Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B • Hacker News Board

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#371

Post by johnfn » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:46 PM UTC

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…

How does this analogy make sense though? Fireworks was, to Adobe, some third-rate app that Adobe had to acquire because they had acquired Flash, the thing they really cared about. Adobe certainly maintained Flash - anyone remember ActionScript 3?

In this Figma acquisition, Figma is the main prize. They're not just going to leave Figma to languish, no more than they left Flash to languish. Eventually Flash did die, yes, but that was more Apple crushing it than a direct decision of Adobe.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#372

Post by nashashmi » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:48 PM UTC

buovjaga wrote: post #368

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.

> 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. Architects rolled up their sleeves and are solving the problem by writing open source software: https://osarch.org/

I rolled up my sleeve too. And found it completely impractical. Especially for non technical experts to undertake such a massive project.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#373

Post by IvanK_net » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:50 PM UTC

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.

You can open Fireworks PNG files in www.Photopea.com :) https://community.adobe.com/t5/fireworks-discussions/open-fi...

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#374

Post by acomjean » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:51 PM UTC

m12k wrote: post #187

bauripalash wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adobe can't eat penpot! That's the beauty of open source

It's kind of amazing to me that we've reached the point where using open source is not a matter of idealism, but rather risk management to guard against the threat of product regressions due to consumer-hostile takeovers.

Or if you want to run your software on Linux.

Its amazing how adobe isn't porting anything to Linux, despite linux being starting to be used heavily now in the creative industries with the rise of blender and tons of work being done on render farms.

Blender and Krita are really high quality stuff, so hopefully problem solved. But those teams are really small compared to adobe.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#375

Post by quest88 » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:51 PM UTC

zippergz wrote: post #334

detritus wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same will happen for graphic designers. I'm not so sure about that, I know quite a few graphic designers who've either reverted to the pirating ways of their youthful years, many years ago - or have moved over to Affinity's offerings. The latter's still a bit rough around the edge - I can't work with Designer (I've been using Illustrator for too many decades to), but I've stopped paying for old rope and nixed my on…

The point is, if Affinity gets too good or competitive, Adobe will acquire them too.

Let's reword it: The founders may want a payout and sell to Adobe too.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#376

Post by pedrogpimenta » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:51 PM UTC

> In addition, when used in this communication, the words “will,” “expects,” “could,” “would,” “may,” “anticipates,” “intends,” “plans,” “believes,” “seeks,” “targets,” “estimates,” “looks for,” “looks to,” “continues” and similar expressions, as well as statements regarding our focus for the future, are generally intended to identify forward-looking statements. Each of the forward-looking statements we make in this communication involves risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements.

Indeed.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#377

Post by tolulade_ato » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:53 PM UTC

No post body was provided.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#378

Post by legitster » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:53 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #354

legitster wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-trust laws were written to address certain perceptions of how businesses operated back in the late 1800s. They were not particularly grounded in reality, and as such they are hard to actually implement as written in most situations.

> Anti-trust laws were written to address certain perceptions of how businesses operated back in the late 1800s Source? First I’ve heard of Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting being a grandiose PR campaign.

Trusts in particular (cooperation agreements between competitors) were entirely a fad of businesses in the 1800s, particularly amongst more progressive-leaning Chairman. It is doubtful they would have had long term success even without government intervention.

https://southerncalifornialawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

We also know that things like predatory pricing and trying to undercut businesses to acquire them was somewhat of a myth. If Standard oil sold for less than you, it was because their operation costs were lower because they were bigger.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~twod/oil/NEW_SCHOOL_COURSE200...

The enforcement of the Anti-trust act mostly relied on companies suing each other for grievances. But most companies never brought grievances about being acquired.

It was a PR campaign! But for protective tariffs: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1890/10/01/103... Sherman himself was pretty open that he wanted to blame rising costs on businesses when a new round of tariffs was passed into law.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#379

Post by joshe » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:54 PM UTC

This is probably the only tech acquisition that's ever made me sad. I just hate Adobe so much. The nightmare of their installer, the weird store with horrible designs popping up when you activate normal ui stuff, the difficulty in canceling a subscription, and the stasis in their product and ui. Oh and the sloppiness of Lightroom on mac with it's weird ui and that it didn't even import and manage photos well.

I've been so happy to have Adobe out of my life these last 10 years. I never even cared about the cost.

And figma has been so admirable, one of the best browser based apps. Always squeezing incredible performance out of the web with their crazy c++ engine. And their fast pace of delivering new features, often reworking ui just for the craft of it. It's been fun to just read the release notes.

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

Perhaps the silver lining will be the talent scattering, moving to and founding other companies, but for today this sucks.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#380

Post by bearmode » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:54 PM UTC

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 used to be a graphic designer, have my degree in it etc before I switched to development.

Adobe's pricing is more than fair. At least compared to what it used to be, where you'd have to shell out a couple of grand every 2-3 years to keep up with major releases. For me, it worked out a bit cheaper now than it did back then, but I also got a massive, high-quality font library thrown in as well as a bunch of other newer programs like Dimension.

They already have a functional monopoly in the industry and the prices aren't too bad.

Also Figma was a rival to Adobe XD, which was already actually cheaper than Figma was/is.