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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#941

Post by whywhywhywhy »

oblio wrote: post #693
ortusdux wrote: post #682

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…

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

Oh the company/team that created the operating system for the iPhone, yeah I've heard of them.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#942

Post by whywhywhywhy »

akrymski wrote: post #718
leodriesch wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe has XD, which is a direct competitor to Figma as a vector based design tool that includes prototyping functionality.

Thanks, I've never actually seen anyone use it in practice but turns out that Figma has a 31.73% market share in the Collaborative Design And Prototyping category, while Adobe XD has a 15.14% market share in the same space

There is absolutely no way those statistics are even remotely accurate

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#943

Post by whywhywhywhy »

silent_cal wrote: post #589
mikece wrote: 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?

After Effects was one of the best pieces of software ever made around the CS6 era, it was insane how powerful it felt and how solid it was to work with while being so modular.

It's a shadow of its former self now and can't even play the timeline without the audio cutting out and pitch shifting. My Core 2 Duo laptop could do that a decade ago, my M1 Max and high end PC can't because Adobe broke playback years ago and never fixed it.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#944

Post by whywhywhywhy »

rglover wrote: post #856
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…

> but calling daddy government

I pay for them, I may as well try to get them to do something that benefits me for the astronomical taxes I'll be paying this year.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#947

Post by 71bw »

DecoPerson wrote: post #905
ulfw wrote: post #904

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a weird way of looking at things. Microsoft bought Powerpoint, bought Excel basically too. There wouldn't be an Office suite otherwise. Google bought Keyhole, there wouldn't be a Google Maps otherwise. Google bought Youtube. They couldn't win with Google Video. Google bought Android. etc etc etc This is how the industry works. In general.

PowerPoint, Excel, Keyhole, YouTube, Google Maps and Android could be significantly better. There’s no competition, which means they keep their users, which means they’re not incentivised to find those ways in which those products could be significantly better. Okay wait, Excel does have some competition now, with Google Sheets, and that can be seen in Microsoft’s recent push to distinguish Excel from Google Sheets w…

Android has no competition? I could swear there is iOS. Same with Maps - Bing, Here, Waze, Apple, Yandex even OSM provide their own maps. Do I fail to recognize a point you're making here?

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#948

Post by DoctorOW »

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.

I think people thought because software cannot really be scarce that it was immune to the flaws of capitalism but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#949

Post by brainbag »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #101
yuchi wrote: post #18

If true, congratulations for Figma founders, and a bad day for designers that were looking for a way to escape from Adobe. I don’t think that in the long term this will give Figma as an ecosystem any benefit — unless Adobe will keep it separate from the main Creative Cloud. This reminds me of the Trello acquisition. As a loyal Figma user I’m pretty sceptical of the future. Hope to be wrong. UPDATE: Looks like it is i…

As others will no doubt call out, Affinity have been my main-stay graphics apps for some years now. Affinity Design, Photo, Publisher.... I refuse to pay a monthly fee for something I use on a scattershot basis.

I used Photoshop for 20 years and really tried to switch to Affinity, but holy cow it's so extremely different. I tried finding a good "Affinity for Photoshop Users" resource and wasn't ever able to before giving up on it and using photopea (which is great).

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#950

Post by svnt »

Thorentis wrote: post #839
ok_dad wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow, the dynamic where a company is an organization of humans to be used to further some human cause was reversed, so now humans are elements of a corporation to be used to further the cause of the corporation. We've gone from running companies in service of humans to running humans in service of companies.

Except that all the engineers working at Figma and getting paid huge salaries, and many of whom will now get a huge exit pay day if they want it, may not have had this opportunity without the company existing. It's well and good to trash talk the idea of companies raking in huge profits, but we as a software industry and incredibly privileged to be making the salaries we do, and this would not be possible without the…

> we as a software industry and incredibly privileged to be making the salaries we do, and this would not be possible without the existence of these companies, and the constant cycle of start-ups and buyouts

Unless you have seen another economy with functional alternatives, this is only ever a statement of faith.

We have found one local maximum. That’s it.

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