"Dark patterns" will be coming to Figma soon with this. I'd suggest anyone running an Adobe product to check your outgoing connections while running one and then trying to block them. It's not just isolated to their products. PMS doing "market research" for their products have led students on to do work for them without paying them. (For anyone skeptical on the accuracy of anything here, feel free to email me at the address in my bio, I'm happy to provide evidence)
Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#782According to the FTC the law states that mergers are illegal when the effect "may be substantially to lessen competition or to tend to create a monopoly." Pretty positive this would lessen competition in design software and restablish Adobe as a monopoly. This merger should be blocked. https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
The FTC uses the Consumer Welfare Standard to decide antitrust cases, which means they have to show that a proposed merger would cause tangible harm to consumers. If "reducing competition" was the standard then all buyouts/mergers would be illegal since they all necessarily reduce competition.
That's what they have used in the past, and are not bound to it. If you read any of Lina Khan's work, it's clear that they'll take a more holistic view of the impact of lack of competition.
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#783For those interested in non-subscription, one-time payment alternatives, there are a few options: 1. Figma replacement - Sketch (1yr fee, updates optional, MacOS only) 2. Adobe Photoshop - Affinity Photo (Win/Mac) 3. Adobe Illustrator - Affinity Designer (Win/Mac) 4. Adobe InDesign - Affinity Publisher (Win/Mac) (I use this to create my indie magazine) 5. Adobe Animate - Tumult Hype (closest thing to Flash that we ha…
After checking out Sketch, I don't believe they offer a one-time payment option any longer. They seem to have switched to a subscription service now? I don't use software like Figma or Sketch often enough to justify an ongoing subscription, so I suppose Penpot might be the next best alternative for users like myself?
> After checking out Sketch, I don't believe they offer a one-time payment option any longer
You still can get it, but only after contacting support:
"We can still offer Mac-only licenses as new purchases to people who, for legal or security reasons, cannot use cloud-based products. However, they only offer access to the Mac app, and don’t get all the other benefits of a subscription. Get in touch with us if you’re a company with special requirements and would like a to use Sketch with only local storage." [0]
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#784I don't understand how this acquisition is not anti-competitive behavior. It was such a joy to see Figma's growth and technical innovation, and now it will just get eaten by the established power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc.#Anti-competitive_pr...
It is. Unfortunately our laws against anti-competitive behaviours are very weak.
thankfully, there is also Europe!
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#785I honestly miss Adobe from 10 - 15 years ago. It feels like they were a product company back then, as opposed to an upsell-advertising company (they are now). I don't use their products a lot these days, but when I do; I am always surprised by the slowness & bloat. I'm not too sure why the Figma people decided this was a good idea - but makes me grateful for Affinity & Sketch still being available.
You mean that Adobe that recently aquired Macromedia and killed off Dreamweaver and Fireworks?
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#786This 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…
For a large company, they also have pretty shady pricing. Like their “annual plan, paid monthly”. You’d think you’re just paying for the monthly subscription, but they hide the fact that you have to pay a penalty for early cancellation in the fine print. Dishonest, expensive, slow.
> Dishonest, expensive, slow.
And depending on your use case, bloated. In all the features Photoshop has gained since 6.0, 7.0, and CS1, only a tiny handful add anything of value for my usage. If 7.0 or CS1 were ported to modern operating systems they would fill my needs well and then some.
This is another reason why alternatives such as Affinity Photo and Pixelmator are increasingly enticing; their core feature sets have reached near-parity with that of Photoshop for many and so Photoshop offers very little extra value.
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#787As much as folks may be unhappy Adobe is taking over Figma, I'm sure the team over at Figma are elated. It's a successful exit for a much loved company and I'm sure the hard working team that built such a fantastic product are being well rewarded by such a large acquisition.
Why is exit so valuable? Ok, money, I understand, fair enough, if your goal is money, and not company and/or product. It is Ok.
But I see contradiction between "much loved company" and "successful exit". Successful acquisition is death for "much loved company" or "much loved product" almost always.
If your company/product is "much loved" (and created not because you are serial entrepreneur for whom exit IS THE goal, but because you want to create this exact product), acquisition is like selling you child to slavery, isn't it?
Edit: grammar.
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#788Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the difficulty in canceling a subscription Never had an issue with this tbh, it's always very easy. Manage account > cancel plan. Hell, if you subscribe but then cancel within the same day, they give you a full refund. I've abused this a few times if I just need to do something quick - sub, use it for a few hours, cancel, and it doesn't cost me anything.
Adobe pioneered the "click cancel plan but we will offer you some stuff that you don't care about in order to stop you from cancelling your plan" dark pattern. Then on the support call they will straight up pretend that none of their systems work in order to stop you from cancelling.
I have literally cancelled (and later re-obtained) subscriptions to CC at least 15 times. It hasn't been an issue, and I've never needed to call anyone.
They do offer you things, but those things tend to be free months. Not random stuff you won't care about.
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#789$20B is hard to say no too. Is that the new Unicorn? One piece of software basically being worth more than some first world cities? Thankfully I never tried it, so I don't know what I'll miss when it's destroyed.
Figma is really pretty revolutionary as far as web apps go, both from the design side (collaborative, beautiful, and easy to use) and from the dev side (realtime multiplayer, fast stateful graphics with undo/redo, incredibly complex UI, built in a combination of WebGL, WASM, and Workers). For a while before it, Sketch was the dominant UX/UI tool, but then Figma came outta nowhere and surprised the world by showing wh…
> Sketch was the dominant UX/UI tool, but then Figma came outta nowhere and surprised the world by showing what could be accomplished ...
I use both frequently and Sketch is far better than Figma. But Figma had one thing really going for it: it works on every platform with a browser, while Sketch is (sadly) Mac only. Every designer and his dog might have a Mac in the US, but the rest of the world is a different story.
Lately, Sketch does show that it is moving in the direction of a cloud, but I doubt that we'd see a web editor from them anytime soon.
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#790https://royandre.medium.com/goodbye-adobe-4f26fa48e28a
Let's hope Figma doesn't become the next Dreamweaver.