Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 1001 posts

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#161

Post by sofixa »

scarface74 wrote: post #142
eurasiantiger wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe’s direct competitor is Adobe XD, which launched with practically no features and was slowly developed only to dwindle to death as a rarely used cloud service, while everyone does the important work in Figma. The parent comment is spot-on. Antitrust legislation needs to be invoked to prevent this acquisition from happening.

It amazes me that people posting on a YC controlled board whose entire purpose for existing is to fund startups long enough to get an exit - statistically most likely through an acquisition by a bigger company - wants to stop acquisitions. The funding environment for startups would be a lot worse if investors thought that the only way they could recoup their investments is through exits. Look how few of YC companies…

> wants to stop acquisitions.

Who said that? The point is that anticompetitive acquisitions, like Adobe acquiring a direct competitor, hurt everyone but the acquirer, and should be tightly controlled.

Nobody would care if Figma were getting acquired by GitLab or Salesforce or Atlassian or whatever. The fact that it's a direct competitor known for destroying acquisitions is the problem.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#162

Post by jmacd »

nayroclade wrote: post #54

Many years ago, when Adobe bought Macromedia, they acquired a tool called Fireworks[1]. This was a combined bitmap and vector editor that was incredibly well-optimised for user-interface and web design, at a time when most designers were paying exorbitant license fees to do such work painfully and slowly in Photoshop and Illustrator. Fireworks was cheap, powerful, and hugely ahead of its time. Many of the features an…

I remember how Fireworks *felt* to use. Just seeing that name written again gave me warm fuzzy feelings. Fireworks came about at a time when web design was almost entirely something you did in HTML. The workflow to go from bitmap to web was really bad, so most of us just did things natively.

Fireworks was the first tool that allowed you to draw, but maintain the constraints (and portability) of HTML and CSS as it came in to prominence.

The closest thing I have had to that feeling again was when a friend of mine did some design for me and shared it in Figma. What I thought were bitmaps were vectors!! I had so much fun bringing that in to my site (which I ended up doing in Webflow, because apparently I haven't kept up with the times enough to hand code reasonably quickly).

I've used the latest and greatest Adobe products, they definitively do not have this feeling. There is really no delight to be found. I know they are incredibly powerful and near and dear to many people, but for the young and restless they are boring.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#163

Post by conductr »

nayroclade wrote: post #54

Many years ago, when Adobe bought Macromedia, they acquired a tool called Fireworks[1]. This was a combined bitmap and vector editor that was incredibly well-optimised for user-interface and web design, at a time when most designers were paying exorbitant license fees to do such work painfully and slowly in Photoshop and Illustrator. Fireworks was cheap, powerful, and hugely ahead of its time. Many of the features an…

The only hope is that since Figma is subscription revenue, they will immediately feel the pain of neglecting the product. I’d imagine it’s a mature enough, well known enough product that you could say it’s already stolen as much share as it would from adobe’s cash cows. Potentially it’s the place users get started nowadays and adobe could leverage it by making it easier for those users to explore adobe’s other products.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#165

Post by pessimizer »

pavlov wrote: post #57

Adobe’s PR includes the price: “…approximately $20 billion in cash and stock” Apparently it’s roughly half in cash according to other news reports. Adobe stock is down 8% premarket, so seems like the market thinks they overpaid. (Personally I disagree — this is a good acquisition for Adobe)

The market is caught up in the long-term value of Figma, but it's worth it to Adobe even if they bought it to run it into the ground.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#166

Post by ethanbond »

oooofigma wrote: post #144
nayroclade wrote: post #54

Many years ago, when Adobe bought Macromedia, they acquired a tool called Fireworks[1]. This was a combined bitmap and vector editor that was incredibly well-optimised for user-interface and web design, at a time when most designers were paying exorbitant license fees to do such work painfully and slowly in Photoshop and Illustrator. Fireworks was cheap, powerful, and hugely ahead of its time. Many of the features an…

Making 9 sliced graphics for the web is obsolete though. That said Flash also supported a bunch of innovation for its time, and it too was obsoleted. Maybe 9 slice graphic were already dead at Fireworks’ peak. Figma is officially way more overrated than this stuff ever was. Does anyone know a person who’s like, bonafide smart, using Figma? I feel like everyone I know who does “Figma” day to day is doing negative ROI…

Well if your definition of bonafide smart is that they’re an engineer, then there are pretty few. If you think design and visual communication has any value whatsoever, then yeah, lots of people are using it, some of whom are very smart. That’s why they’re worth $20B after all.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#167

Post by dimmke »

nayroclade wrote: post #54

Many years ago, when Adobe bought Macromedia, they acquired a tool called Fireworks[1]. This was a combined bitmap and vector editor that was incredibly well-optimised for user-interface and web design, at a time when most designers were paying exorbitant license fees to do such work painfully and slowly in Photoshop and Illustrator. Fireworks was cheap, powerful, and hugely ahead of its time. Many of the features an…

Yeah but we will still have Sketch, which rules. Nobody uses Illustrator and Photoshop to do web design anymore.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#168

Post by JimDabell »

scrollaway wrote: post #112
pembrook wrote: post #22

I’d put the odds at about 95% that Adobe will ruin Figma with bloat, 14 different “Creative Cloud” background processes, and hostile pricing models within 5 years. This is huge news for Sketch. However, to be honest, this is the type of acquisition that should be blocked IMO. Adobe is literally acquiring a direct competitor here. To me the consumer harm is pretty clear. Instead of a more competent org (Figma) growing…

> This is huge news for Sketch. Why, do they have an online editor yet? As a cto/admin/manager/hiring person: Sketch is worthless for me because I don't have a Mac. But because of that, my company does not use it: despite designers working on macOS, if I can't run it to look at their work and actively comment/collaborate with them, it's not a useful workflow. Therefore instead we hire people familiar with Figma (sadl…

> if I can't run it to look at their work and actively comment/collaborate with them, it's not a useful workflow.

But you can do that though:

https://www.sketch.com/docs/browsing-web-documents/

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#169

Post by mikece »

And now all of the Figma users are saying "Oh [crap]... now I need to find a new tool to use." When is the last time Adobe acquired something and it improved? They destroyed Fireworks and Dreamweaver when they acquired Macromedia (which they only did because they wanted Flash). At this point I'm tempted to swear off Adobe products entirely -- except that the combo of Lightroom and Photoshop are the industry standard for photography.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#170

Post by [deleted] »

FractalHQ wrote: post #80
pelagic_sky wrote: post #37

As a long time Figma champion, this breaks my heart. Every time I am forced to go back to an Adobe product I find it worse off than I left it. I worry that I will no longer see rapid updates and features that benefit me as a user and not the grater "cloud ecosystem".

Same here. This is going to do tangible damage to my daily life as someone who opens Figma daily. I also spend time hunting rogue Adobe spyware processes in activity monitor daily. Adobe destroys everything they touch and Figma was finally innovating despite them. I hope we get real anti trust laws someday.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN