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

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

#111

Post by p_l »

jampekka wrote: post #85
duxup wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? I've worked a company that was profitable, operated well, growing ... but were sold and the CEO said (I'll get the words not quite right): "I fought for keeping independent and not selling, that's how I've kept that company and I wanted it to stay that way. But the offer was increased into the range where I didn't feel like I could survive a legal challenge (if it…

A lot of people tend to not accept this plain fact that for-profits must maximize profit. It's literally illegal not to do so. https://www.wakeforestlawreview.com/2012/04/our-continuing-s...

However, the stockholders could make a civil case that, as majority owners,they wanted to go that way, and with high enough offer and social perception that CEO must work to do so, they could make it a very bad time in courts - or possibly just replace the CEO with someone willing to burn the ckmpany for their profits.

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

#112

Post by PaulHoule »

jcheng wrote: post #99
PaulHoule wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still use Photoshop because I know how to do a lot of things with it but I'd really like to have a similar app which is designed entirely around linear light. (It's not like the 1990s when I was always editing indexed color images) They are still keeping it relevant because of the generative AI features which I often use to touch up photos (remove a spot of grout from a brick wall, then add a row of bricks to cente…

> designed entirely around linear light Can you say more about that? What is “linear light”?

Linear light is when you do the math right to represent how light interacts with the environment in terms of transmission, reflection, etc.

Most GFX tools use some kind of color space with a curve such as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRGB

This is a practical answer to the problems of 8-bit technology where you would have terrible posterization in some values and also wasted bits in other values if you used linear light. sRGB is reflective of how the human eye works but not the physics of light. If you want to, say, average or subtract two images or rescale an image you should do it in linear light.

The right thing to do is to do transformations with linear light with at least 16 bit depth but output whatever color space the display expects. Most people (like the creators of Photoshop) do calculations that would be correct in linear light in sRGB and are oblivious to the results being wrong. It drives me nuts because my photog friends think I am nuts to write my own (correct) Python code with Pillow meantime they process everything with tools like

http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/

which makes everything look dark because the developers just didn’t think about color spaces.

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

#114

Post by jph00 »

adamc wrote: post #76
duxup wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? I've worked a company that was profitable, operated well, growing ... but were sold and the CEO said (I'll get the words not quite right): "I fought for keeping independent and not selling, that's how I've kept that company and I wanted it to stay that way. But the offer was increased into the range where I didn't feel like I could survive a legal challenge (if it…

It makes sense as things are right now. It's anchored by a bunch of court decisions that arguably subvert the public interest. Do I think Shareholder value should be all that drives corporations? No. But I don't think corporations should be considered people, either.

In the US there’s another option: become a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). That’s what we (Answer.AI) did. It provides a great solution to exactly this problem: you don’t have to sell your company just because the financial offer is high; if it’s not going to help you achieve your stated public benefit then you can reject the offer.

There’s really no significant downside to becoming a PBC, AFAICT, and a lot of potential upside.

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

#115

Post by throw_m239339 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #58

I still don't understand (as a DAW author) how there are so many more people doing various graphics tasks on computers, and relatively speaking so few significant apps to do them with, whereas there so many fewer people doing stuff with audio and more than a dozen serious contenders for the toolbox.

The graphic/video industry has this idea of pipeline where multiple software are used to produce something. So if tomorrow I create say a Photoshop competitor, well, professionals using Photoshop as part of their pipeline will not even bother checking my product if it doesn't integrate with say illustrator, after effects, premiere, in design... in the sense that they should be able import the dot AI in my software for a project, and if the dot AI file changes, it should also change inside my software automatically.

Adobe and their software basically dominate the graphic design pipeline, and you bet that the format they use aren't all documented.

DAW work differently. First every software is expected to have a level of support for plugins off various formats (vst, au, clap...), MIDI, and of course audio is audio. There is also an effort to create an DAW interexchange format. So this is somehow a much much more collaborative community. So there is less vendor lock-in...

Finally, each DAW is different enough that there are not really in competition with one another. Been using Logic since 1998, nothing beats it at what it does well, but I'm willing to check alternatives ;)

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

#116

Post by tjr »

iambateman wrote: post #109

I believe this is a minority opinion, but I love XD. It (1) does everything I need, (2) doesn't do things I don't need, (3) is fast and (4) is easy to teach other people. Considering none of this is true of other Adobe products, it's not surprising that the XD product felt "out of place" to their executives. I imagine several SVP's are quietly relieved to see XD hit the bin.

I also like XD. I do a little bit of UX design work, and XD feels more intuitive to me than Figma. I still have XD installed as part of Adobe Creative Cloud, and would prefer not to lose it.

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

#117

Post by seltzered_ »

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…

"The buy-in of Adobe's subscription model was a compelling reason for my employers to provide only XD to me for my work."

Yep, Adobe XD was at least something I could use when in a giant 'enterprise' company that already partnered with Adobe on subscriptions and didn't like using any other companies for creative products.

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

#118

Post by paulddraper »

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…

> did Figma even need to sell in the first place?

In order to not bankrupt? No.

In order to maximize discounted cash flow? Maybe.

Define your objective, get your answer.

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

#119

Post by paulddraper »

hipadev23 wrote: post #14
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…

> a clear attempt at Adobe trying to buyout their competition because they can't seem to compete. You paint this like it's a bad thing, that's why many acquisitions occur.

It's a bad thing for Adobe that they can't compete.

It's a good thing for Figma that they can compete.

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

#120

Post by poisonborz »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #58

I still don't understand (as a DAW author) how there are so many more people doing various graphics tasks on computers, and relatively speaking so few significant apps to do them with, whereas there so many fewer people doing stuff with audio and more than a dozen serious contenders for the toolbox.

Graphics is harder. More users means more use cases, needs to work on more platforms, layout and output to work on various resolutions/dpi, GPU/driver dependence and issues. Print, web, UI design, prototyping, photo editing, all wildly different areas, whereas audio is way narrower scope with less or more mature standards background (eg MIDI spec is 1983).
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