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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

bloomberg.com

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#301

Post by cmrdporcupine »

swyx wrote: post #218
tomaskafka wrote: post #134

> By bringing powerful capabilities from Adobe’s imaging, photography, illustration, video, 3D and font technologies into the Figma platform, we can benefit all customers involved in the product design process, from designers to product managers to developers. Figma’s community will ultimately have a continuous user experience across ideation, screen layout, interaction design and content editing, allowing product de…

for what its worth @zoink says they'll still be autonomous https://twitter.com/zoink/status/1570385560312909826 and he doesnt seem like the kinda guy to lie about it (even if this might change 1-3 years down the road)

That's the promise almost all acquisitions get.

Even if it holds for a couple years, there's still the corrosive effect it has on morale and productivity as the surrounding company's broken culture seeps in and most of the high quality employees just either rest & vest or flee the vacating ship.

The founders will stick around and play middle mgmt until their agreements run out, then leave ASAP. You know it's really bad if they leave before those agreements are done.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#302

Post by jansan »

happytoexplain wrote: post #293
jansan wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the great feature of Figma? I tried to use it for illustration and it did not feel great at all compared to software like Affinity Designer. How were you using it that it feels like such a great loss to you?

Not illustration - design (UI design, specifically). It's fantastic for maintaining styles/themes, collaborating, iconographic design, flows, and especially composable/configurable/modular UI components. The components are one of the standouts for me, as compared to other software. They are more powerful, and yet somehow less confusing/complex than in other software. In general, I always run into some kind of limitat…

Thank you (and the others). I seem to have completely missed the whole purpose of Figma.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#303

Post by tekkk »

Boo. How come the big American mega-companies are always allowed to buy out the upcoming competitors? I thought you guys were all about free-market? Although I guess that's what complete free-market does. Oh well. For sure prepare for price hike.

But it'll be interesting to see what they'll do with the cutting-edge web app know-how they'll acquire from Figma.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#304

Post by dylan604 »

javajosh wrote: post #128
vouaobrasil wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>we need new antitrust laws that are a bit more proactive Bingo! Adobe has a de facto monopoly on vector and bitmap editing software tools, and it would make total sense for this acquisition to be stopped by the government on that basis. "The government" in this case would be the DoJ's antitrust division headed by Jonathan Kanter [1]. Looks like the process is to send a letter requesting a "Business Review" [2]. It's…

>wait 2.5 years (max!) and then have your review request politely declined" situation >2 - https://www.justice.gov/atr/business-reviews

"3. The Division may, in its discretion, refuse to consider a request. "

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#305

Post by capableweb »

ryanSrich wrote: post #265
pastor_bob wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, i don't get this. Seems like textbook anti-competitive behavior to me. Doesn't Adobe already have their own version of Figma (XD)?

They do, but it’s not nearly as popular (or as valuable) as Figma. In the last couple of years Figma has essentially overtaken Adobe and Sketch in terms of designer mindshare and usage. I don’t know a single designer (I know hundreds), that doesn’t use Figma. Of course, I’m focused 100% on software, so I’m strictly talking about product, UI/UX design. Not print or graphic design. The way I see it, Adobe had to buy Fi…

> The way I see it, Adobe had to buy Figma.

It's so fucked up though. Just because Adobe has existed for a long time and managed to squeeze their existing customers enough, they been able to stop innovating. And instead of innovating enough to be able to beat their competition (Figma), they'll just buy the competition and continue doing the same thing. Until another competitor appears, rinse-and-repeat.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#307

Post by rchaud »

jansan wrote: post #254
happytoexplain wrote: post #156

My heart plummeted when I read this headline. I've done UI design work in some capacity for 18 years, and have always dreamed of design software with the thoughtful UI and features of Figma. When I realized Figma was that software, it was like experiencing a miracle. Software like this doesn't exist . It was the first design software I paid for (yes, in 18 years). And now it's going to die. I almost feel like crying.

What is the great feature of Figma? I tried to use it for illustration and it did not feel great at all compared to software like Affinity Designer. How were you using it that it feels like such a great loss to you?

Figma is mostly used for website and app prototyping. It's very popular because it allows for multi-user collaboration, like a Google doc. Older prototyping tools like Invision or Sketch did not have this, and it was a major differentiator.

You can create different screens and set up click points, such as a button. Clicking the button navigates you to another screen in your design. This is called "interactive prototyping".

Figma puts these interactive prototypes on the web, so designers can create a visual prototype that can be tested on mobile and desktop devices. It's more realistic than simply looking at pictures of mockups. The biggest advantage is that it does not require developers to write working code and deploy a whole app just to click around and test it out.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#308

Post by LeftCorner »

chrisseaton wrote: post #251
LeftCorner wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A basic image viewer included in your OS can probably do that - and a lot quicker than two minutes! How does Fireworks make it so slow to open, resize, and close?

Most of the two minutes was setting up Windows to select Fireworks as the editor.

I have Windows 10. There is a program called Paint 3D. I opened it now and do not see guides or the option to turn on guides. I do not have an export option where I can preview different formats with different color palettes. If I had more time I could probably list other features Fireworks has that I have become accustomed to.

Oh and Fireworks is consistent. I can trust when I have a task I can open it and it will have expected behavior and features. The way modern software removes and add features and add and hides options on every update makes using the software a task in of itself, before doing the business at hand. I'd rather make my images and be on about my day.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#310

Post by phailhaus »

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.

You'd never be able to compete because the design is the product. You'd just be stuck copying them, always one step behind.

Their interface's responsiveness is also a consequence of writing a rendering engine in WASM, so you'd have to figure that out too. [1] Plus the real-time collab. I don't know why you pretend as if these aren't difficult engineering problems to solve.

[1] https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

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