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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

#211

Post by sirwhinesalot »

scarface_74 wrote: post #200
asoneth wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current employer and my last were both 25+ year-old quietly successful private tech companies. In both cases there was a strong commitment to product quality in order to maintain our reputation and long-term customer relationships whereas the public companies I worked at were focused on chasing the next quarter to satisfy "the shareholders". Every once in a while I'm tempted to work for a public company again sinc…

Out of all the major tech companies - Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Tesla, Nvidia, etc. can you honestly say any of them are short term focused. Well it would be a stretch to say that Google has any focus.

Yes, all of them, though not to the same extent. Microsoft and Amazon are probably the worst.

Consider all the layoffs recently.

Microsoft is hellbent on destroying windows if it means growth in the ads market.

Amazon has let its store become a total cesspit, and look at the bullshit they pulled with prime.

Youtube has 30 ads in a 3 minute video these days.

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

#212

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

smilespray wrote: post #204
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ImageReady’s tooling (slicing, 2-Up/4-Up Save-for-Web, GIF frame editing, etc) was incorporated directly into Photoshop. It wasn’t “nixed”.

Of course it was. ImageReady was lean, fast and web-focused. When they killed it you had to buy a PS license and deal with the monolith PS was becoming. If you're making web pages, you don't need CMYK workflows.

> ImageReady was lean, fast and web-focused. When they killed it you had to buy a PS license and deal with the monolith PS was becoming.

To my knowledge, ImageReady 1.0 was the only version sold standalone - and that was back in 1998; the very next version (in 1999) was sold in-box with Photoshop 5.5 - but the separate ImageReady.exe program was around until 2005 - whereas the way your post is worded implies Adobe were being more customer-hostile than they usually are (hah).

I see your point about not needing the weight of Photoshop's print-and-photo tools when web-design folks back then were just wanting a flexible raster image editor - but my recollection of the web-design scene back then was that most web-designers tended to already have a background in print design work (e.g. think about all the print-shops who expanded into website-design in the late-1990s) - so it makes a lot of sense for Adobe to extend their tooling to support the web and "new media" as we called it - rather than create a new tool which would operate on a completely different, "web-first", domain-model (of course, that's exactly what Macromedia did, and they rightfully have their fans for that).

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

#213

Post by zigzag312 »

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.

More people are passionate about making music than people passionate about making user interfaces.

For example, there're lots of photo editing apps, which also supports my premise.

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

#214

Post by zigzag312 »

tamimio wrote: post #59

But I use XD for more than 3 years now, not just for mockups but also for diagrams and other quick drawing.. now I have to learn figma!

I've also been looking for a replacement for XD.

I decided to try Lunacy instead of Figma and my first impressions are really positive.

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

#215

Post by TylerE »

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.

It’s really hard not to in many fields these days. Network effects/marketshare are the whole ball of wax. You can’t scale them down beyond a certain point without making them utteerly irrelevant.

You can have a viable speciality car manufacturer that employees a handful of people to build a couple of cars a year. There are tons of such shops building hot rods, doing EV conversions, building movie cars, and things like that.

You can’t build a viable commercial social media site that serves 50 users.

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

#216

Post by FoodWThrow »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #191
FoodWThrow wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it would be easy to understand the difference between x channels that play 1D data (that remained unchanged for half a century almost) and going from 50 thousand pixels to 15 million, with dozens of different sizes and aspect ratios would be readily apparent. Alas, I was mistaken. Sigh.

I don't pretend to know much, if anything, about the intricacies of video and graphics programming. It would be nice if people who think that audio is "x channels that play 1D data (that remained unchanged for half a century almost)" could return the same courtesy towards audio.

5.1 surround was invented in 1987. Sound mixing as we know it did not change in the same way graphics did. One should not expect courtesy if they can't offer it in the first place.

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

#217

Post by TylerE »

Vicinity9635 wrote: post #198
awright415 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason you can’t find a federal law is that corporations are largely governed by state law. See, for example, Section 5231 of the California Corporations Code. https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/corporations-code/corp-sect-523...

So it's not a legal obligation in the US, but possibly in some states. Which boils down to the same thing. Incorporate where it's not. Viola - no legal obligation.

The laws against murder are also state, and not federal. Doesn’t mean you have no legal obligation to not commit murder.

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

#218

Post by Karellen »

gottorf wrote: post #194
Karellen wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before the Friedman Doctrine[0] (that is, that a corporation's only responsibility was to its shareholders) was put forward in 1970, and generally accepted sometime around the '80s, it had been held for centuries [1] that shareholder-owned corporations also had responsibilities to society and the general public, as well as to their industry and their employees. Yes, they had responsibilities to their shareholders, bu…

> it had been held for centuries[1] that shareholder-owned corporations also had responsibilities to society and the general public, as well as to their industry and their employees. For centuries[0], governments were very limited, and other organized institutions of human life, like churches and businesses, held duties to the public at large. Government spending as a percentage of GDP in the US, for example, remaine…

Those aren't totally unreasonable points, but I feel like they're somewhat undercut by:

a) the people who advocate most strongly for the Friedman Doctrine (maximising shareholder value at all costs) also seem to be the people who most want to abolish (or prevent) government-provided safety nets, like state pensions, or universal healthcare, or public education, or UBI. It doesn't seem like it's a "Well, so long as we have these valuable strong public institutions, we might as well see how taking the reigns off private investment turns out" type situation, as much as it is a "I got mine, fuck you" libertarian class-warfare fantasy.

b) the idea that the public programs we have are expansive and comprehensive enough to have "crowded out private efforts in those areas" feels like a stretch to me.

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

#219

Post by asoneth »

scarface_74 wrote: post #200
asoneth wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current employer and my last were both 25+ year-old quietly successful private tech companies. In both cases there was a strong commitment to product quality in order to maintain our reputation and long-term customer relationships whereas the public companies I worked at were focused on chasing the next quarter to satisfy "the shareholders". Every once in a while I'm tempted to work for a public company again sinc…

Out of all the major tech companies - Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Tesla, Nvidia, etc. can you honestly say any of them are short term focused. Well it would be a stretch to say that Google has any focus.

Yes. Many of those companies have made choices that trade reputation and/or relationships built up over years to increase a quarterly profit margin.

Whether that is sacrificing product quality, sunsetting well-loved products/services only to spin up similar efforts in the future, treating long-term employees poorly, burning through developer goodwill through high fees or API churn, etc.

When I think about the value of long timeframes I don't just mean having a good R&D dept or throwing money at moonshots, I mean building up and maintaining goodwill with employees, customers, users, partners, developers, and regulators.

Of course many private companies are run by profit-maximizing jerks and some public companies have patient shareholders who trust the company's management. But in general I have had better experiences working for an engaged owner who I can meet face-to-face over working for a crowd of shareholders and venture capitalists for whom the company is just another financial instrument in their portfolio.

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

#220

Post by scarface_74 »

asoneth wrote: post #219
scarface_74 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all the major tech companies - Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Tesla, Nvidia, etc. can you honestly say any of them are short term focused. Well it would be a stretch to say that Google has any focus.

Yes. Many of those companies have made choices that trade reputation and/or relationships built up over years to increase a quarterly profit margin. Whether that is sacrificing product quality, sunsetting well-loved products/services only to spin up similar efforts in the future, treating long-term employees poorly, burning through developer goodwill through high fees or API churn, etc. When I think about the value o…

Out of the companies I named

- Apple is over 45 years old and is still creating new market defining products

- Microsoft has been around for 45+ years and didn’t stay one of the most valuable companies for 25 years by not thinking long term

- Amazon Retail is a nothing burger as far as profitability . The future is AWS. (Former AWS employee. I have no love for the company). They have also invested in the long term and still people overwhelmingly shop at Amazon.

- Google has always been a rudderless shit show led by executives with the attention span of a crack addled flea

- Tesla - I hate to admit it. But they built one of the few hardware based tech startups and you don’t become Tesla with a short term focus.

Consumers love Apple and Amazon and Microsoft’s true customers - OEMs - have had a good relationship with MS post the DOJ lawsuit it seems.

Shareholders seem to trust the management of those companies as they have pivoted

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