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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our university subscribes to Adobe Products Suit- when all of their functionality can be replicated with FOSS. They sent out a survey about this before they started the subscription and I answered negatively to that, to no avail. So that's where our tuition/grant/loan/savings money are going.

Unless some stuff has changed in the past few years gimp is not a suitable replacement for adobes products.

There are a lot more FOSS tools than GIMP. Also, don't criticize the tool for a lack of understanding. You also had to learn adobe tools, after all.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#712

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.

Can someone plz enlighten me how Figma competes with Adobe? AFAIK Web/app designers use either Sketch or Figma, publishers use Illustrator and photographers use Photoshop/Lightroom. At least that's how it's been back in the day. Is that no longer the case?

There are use cases where Figma and Adobe already directly compete:

- Product wireframes/mockups

- Memes/social media posts

- Simple vector creation/editing

And that list is only expanding.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to beta test for them. A few months back I took at look at the current version of Audition to see what I'd been missing out on since the days of CS6 nearly a decade ago. Three things have changed. It now includes one third-party plugin (that anyone could purchase) offering an alternative volume meter - the equivalent of a slightly different color histogram for photo/video software. It offers some new presets w…

CoolEdit! haven't heard that name in a while. Yeah, Adobe used to be ultra-respected, especially in the 90's as Photoshop took the world by storm. These days, as you can see, the response to "X acquired by Adobe" is met with universal disappointment (except by those who have Adobe stock, I guess).

SoundForge was the better option, cracked, just like Microsoft used it, of course. That was in the Radium days.

It went over to Sony and is now at Magix.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#714
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 can't think of any other company to which my relationship as a customer has swung so completely as Adobe. In the 2000s, their tools were unsurpassed, and I was happy to pay the premium prices they asked (though I'd skip versions to save money). When Creative Suite was discontinued, that was a pretty abrupt turn, as I had no interest in a subscription for software I only used for personal projects. And yet, I stayed…

Kinda weird complaining about Adobe subscription pricing in a Figma thread when Figma also has the subscription pricing model.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#716
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ye…

Adobe ran Flash into the ground. Flash was developing at such a rapid pace until it was acquired, and then quickly stagnated. Adobe too way too long to get Adobe Air performant and the tooling was abysmal. If Flash was in capable hands, it would have become a major player in the game development space, which is where most of its strengths were.

And yet I still get jobs working in Flash, there's still no comparable program for frame-by-frame vector animation. A package that you can draw into but also rig puppets in. I'm rooting for Grease Pencil to catch up but really it's nowhere near in terms of fast usability.

That's not so say they didn't run it into the ground - I still remember the nightmare of CS5.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone plz enlighten me how Figma competes with Adobe? AFAIK Web/app designers use either Sketch or Figma, publishers use Illustrator and photographers use Photoshop/Lightroom. At least that's how it's been back in the day. Is that no longer the case?

Adobe has XD, which is a direct competitor to Figma as a vector based design tool that includes prototyping functionality.

Thanks, I've never actually seen anyone use it in practice but turns out that Figma has a 31.73% market share in the Collaborative Design And Prototyping category, while Adobe XD has a 15.14% market share in the same space

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone plz enlighten me how Figma competes with Adobe? AFAIK Web/app designers use either Sketch or Figma, publishers use Illustrator and photographers use Photoshop/Lightroom. At least that's how it's been back in the day. Is that no longer the case?

People are moving away from designing in photoshop to figma in large numbers hence the 20bn.

But Photoshop is not a vector design tool? I thought this move happened in the 90s

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#720
post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find myself coming back to this Steve Jobs quote more and more: "It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketin…

Creatives also destroy companies. See NeXT or whatever the weird letter casing was.

this is true, to be fair .. anyone remember "Xaos Tools" (video effects), Audion or when Marc Cantor became so personally offensive that the business people paid him to leave? it is true.. end of innocence stories here
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