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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#811
Screw all of this SaaS needs to die a horrible death. All of these webapps/SaaS products are just data collection apps that can lock you out at any moment. We need to get back to owning our data and installing locally.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#812
post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's that Adobe was likely seeing subscription revenue take hit from customers While being pummeled by public markets, and being forced to make a move that might keep shareholders from calling for blood. This is certainly not the first time that Adobe has presented a number to Figma's board — but it has to be the biggest number yet, by far. From Figma's position: take your chances on an IPO while the Fed is crackin…

Another interesting layer to this is that Adobe only has $5b in cash according to their balance sheet, so the overwhelming majority of this deal is probably in Adobe stock with a long vesting period. Also the deal being done in a downturn means that the difference between this and an IPO is academic in my view

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#815

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.

Consumer welfare is stupid, but all these SAAS rent-seeking makes me feel like you could actually make a case.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#816
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…

> This is probably the only tech acquisition that's ever made me sad. For me, it was… Atlassian buying HipChat Salesforce buying Tableau Salesforce buying Slack Microsoft buying GitHub (sort of) Alteryx buying Trifacta Oracle buying Cerner

> Salesforce buying slack

I'm a very heavy slack user for work and personal workspaces and haven't seen anything bad yet, though I also don't pay the bill for those organizations. Im sure over time it may get worse, but for the meantime this seems to be one of those rare acquisitions where the child company is doing so well the parent may be afraid to touch it (rightfully so).

> Microsoft buying Github

This one haunts my dreams. Microsoft is drawing a huuuuge moat around the developer experience. I have to imagine they will tighten the noose within the next 5 years. Ditto for Gaming as they now own half the games industry: EA, Activision/Blizzard, Obsidian, and many many more.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#818
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…

For a large company, they also have pretty shady pricing. Like their “annual plan, paid monthly”. You’d think you’re just paying for the monthly subscription, but they hide the fact that you have to pay a penalty for early cancellation in the fine print. Dishonest, expensive, slow.

My wife tried to cancel her subscription but the agent on the live chat just quickly and out of the blue gave her 4 months of free subscription. Not sure if this is unusual or part of their playbook.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#819
Signed up for adobe trial to use a feature of it that was not included in the free version. Forgot to cancel during free period, tried to cancel subscription they wanted a 120$ early cancellation fee. Charged it back on my cc and blacklisted adobe from charging my cc ever again. Sad say for sigma users have always heard really good things from friends that use it.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I recently found out MARS yes the candy company has become the largest owner of Veterinarian offices in the USA. It really is palpable how everything is on a runaway train and we can all see it yet are powerless to stop it.
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