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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#871

Post by rboes »

suyash wrote: post #846
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…

Why can't we just have an open source version which is as good if not better?

Because a bunch of unpaid dudes have to write it

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#872

Post by polk »

knicholes wrote: post #696
heyyeah wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Irrelevant, if that doesn't lead to product innovation. Historically, it hasn't.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#874

Post by solardev »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #789
solardev wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Figma is really pretty revolutionary as far as web apps go, both from the design side (collaborative, beautiful, and easy to use) and from the dev side (realtime multiplayer, fast stateful graphics with undo/redo, incredibly complex UI, built in a combination of WebGL, WASM, and Workers). For a while before it, Sketch was the dominant UX/UI tool, but then Figma came outta nowhere and surprised the world by showing wh…

> Sketch was the dominant UX/UI tool, but then Figma came outta nowhere and surprised the world by showing what could be accomplished ... I use both frequently and Sketch is far better than Figma. But Figma had one thing really going for it: it works on every platform with a browser, while Sketch is (sadly) Mac only. Every designer and his dog might have a Mac in the US, but the rest of the world is a different story…

What do you like better about Sketch?

(Just curious. I'm a FE dev and all the designers I've worked with have moved to Figma over the last few years, and you're the only one who's ever told me it was better.)

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#875

Post by gigglesupstairs »

IvanK_net wrote: post #373
LeftCorner wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still run a 22 year old copy Fireworks 4 because of Adobe's shenanigans. Just this morning I had to crop and resize a 1 MB image for display on a website and was able to do that in Fireworks in about 2 minutes resulting in 15k PNG and was on to my next task.

You can open Fireworks PNG files in www.Photopea.com :) https://community.adobe.com/t5/fireworks-discussions/open-fi...

I can never forget that giddy feeling when I found out that Fireworks had native support for layered PNGs at the time.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#876

Post by solardev »

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...

Does the FTC even do anything anymore...? I can't remember a single significant enforcement action in my lifetime.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#877

Post by js2 »

solardev wrote: post #876
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...

Does the FTC even do anything anymore...? I can't remember a single significant enforcement action in my lifetime.

The FTC blocks mergers all the time. Here’s some in the news:

https://khn.org/news/article/biden-ftc-block-hospital-merger...

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/ftc-blocks-merger-of-lockh...

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/nvidia-and-arm-merger-deal-b...

https://www.housingwire.com/articles/50114-ftc-moves-to-bloc...

https://www.legalbettingonline.com/news/daily-fantasy-sports...

Mostly the FTC’s work happens quietly and unnoticed, but there are annual reports here:

https://www.ftc.gov/policy/reports/annual-competition-report...

And you can search merger actions here:

https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/merger-review

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#878

Post by micromacrofoot »

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

I sometimes consult with internal design teams and a lot of them just never switched away from photoshop

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#879

Post by solardev »

js2 wrote: post #877
solardev wrote: post #876

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the FTC even do anything anymore...? I can't remember a single significant enforcement action in my lifetime.

The FTC blocks mergers all the time. Here’s some in the news: https://khn.org/news/article/biden-ftc-block-hospital-merger... https://www.airandspaceforces.com/ftc-blocks-merger-of-lockh... https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/nvidia-and-arm-merger-deal-b... https://www.housingwire.com/articles/50114-ftc-moves-to-bloc... https://www.legalbettingonline.com/news/daily-fantasy-sports... Mostly the FTC’s work happens quietly…

Are there any significant historical cases? The Nvidia and Arm one seems like a big deal (if it succeeds), but the others just seem like random low-hanging fruit. I feel like the ones that matter (ISPs, cell phone carriers gobbling each other up, the Microsoft/Facebook/Adobes of the world, AMD buying ATI...) never really get stopped.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#880

Post by jaxrtech »

epolanski wrote: post #870
tus666 wrote: post #851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I count more software that has been ruined and/or killed by acquisitions than the one bred by those.

Would agree in large part. I think the ones that were successful, they're successful enough that you forget it was an acquisition.

One off the top my head is Google Docs[1] which, for the longest time, I was pretty sure it was in-house tech. It's actually a number of acquisitions for the collaborative editor tech and then MS Office support.

It seems now that most incumbents have enough cash to not care about being that strategic about acquisitions.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs#History

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