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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

#171

Post by kelnos »

clintonb wrote: post #136
no_wizard wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds a little like the delayed-gratification experiments where they tell children they can have a single candy bar now, but if they wait a half hour, they can have two.

In general I would take the dividend, if the expected value over that time was greater than the immediate lump sum, plus what I might get for investing that lump sum in something over those few years.

And in reality it's usually not over just a few years; the dividend is long-term. I'd much rather build something valuable and get steady income from it than build something to flip.

Now if the risk of no dividend payout is high enough, I'll take that lump sum. But I feel like those sorts of deals -- huge money now, or very risky, uncertain money over a number of years -- just aren't really a thing that often.

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

#172

Post by acherion »

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.

XD may be good to use from a UX engineer perspective, but from a web developer perspective, it's not so great.

I occasionally get XD files from designers that I then have to cut up / develop for in HTML/CSS/JS, and XD does not do this well. Figma on the other hand, seems like it is designed really well with considerations for both designers (creating the designs) and developers (turning the designs into a product / project) alike.

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

#173

Post by Vicinity9635 »

TylerE wrote: post #148
tough wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

U just keep private and not ever get share holders if you want full control

Hard when you "have" to give VC equity to get off the ground.

Assuming you're using VC. It's not the only way to start a business.

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

#174

Post by tfourb »

weaksauce wrote: post #154
TylerE wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is anecdotes like this that make me think that the public shareholder model is fundamentally flawed and a large part of why many American companies are struggling to truly build long term value, and many once great companies have been destroyed by beancounters to bleating calls of shareholder value.

we don't need shareholder growth capitalism as it stands... we need sustainable capitalism that is in it for the long term. no clue how to achieve that as it stands though and ceos have short term goals/bonuses tied to short term profits.

You could quite simply legislate permissible compensation structures to make sure that long-term sustainability (however you want to define that) is incentivized. I.e. mandate that above a certain threshold, c-suite and board compensation is tied to long-term performance of the company.

Another (perhaps more drastic) approach would be to force shareholders to hold their shares for a minimum period of time, or institute a mechanism that distributes losses across the shareholders of the last X years. That would incentivize long-term investment strategies over short-term rent-seeking.

Or you use taxes. In Germany (where I live) we have a speculation tax on property, for example: If you (as a private individual) sell a property less than 10 years after you have acquired it, any profit from that sale is taxed as income. After the 10-year cut-off you don't have to tax it at all.

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

#175

Post by omnimus »

jwells89 wrote: post #75
staplers wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to believe that a company with the expertise of Adobe in graphics programming (Photoshop, Premier, After Effects, Illustrator) cannot build a vector design program. Not for the workers using those tools. Adobe has been coasting for a decade if not more. Probably difficult to see from the outside if you're not directly using it daily.

Moving to a subscription model is largely a symptom of that coasting. They couldn’t consistently come up with compelling reasons to upgrade to new versions of Creative Suite, with users being perfectly happy to run what they had for as many years as possible. They were always going to hit a ceiling on interesting features to implement, but they could’ve sold new CS versions on improvements in stability, performance,…

With the software professional industries really care about (like InDesign) instead of messing with it they instead took approach of never changing it to not upset anyone. And instead of paying 1200usd one time people accepted paying 60usd month rent. I know places that still use CS6 and InDesign CS6 vs the current one is almost indistinguishable software. There are maybe 5 minor new features that anybody cares about in the current one. It's insane that in those 10 years somebody payed adobe over 7k. Users should revolt.

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

#176

Post by hnbad »

TylerE wrote: post #123
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 is anecdotes like this that make me think that the public shareholder model is fundamentally flawed and a large part of why many American companies are struggling to truly build long term value, and many once great companies have been destroyed by beancounters to bleating calls of shareholder value.

I agree but I think the mistake is to think this only affects public companies. Private investors also want ROI and this means they'll be more likely to push for a profitable "exit" than let the company just be sustainable and reasonably profitable forever.

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

#177

Post by omnimus »

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.

This is actually quite surprising considering how many DAWs there are and most of them are also graphically intensive. I don't think audio industry is somehow bigger.

My wild guess would be that audio attracts a lot more programmer types and there is more demand for engineering. With graphics the engineers and programmer types are in 3D. Nobody really cares about writing type rendering engines and pdf parsers.

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

#178

Post by hnbad »

Vicinity9635 wrote: post #167
1_1xdev1 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Legal obligation to shareholders” is absolutely a thing, in the USA anyway. “Fiduciary duty” is the term to Google.

No it's not. I've been in discussions about it here and nobody could cite a law. If one can't cite a specific US code, it's not a legal obligation. It could be in a charter or contract, but it's not US law. Feel free to correct me if you can cite one. I believe this is a good starting point: https://www.congress.gov/advanced-search/legislation Fiduciary duty doesn't apply to most non-finance related companies. It's m…

The US has a Common Law system so case law is as important as code (or even more so). The question isn't whether there's "a law", the question is whether there have been cases fought over it and what the outcome was. That seems harder to google.

Likewise I have yet to hear a coherent legal justification for the idea of the "state monopoly on violence" that doesn't boil down to a just-so story invoking the fiction of the social contract (even the US only grants a limited exemption to this via the second amendment and even that still uses the context of "militias"). But even in Civil Law systems that doesn't mean the state won't act as if it is a thing and base legislation on that assumption.

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

#179

Post by hnbad »

Vicinity9635 wrote: post #173
TylerE wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard when you "have" to give VC equity to get off the ground.

Assuming you're using VC. It's not the only way to start a business.

This is the outgrowth of a VC startup accelerator. "Startup" in these parts usually implies being VC funded, seeking VC funding or acting as if you were VC funded (i.e. growth focus rather than sustainability).

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

#180

Post by seanwilson »

omnimus wrote: post #168
seanwilson wrote: post #55

I wish Adobe InDesign had more competition for desktop/print publishing as well. Affinity Designer/Publisher seems a popular alternative for Windows and Mac for a one-off cost. Scribus is open source and runs on Linux but I found it hard to use and slow on a modest document. Does anyone know of other good options on Linux? I've seen some posts about Affinity running unofficially in Wine but it seems a risky choice. T…

The problem with InDesign is that publishing industry is too small. Most people don't know InDesign but its used to produce practically every single print, book, label, poster ever. Yet it is too small for any company to care about to create competition (except Affinity). Funny thing is InDesign by itself already had most of what you need for digital design tool like Figma (and more). At some point (when InDesign sti…

> Yet it is too small for any company to care about to create competition (except Affinity).

I'm curious about their business model for this. When the Affinity suite is ~$170 one-off cost, I wonder how many they have to sell each year to keep going and how big the market is. If someone is using this software every day as their main way to make money, that's incredibly cheap as well but could they charge more? People hate subscriptions, but paying $100s upfront when it's actually worth it given how much it earns you is unpalatable as well.

I'm curious if there's any other approaching to charging. Not suggesting this would work here but for example game engines take a % of the sales generated so you only get charged when you start making money, which avoids upfront costs and subscriptions while you're getting started.

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