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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#851

Post by tus666 »

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…

Isn't this how competition works?

Big payoffs create massive incentives for people to create great products in the hope they will be bought out.

Adobe may have "destroyed" one great product, but think of the hundreds of new ones they have incentivized to be created.

People look at this all wrong and ignore the downstream effect.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#853

Post by cmeacham98 »

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.

It's not "reducing competition", it's "___substantially___ reducing competition". The difference matters.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#855

Post by wellbehaved »

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…

This is mere hand-wringing; Steve Jobs never cared to consider the aspects of our political system that leads to this, on the contrary, he positively exploited them for his own gain, e.g. patents and his app store tyranny. Steve Jobs is among the worst people to talk about this kind of neo-feudalism.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#856

Post by rglover »

lioeters wrote: post #55

I don't understand how this acquisition is not anti-competitive behavior. It was such a joy to see Figma's growth and technical innovation, and now it will just get eaten by the established power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc.#Anti-competitive_pr...

It's not anti-competitive because there are plenty of other options available (and anyone can go and make their own if they're willing to invest the time).

Anti-competitive would assume that there's no other viable option or means for replacement.

FWIW, I think Adobe is a shit company but calling daddy government in to thump them for (presumably) taking away or breaking the favorite toy sets a terrible precedent. If anything, this is pro-competitive because it should light a fire under the ass of indie's to replace it (which is already underway by the looks of Penpot).

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#857

Post by sunpazed »

Adobe charged me an “early termination” fee of $43.99 after 6 years of continuous subscription! https://twitter.com/sunpazed/status/1561679328995250177

Support didn’t help, so I had to vent on Twitter before they refunded the amount.

Not happy with their obscure and deliberately misleading subscription model.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#858

Post by chillfox »

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…

The Lightroom subscription is particularly painful because not only did Lightroom move to a subscription, they also “updated” it to a version with fewer features.

I really want to move off Lightroom, to something that doesn’t change a subscription, but getting close to a terabyte of data out of that cloud with all the edits and into something else is painful.

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