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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#231

Post by brennvin »

sn0w_crash wrote: post #217
brennvin wrote: post #203

I'm surprised Figma is worth that much. For a while I was considering bootstrapping a business in this space and I was never very impressed with what I saw of Figma. Does not look that hard to compete with or replicate.

“Does not look that hard to compete with or replicate” Then why haven’t you? Seems like a good opportunity to make a few billion now that Adobe has set a price. I hear this all the time on HN. And yet, this rhetoric never seems to follow through.

> Then why haven’t you?

I found another product opportunity that will be faster and cheaper to build. That I believe I could out-compete Figma were I rich does not mean I _am_ rich.

Thanks for the down vote.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#232

Post by coldtea »

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'd argue this wasn't simply negligence, but a calculated decision to kill an innovative product because it threatened the profits of their cash cows.

Well, that product was also theirs at that point, so it wouldn't be threatening anything (profits of its sales would go to them anyway).

If you people people would stop buying Photoshop and Illustrator, then no, Fireworks was meant for other use case entirely (web mostly), and it had 1/10 the capabilities of Photoshop and Illustrator pertaining to their own domains (yes, many use just 10% of a program, but many must-have features included in that 10% differ from person to person, so Fireworks having that 10% wouldn't be enough).

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#234

Post by seasnake »

trymas wrote: post #213
seasnake wrote: post #136

No mention of Penpot[0] yet? [0] http://penpot.app

a reply to the top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32850953 TIL of penpot from that comment - seems great tool!

Oh, tried to find it on the page but must have hidden the comment. I've never worked in it, but played around with it for a few minutes and it certainly seems capable enough for solo or small team use. It's also the only open source prototyping tool I've found yet.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#235

Post by snarf21 »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #87
garyclarke27 wrote: post #63

It’s a shame that the competition authorities don’t seem to have any interest in these type of acquisitions which destroys competition and harms consumers. Same thing happened with Architecture software eg when Autocad bought Revit - end result is extortionately priced software that many architects cannot afford because they are paid so poorly. Same will happen for graphic designers.

I actually think we need new antitrust laws that are a bit more proactive when it comes to super-massive companies like Adobe. Such companies have learned to be much more cunning when it comes to get around existing laws, and plus they have much more money than ever.

No, we just need to fund the SEC and FTC and let them do their job. We also need to enforce consumer protection not simply maximize shareholder value.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#236

Post by nine_k »

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…

It's not the acquisition itself. It's what company acquires it. Adobe is the IBM of creative tools. (If not Oracle.)

OTOH being acquired by a behemoth company always feels uneasy for the product. Imagine an acquisition by Google, or Facebook, or Microsoft, or even Apple. I bet people would start imaging how Firma were to deteriorate under their corporate governance.

Ideally an acquired company is just left as is, and used as a cash cow, resulting just in the products becoming a bit more expensive for large customers.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#237

Post by MiddleEndian »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #176
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…

In case people are too young to remember, Macromedia was well on its way to matching Adobe's application suite – except Macromedia apps had far better UX, better performance, and better integration with the web. There's a good case that Adobe would no longer exist today had Adobe not acquired Macromedia.

I still use Adobe Animate (formerly Macromedia Flash), for simple vector drawings. For example, you can just draw a circle, draw a line through it, delete part of the circle that is bisected on the line, then click and drag the line or the remaining curve to curve those two segments. It's so much easier than using the pen tool or having to deal with vectors in Illustrator.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#238

Post by kristopolous »

notaboredguy wrote: post #58
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although it’s still great software I’m stopping usage today because a) I refuse to support adobe and b) I’m confident the software will progressively get much worse, so any investment today is a waste of time I should spend finding and learning something else. Is there a blender of tools like this?

Inkscape, penpot and/or maybe gimp afaik.

Common things are so obtusely buried in these applications. It's extraordinary the decisions they make.

Maybe there should be a telematics tool for gtk that tracks when a user is clicking around looking for something and treats it like a bug report after a program crash.

Some Non-Obtrusive (very important) dialog says something like "looking for something? Tell us what and where you're expecting it so we can add it".

There's no reason at all things can't be in 2 or 3 places instead of like View / Interface Options / General / Advanced / ... or wherever the hell someone decided to place it.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#240

Post by coldtea »

LeftCorner wrote: post #180
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 still run a 22 year old copy Fireworks 4 because of Adobe's shenanigans. Just this morning I had to crop and resize a 1 MB image for display on a website and was able to do that in Fireworks in about 2 minutes resulting in 15k PNG and was on to my next task.

Well, you can do that with almost any very lightweight app, including apps costing like $10 and having hardware acceleration and everything, like Acorn and Pixelmator (examples on the Mac side) and also "be on to your next task".

You can even fully automate it (well, at least the resize, you'll still need to pick where to crop) with both.

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