Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 1001 posts

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#721

Post by airstrike »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #578
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...

How much is this enforced though? Wouldn’t this make most mergers illegal? I guess it all comes down to who defines what ‘substantially lessen competition” means

The rule of thumb is if there are still at least 3 competitors left in a market, it is not "substantially" lessening competition

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#722

Post by homarp »

https://mobile.twitter.com/pitdesi/status/157046798711905075...

What investors first paid for @Figma , which @adobe buying for ~$40.20 per share:

$0.088: @dannyrimer/@IndexVentures , Jacobsen/OATV

A $0.199: @johnolilly /@GreylockVC, @semil

B $0.332: @mamoonha/@kleinerperkins

C $1.098: @andrew__reed/@sequoia

D $4.619: Peter Levine/@a16z

  $21.29: @henryellenbogen/Durable

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#723

Post by scrozier »

Lorin wrote: post #486
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…

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

This. Fireworks was my go-to tool for years. Hit the perfect sweet spot for a semi-professional user. I've not yet recovered from this loss.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#725

Post by skyfalldev »

lenkite wrote: post #714
mortenjorck wrote: post #494

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…

Kinda weird complaining about Adobe subscription pricing in a Figma thread when Figma also has the subscription pricing model.

Figma doesn't have Adobe's predatory cancellation fees AFAIK.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#726

Post by ROTMetro »

ortusdux wrote: post #682
mortenjorck wrote: post #494

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…

It's a great quote for what has happened to the USA in almost every single area, industry, government, education, religious thought, political thought.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#727

Post by tekkk »

chresko wrote: post #669
tekkk wrote: post #303

Boo. 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).

Now they aren't forced, but you wonder does this consolidation of assets/companies benefit customer in any way. For Figma this is probably a great move to become part of the biggest design/image/video/whatever editing company - you get your pay-day as well join the winning team in the market. To me it just seems less competition for them, higher prices for customers since there aren't really options (eg photoshop, Figma for collaborative design).

But if FTC says this is cool, I guess we'll just have to live with it.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#729

Post by amiga-workbench »

akrymski wrote: post #719
HellDunkel wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But Photoshop is not a vector design tool? I thought this move happened in the 90s

The agencies I've worked at only started dumping Photoshop around 2015-ish, going for Sketch and XD.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#730

Post by s3r3nity »

garyclarke27 wrote: post #63

It’s a shame that the competition authorities don’t seem to have any interest in these type of acquisitions which destroys competition and harms consumers. Same thing happened with Architecture software eg when Autocad bought Revit - end result is extortionately priced software that many architects cannot afford because they are paid so poorly. Same will happen for graphic designers.

Fam - we can’t even make climate change laws without oil lobbies paying lawmakers off…what makes you think that yet another corruptible organization in govt is going to help?
Post reply on HN