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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

#131

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

poisonborz wrote: post #120
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).

I don't know how much you know about graphics programming, but this comment is strong evidence you don't know much about audio/MIDI programming.

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

#133

Post by lolinder »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #30
chrisfinazzo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't the first time Adobe has taken a decent app w/ potential and run it into the ground: Dreamweaver did many things, not all of them well, but it was never actively terrible. Over time, its functionality got split out into more apps that didn't actually require people to write web code - a disappointment that shouldn't surprise as Adobe's heart was still w/ print production and never really committed to the d…

Fireworks actually had a lot of features people gushed about Sketch and Figma having close to a decade before they existed. Adobe never understood this and tried to push web design into PS and AI then killed FW.

> and AI then killed FW.

I did a double take here before remembering that AI is also the acronym for Adobe Illustrator. I'd totally forgotten about AI!

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

#134

Post by PaulHoule »

vegadw wrote: post #127
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

120 channels of 96kHz 24 bit audio? Also, images and video have either no timing requirements or very relaxed ones (human perceptual response to missing video frames is minimal; human perceptual response to missing audio deadlines is universal and significant).

Related: Human sensitivity to "unwanted" noise is impressive. There's a lot of professionally released music out there where the noise floor is high enough to be annoying. Similarly our reaction to lossy codecs not quite preserving quality is usually visceral if we know the track well.

I had a time when I listened to CDs that were ripped and then compressed to 128kbps MP3. One day I had the CD and just listened to it straight on the computer through headphones and was blown away by how much I was missing on the MP3. My take is 192kbps MP3 is a lot better and 320kbps is basically transparent.

I got a really great set of Yamaha speakers at our reuse center and, similarly, found a whole new world in some recordings (everything by the Super Furry Animals except their first album) but then found others (anything by Foreigner) sounded just the same as they always did on FM radio.

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

#135

Post by over_bridge »

dyno12345 wrote: post #63
Mistletoe wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*good public businesses Private businesses don’t have to do anything and is where you get some of the best companies that exist and care about their customers like Patagonia. https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/gear-news/patagon... Maybe it’s the only way out of the enshittification death spiral because there are no shareholders to destroy the company to “create value” for.

There is still a fiduciary duty even for private companies

That fiduciary duty needs to die/ be reimagined. It's turned corporations into one dimensional money makers. Profit at any cost. You should make money in order to achieve your goals, not just to set the high score for making money.

It's way too easy for hostile shareholders to force companies to do things that the workers, even CEO level workers, don't want to do.

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

#136

Post by clintonb »

no_wizard wrote: post #100
s3r3nity wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 max…

IPO is another way to return to shareholders though, as is making a profit and paying a percentage of those profits via dividends to shareholders, which any private company can do, or using those profits to do share buybacks. There's any number of ways to benefit the shareholders. Its not anything you said per se, I'm simply annoyed at the legal maxim that we must maximize shareholder value whenever presented to do s…

If you give me the option to more than double my money now versus get dividends over the next few years, I'm taking the money now. The goal of most businesses is to make money. Building with a focus on longevity is just one of many ways to achieve that goal.

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

#137

Post by jampekka »

p_l wrote: post #111
jampekka wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Minority owners can and do sue and win even if the majority would agree to non-profit-maximizing decision.

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

#138

Post by jampekka »

toyg wrote: post #96
jampekka wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

If it were "illegal", the State would be actively prosecuting any executive not making money. That's obviously absurd. Not maximizing shareholder value (which in itself doesn't necessarily mean profit, btw) is, at best, a breach of contract, a civil matter between private parties. Losing a civil trial doesn't mean having done something illegal. You know how people say things like "I wish the fundamentals of coding/ma…

Fiduciary duty is in the law and breaking it is illegal. Illegal doesn't mean it's a crime.

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

#139

Post by smilespray »

lrivers wrote: post #37
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…

Adobe has a record of acquiring products and then killing them. Fireworks & Freehand for example.

They also kill good internal products because of infighting. ImageReady was nixed by the Photoshop guys.

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

#140

Post by kccqzy »

chrisfinazzo wrote: post #20
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…

This isn't the first time Adobe has taken a decent app w/ potential and run it into the ground: Dreamweaver did many things, not all of them well, but it was never actively terrible. Over time, its functionality got split out into more apps that didn't actually require people to write web code - a disappointment that shouldn't surprise as Adobe's heart was still w/ print production and never really committed to the d…

Adobe just didn't manage the pivot to web design very well. Dreamweaver had been run into the ground. So was Fireworks. And look at where Flash is.
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