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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

#71

Post by v3ss0n »

_jab wrote: post #70
karaterobot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Small startups these days regularly train cutting edge LLMs. I don't think Figma is that far out-of-reach.

Training LLM and developing webgl app that works like magic on any devices with no visible performance problems on any level of zoom, dynamic, interactive, smart, lightweight is totally different level of engineerinf skill requirements.

Training LLM is like a child play compared to it.hack , even NEETs from 4chan are training erotic roleplay LLM for fun.

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

#72

Post by v3ss0n »

hiidrew wrote: post #66

I love figma, dislike the merger. Have hopes for this open source alternative https://penpot.app/ .

You are saying without trying.Penpot can only compete in functionalities. Due to their architectural choices of using SVG ,no WebGL renderers, very resource intensive java backend they will never reach performance req of FIGMA. Designing just a few screen is crippling it.

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

#73

Post by oli5679 »

hfkwer wrote: post #40
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, I’ve provided some feedback.

You're about a month and a half too late. The request for comments ended on May 18.

Yeah my comment wasn’t that clear but I was encouraging people to comment on future tech mergers.

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

#74

Post by firecall »

elforce002 wrote: post #14
GenerWork wrote: post #11

Interesting. Right now Figma is THE standard for UX design. It completely blew Sketch away thanks to Covid. I really haven't heard UX designers talk about going back to Sketch or any other program, in fact I've only heard multiple people talk about how Figma is just getting better with their new update (especially around prototyping). Personally, I'm not a fan of Adobe, but it seems like there's a lot of UX designers…

Until they find Figma will either disappear or get more expensive under adobe.

They’ll just roll it into their Creative Cloud sub.

Probably.

It will replace XD.

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

#75

Post by firecall »

rvense wrote: post #36
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.

They did this before with at least Aldus and Macromedia.

although they genuinely killed Quark Xpress by making a better product with Indesign.

Whilst Quark totally dropped the ball and failed to innovate and update for modern MacOS.

Quark had as good as a 100% of the market before InDesign came along.

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

#76

Post by mushbino »

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…

They also recently got rid of most of the free tier. Many files I had from years of use gone overnight without warning. I used the free version as a personal depository for files, I made using the pro version paid for by my employers.

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

#77

Post by mushbino »

GenerWork wrote: post #11

Interesting. Right now Figma is THE standard for UX design. It completely blew Sketch away thanks to Covid. I really haven't heard UX designers talk about going back to Sketch or any other program, in fact I've only heard multiple people talk about how Figma is just getting better with their new update (especially around prototyping). Personally, I'm not a fan of Adobe, but it seems like there's a lot of UX designers…

I love sigma and have been using it for years, but I'm already starting to look for alternatives. They've already made some changes to free versus premium tiers and anyone who trusts Adobe is an absolute fool. I've moved away from all of their products entirely with the exception of Figma.....for now.

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

#78

Post by barnabee »

lhnz wrote: post #69
barnabee wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument makes absolutely no sense to me. The large tech acquirers have extremely high market valuations partly because of the expectation that they continue to get away with doing exactly this. If we had more competent competition regulators and this sort of acquisition was basically not on the cards at all, ever, once a company reaches a certain size then that value would stay in the innovating startups until…

I don't want to get into an argument with you and didn't explain the argument very well, however, it's not as if I'm just coming up with weird opinions on my own here. The basis of my argument comes from the director of competition policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, who explains it all in depth here: https://www.ft.com/content/b7fdbb35-e104-47bf-9e03-ef5d8b324... > Moreover, start-ups depend on a…

Interesting and fair enough, certainly should be a consideration.

Obviously it's easy to think of laws that could be enacted that would make founding a startup more attractive and increase the number of startups and amount of investment in them that everyone would agree would still be bad and shouldn't exist.

This is obviously not such a clear case, but I personally fall on the side that reducing startup formation/investment would be an ok price to pay here.

I have some (but not 100%) confidence that this could mostly or entirely be offset by other improvements such as making going public easier for smaller companies (perhaps similar to London's AIM for example) or creating market/tax incentives that favour startups and smaller companies, and/or penalise companies that become larger, especially by acquiring other companies or entering many relatively unrelated/independent verticals.

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