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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#631

Post by the_other »

hackitup7 wrote: post #458

So smart for both Adobe and Figma. Figma posed a serious threat to Adobe and it makes sense for them to do it. The losers are all of us poor sods who were happy Figma customers. Just goes to show that if you want an outsized exit multiple the best way is to put a gun to a $100B company's head.

> So smart for both Adobe and Figma. Figma posed a serious threat to Adobe and it makes sense for them to do it. The losers are all of us poor sods who were happy Figma customers.

It's utterly fucked up that "so smart for the companies: the losers are the customers" is baked into the system we use to transact culture.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#632

Post by MarkMarine »

cjsawyer wrote: post #622
tempie_deleteme wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's a bit counterintuitive that something can be good for a company (or companies) AND bad for the customers of said company... shouldn't something that is bad for a customer of a company be bad for the company too?

Companies aren’t your friends. They exist to maximize what customers will pay in exchange for the minimum effort on their part.

This is super true. Also, the reverse relationship exists with the company and the workers, but we workers often imagine it's different.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#633

Post by creativenolo »

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 quickly did Adobe fold the Macromedia products into their own product eco-system?

I ask because Adobe have been sitting on their Substance aqusition without making part of the Creative Cloud Suite.

Hopefully they may leave it alone.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#634

Post by ethbr0 »

c0mptonFP wrote: post #575
patcon wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> discovered it had gone subscription-only as well, meaning my entire photo library would now be trapped on my old laptop unless I paid a monthly fee forever. I empathize, but isn't all this the reason they would fork out so much for figma? I mean, people hated them for going subscription with the tools that used to be desktop, but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription. It's confus…

> but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription. Doesn't Figma have a free tier? That changes everything.

> free tier? That changes everything.

Does it? To me, that just says "Locking my data in a platform that can suddenly decide to charge me for functionality."

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#635

Post by the_other »

tempie_deleteme wrote: post #485
hackitup7 wrote: post #458

So smart for both Adobe and Figma. Figma posed a serious threat to Adobe and it makes sense for them to do it. The losers are all of us poor sods who were happy Figma customers. Just goes to show that if you want an outsized exit multiple the best way is to put a gun to a $100B company's head.

it's a bit counterintuitive that something can be good for a company (or companies) AND bad for the customers of said company... shouldn't something that is bad for a customer of a company be bad for the company too?

I agree so hard that I rage posted the same idea with less polite wording. Sorry for not reading your comment first.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#638

Post by unstrategic »

zinglersen wrote: post #629
unstrategic wrote: post #604

Figma was never on track to change the world. They were an Adobe clone from the beginning, out-executing them, but fundamentally exactly as anti-innovative. Not that $20B is anything to shake a stick at — but real innovation in this market will be worth one to two orders of magnitude more. Figma was scratching at this with their "whole org collab" vision and FigJam, but they lacked the vision to crack it, and their e…

Figma literally changed my world so I couldn't disagree more. Today I have +800 users and +100 editors in my Figma system; copy writers, ux, ui, ur, pm's, analysts, bizz, everyone, is collaborating like I have never seen in any Adobe setup. Adobe hasn't even been a contender, meanwhile Figma won over Sketch and Invision as well. So while I agree that they are still missing some features, especially for shared design…

So they made a slightly better Adobe.

Figma is all about collaborating on software — yet they don't touch software. They have been incrementally innovative in involving design-adjacent stakeholders in the design process, but the elephant in room is "how do we collaborate on _software itself_," rather than pictures of software?

When you have copywriters, designers, managers, and biz making pull requests to a Github repo via a design tool — that will be world-changing. This COULD have been our world already, but this paradigm is against Adobe's entrenched interests. Figma just played Adobe's game, and netted a cool $20B for it.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#639

Post by biztos »

prepend wrote: post #501
joshe wrote: post #379

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 be…

> This is probably the only tech acquisition that's ever made me sad. For me, it was… Atlassian buying HipChat Salesforce buying Tableau Salesforce buying Slack Microsoft buying GitHub (sort of) Alteryx buying Trifacta Oracle buying Cerner

Oracle buying Sun?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Sun_Microsystem...

Has more real value ever been destroyed in the service of paper value?

Arguably yes, though I am including DEC in this equation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq#Acquisition_by_Hewlett-...

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#640

Post by ginger2016 »

joshe wrote: post #379

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 be…

I have an adobe subscription, I never heard of Figma. I am sure their product is great, but it is a niche product. Figma is not worth 20B as a standalone company. Adobe will integrate Figma’s technology into Adobe’s suite of products and will make it available to the masses. I say it is a good thing that Adobe is acquiring Figma.

Change is hard; As a Figma consumer you are probably uncomfortable with the change, but Adobe acquiring is better than Figma going shutting down due to lack of mass adoption.

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