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

121–130 of 233 posts

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

#121

Post by hahamaster »

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 similar to you buying a car because you're unable to make one yourself, really.

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

#122

Post by SSLy »

PaulHoule wrote: post #61
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? It’s pretty clear Figma in 5-10 years could make photo and video editing products that outperform Adobe and Adobe can’t even make one web product as good as Fireworks was that they killed so yeah no Figma has no need for Adobe. Figma has an outstanding engineering team you can tell just by using the app, Adobes dev team it’s questionable how much of Photoshop and…

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…

> hypothetically I might want to make and edit a video

… and you'll reach to Resolve like most sane human beings.

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

#123

Post by TylerE »

duxup wrote: post #51
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…

>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.

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

#124

Post by earthnail »

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…

No, because the state only prosecutes criminal law and not civil law.

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

#125

Post by some-guy »

duxup wrote: post #51
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…

>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…

I know many people who joined Figma specifically because of the promise and goal of a large buyout. Even if it isn't explicitly stated, in most circumstances people want to go public at the right price.

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

#126

Post by vegadw »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #90
Negitivefrags wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the lock in with audio is significantly lower than with graphical applications. You can even tell this by the fact that there is a universe of plug-ins that work across many DAWs due to having somewhat standard interfaces. The culture of audio creation before computers was already that you connected many devices from different manufacturers together for different specialised tasks. I mean even the term “plug-…

Reasonably true, except that in reality people move between DAWs rather rarely. The real world lock-in is quite high, even if the theoretical lock-in is lower.

I think some of the lock in is because MIDI (1.0, at least) just isn't good enough. I have an Ableton Push (Obviously locked to Ableton ... (mostly, there is 3rd party BitWig support)), Osmose (weird MPE+ standard), and a lot of pedals and effects which have their own, sort crappy apps for controlling them. (TC Plethora x3, Blackstar Dual Distortion, TD-3, etc.). Sys-ex is so strange to use that nobody want's to deal with it either.

The other half is because pretty much every DAW has some non-standard plugin/scripting system: Ableton with Max, Reaper with rJS, Bitwig with The Grid, etc. If I moved away from Ableton, I'd lose my M4L plugins/patches.

Standards for opening projcets cross Daws will help, I think, but the biggest 2 things that will motivate change is MIDI 1.0's slow death so that more is possible without strange, custom systems and CLAP, again for more-or-less the same reasons.

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

#127

Post by vegadw »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #73
PaulHoule wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DAW is easier because images and video involve more data?

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.

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

#128

Post by collaborative »

graemep wrote: post #82
lolinder wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> good public businesses > Private businesses don’t have to do anything Is this a baked-in legal distinction between public and private businesses, or is it that the company is supposed to do what the shareholders want and the shareholders of a private business are more likely than those of a public business to want something beyond ROI?

I think very often with private companies it is not just looking beyond ROI (they may do) but they also look longer term. A shareholder whose children will inherit the business one day will have a very different outlook to one who is looking at their annual performance numbers, which is the sort thing institutional shareholders are looking at.

Sadly, nowadays the shareholder will sell the shares and buy properties to pass on to children. Land owner is fast becoming the only profession with inter generational prospects. That's why a property crash is the only hope for a return to a normal economy (where people run businesses, develop skills, do actual work)

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

#129

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

vegadw wrote: post #126
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasonably true, except that in reality people move between DAWs rather rarely. The real world lock-in is quite high, even if the theoretical lock-in is lower.

I think some of the lock in is because MIDI (1.0, at least) just isn't good enough. I have an Ableton Push (Obviously locked to Ableton ... (mostly, there is 3rd party BitWig support)), Osmose (weird MPE+ standard), and a lot of pedals and effects which have their own, sort crappy apps for controlling them. (TC Plethora x3, Blackstar Dual Distortion, TD-3, etc.). Sys-ex is so strange to use that nobody want's to deal…

Uh, no.

Push is not locked to Live at all. I wrote the support for it for Ardour.

Osmose uses MPE, just like other MPE devices, and it's not weird, its actually quite elegant.

Sysex was always meant to support device specific control, so of course it's "strange". And almost every bit of MIDI software "deals with" sysex in some way.

"Pretty much every DAW has some non-standard plugin/scripting system" - there is no "standard" scripting system, and in fact most DAWs have no scripting facilities at all.

CLAP offers nothing that existing plugin APIs do not, except for modulation ala Bitwig, and since no other DAW so far can do modulation like Bitwig, the value proposition here is low (not zero, but low).

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

#130

Post by duxup »

some-guy wrote: post #125
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…

I know many people who joined Figma specifically because of the promise and goal of a large buyout. Even if it isn't explicitly stated, in most circumstances people want to go public at the right price.

I believe it, I knew some folks at the company who I mentioned who left (before the acquisition) and said it was because they CEO didn't to sell.

Personally I've found it never a good idea to bank on that kind of thing.

Post reply on HN