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

Adobe gives up on web-design product to rival Figma after deal collapse

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 233 posts

Re: Adobe gives up on web-design product to rival Figma after deal collapse

#2

Post by no_wizard »

Now Figma can become the de-facto choice for its software category and a merger was proved to be ultimately unnecessary for its survival and was a clear attempt at Adobe trying to buyout their competition because they can't seem to compete.

I think overall this is a good thing. Adobe owning Figma isn't a great promise that it would be make Figma better, improve Figma in any way, nor keep Figma on the path of making healthy improvements.

I can't blame anyone for seeing $20 Billion dollars upfront and taking the offer, but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? I don't know that I'll ever know the actual answer to this question, but this is a sign to me that no, it didn't, it is building a healthy business as a standalone product.

Now Figma can take the $1 billion USD breakup fee and do some amazing work on solidifying their position.

I do, as a sense of morbid curiosity, wonder if Adobe has had discussions in their boardroom about buying PenPot

Re: Adobe gives up on web-design product to rival Figma after deal collapse

#5

Post by s3r3nity »

no_wizard wrote: post #2

Now Figma can become the de-facto choice for its software category and a merger was proved to be ultimately unnecessary for its survival and was a clear attempt at Adobe trying to buyout their competition because they can't seem to compete. I think overall this is a good thing. Adobe owning Figma isn't a great promise that it would be make Figma better, improve Figma in any way, nor keep Figma on the path of making h…

> I can't blame anyone for seeing $20 Billion dollars upfront and taking the offer, but did Figma even need to sell in the first place?

It's a great question from a P&L standpoint, but like you said: the board of the company represents the shareholders, and it's likely that $20 billion was a number _far_ above what they viewed the company's value - therefore accepting that type of deal would've made 100% sense to maximize return for those investors.

Note that many employees are also shareholders, and therefore would've banked quite a bit of $ if this went through.

I think the better questions are: did Adobe _need_ Figma? (We'll see...) and why did Adobe overpay by so much?

EDIT: after some quick searching, estimates place the value of Figma at $8-9 billion...making the offer of $20B virtually impossible to reject.

Re: Adobe gives up on web-design product to rival Figma after deal collapse

#6

Post by DHPersonal »

Killing Adobe XD because they couldn't buy Figma for $20 billion means to me that they would never have been a good owner for Figma. XD may have not had as many features as Figma, but it was still a decent program and could have been a very good competitor to Figma for far less than the cost of buying out that company. The buy-in of Adobe's subscription model was a compelling reason for my employers to provide only XD to me for my work.

Re: Adobe gives up on web-design product to rival Figma after deal collapse

#9

Post by asah »

DHPersonal wrote: post #6

Killing Adobe XD because they couldn't buy Figma for $20 billion means to me that they would never have been a good owner for Figma. XD may have not had as many features as Figma, but it was still a decent program and could have been a very good competitor to Figma for far less than the cost of buying out that company. The buy-in of Adobe's subscription model was a compelling reason for my employers to provide only X…

Google Video was killed after the YouTube acquisition and YT flourished under Google.
Post reply on HN