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UK competition regulator finds Adobe’s purchase of Figma could reduce innovation

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Re: UK competition regulator finds Adobe’s purchase of Figma could reduce innovation

#51

Post by mattkevan »

pavlov wrote: post #28
drumhead wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe's actually done investors a favour and made a realistic enterprise valuation of the company for everyone. If it's worth $20bn to them then it's not likely to float for $5bn. They clearly think there's value there or some kind of competitive advantage that makes the company worth that much.

The problem is that the company is worth $20 billion only to Adobe. And that explains why antitrust authorities around the world are interested in this deal: that kind of discrepancy suggests a market distortion in progress.

XD proved that Adobe doesn’t really care about the UX/UI design sector - Figma’s worth 20bn to Adobe to kneecap a potentially existential threat.

Re: UK competition regulator finds Adobe’s purchase of Figma could reduce innovation

#52

Post by danielmarkbruce »

karaterobot wrote: post #30
have_faith wrote: post #2

I think many Figma users are concerned with Adobe's purchase of Figma. I've already removed Adobe products twice from my life (professional and personal) and would prefer to not have to do it again. That said, I can't see the acquisition being a problem for competition in this particular space. It's not hard to imagine someone just making figma-but-different and becoming the next big thing. There are also countless o…

It would be very hard to build a product from scratch that competed with Figma. Even if you just straight-up stole all their product choices, features and UX and so on, the engineering under the hood seems pretty high level. Anything is possible, but it would not be trivial.

Figma started in 2016 and competed against giant companies (like Adobe) who had been around for decades, and did extremely well. The competition in this space is never ending. They just keep coming. The competition regulators seem to consistently misunderstand the industries they are regulating.

Re: UK competition regulator finds Adobe’s purchase of Figma could reduce innovation

#53

Post by danielmarkbruce »

karaterobot wrote: post #32

They were losing the battle for the design software market, so they bought the competition. The less innovative company bought the more innovative company. Of course it would reduce innovation.

Some people argue this acquisition opens the door for a new company to make another, newer, better version of Figma because Adobe could screw it up.

Ie, they are driving innovation by killing the leader.

Re: UK competition regulator finds Adobe’s purchase of Figma could reduce innovation

#54

Post by whalesalad »

floomk wrote: post #46

If you want to talk about reducing innovation then have a look at Apple's walled garden. They're preventing so many innovative new apps from ever being created by being inaccessible to young/poor developers.

You can develop iOS applications for free?

This comment is so ironic because Apple has been the #1 innovator in so many arenas for decades.

Re: UK competition regulator finds Adobe’s purchase of Figma could reduce innovation

#55

Post by etblg »

mattkevan wrote: post #50
lhnz wrote: post #21

On the contrary, the ability for startups to be purchased by larger companies is the majority of the financial incentive towards creating startups. If competition regulators prohibit these transactions, it will harm the startup ecosystem and reduce innovation.

Or they could have focused on building a sustainable company that made a profit from the start and didn’t use VC money to essentially give the product away for free. I was really unhappy about switching my design team to Figma because their only ways forward are to either IPO or get purchased, with all the pain they involve. Or worse, if they actually have to start making a profit, then prices will be raised immensel…

Out of curiosity, what were the alternatives to Figma you were looking at and were more in favour of?

Re: UK competition regulator finds Adobe’s purchase of Figma could reduce innovation

#56

Post by mattkevan »

etblg wrote: post #55
mattkevan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they could have focused on building a sustainable company that made a profit from the start and didn’t use VC money to essentially give the product away for free. I was really unhappy about switching my design team to Figma because their only ways forward are to either IPO or get purchased, with all the pain they involve. Or worse, if they actually have to start making a profit, then prices will be raised immensel…

Out of curiosity, what were the alternatives to Figma you were looking at and were more in favour of?

Sketch doesn’t have all the features of Figma, but it is backed by a sustainable company who haven’t taken on vast amounts of funding.

We really needed the real-time collaboration features, which Sketch didn’t have at that time so we went with Figma. I was concerned that it only had a couple of years left in its current state, which sadly seems to be true.

Penpot is an interesting upcoming alternative, though it’s not ready for prime-time yet.

Re: UK competition regulator finds Adobe’s purchase of Figma could reduce innovation

#58

Post by lotsofpulp »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #48
lhnz wrote: post #21

On the contrary, the ability for startups to be purchased by larger companies is the majority of the financial incentive towards creating startups. If competition regulators prohibit these transactions, it will harm the startup ecosystem and reduce innovation.

>reduce innovation Maybe the real innovation that we need is how to create companies that are designed to operate indefinitely as a going concern, breaking even or turning a profit without the need for an "exit" event. Let's work on business fundamentals that aren't three financial engineering schemes in a trenchcoat, for once.

Nature does not allow for solving anything “indefinitely”.

Restricting owners from being able to sell is an idea, although not sure it has enough merit, since society can benefit from businesses being able to be acquired. Perhaps the pendulum has tilted too far, or technology makes economies of scale too good to compete against.

Re: UK competition regulator finds Adobe’s purchase of Figma could reduce innovation

#59

Post by pcurve »

spandrew wrote: post #35
mattkevan wrote: post #3

Good. It absolutely would reduce innovation. Adobe have already canned XD, which was a poor alternative to Figma, but Adobe had to at least pretend to compete. Problem is, even though Figma have captured a large proportion of the digital design market, they took on so much funding that their only real options are a purchase or IPO. I don’t believe that subscriptions alone would bring in enough for the kind of returns…

This is absolutely right, and why their new dev tools feature add an additional $25 per seat to use. Even though I would rather pay less — if the integration between a Design System and Github is clean enough it might be worth it for my DSM team? It's real value. It's also why they launched Figjam — which has gotten Miro off of my balance sheet. I want Figma to scale up and be the anti-Adobe. Financial balance of Fig…

They're also continuing to cripple free seat functions.
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