely not aware of how Figma changed the game and how essential it is to web design today. Whether you’re a solo designer, a freelancer, a startup, a tech company, a UX team in a major company… Figma just works. And just makes sense. Their velocity is fantastic. They launch features every few months. The performance is incredible. The ease…

The thing about Adobe is that their products are used by common people and professionals. I edit 10 of my personal photos a year, still I have an Adobe subscription which includes Photoshop and Lightroom.

Had Figma been part of the Adobe Suite I would have at-least downloaded it and tried it. As great as Figma is, reach of their product is limited, Adobe is giving Figma‘s technology the reach they would have never gotten as a standalone company.

Post reply on HN