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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#791

Post by marpstar »

mikece wrote: post #169

And now all of the Figma users are saying "Oh [crap]... now I need to find a new tool to use." When is the last time Adobe acquired something and it improved? They destroyed Fireworks and Dreamweaver when they acquired Macromedia (which they only did because they wanted Flash). At this point I'm tempted to swear off Adobe products entirely -- except that the combo of Lightroom and Photoshop are the industry standard…

On the audio side of things: Cool Edit Pro 2 became Adobe Audition, which was single-license but of course has since been SaaS-ed. It was never as popular as Pro Tools, Cubase, etc but it was my goto DAW (as a hobbyist) for a long time.

Apple's work in last few years on Logic Pro has it lightyears ahead of Audition, and I wouldn't even call Apple the most popular product in that space right now (oh hi, Ableton)

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#793

Post by peebeebee »

LeftCorner wrote: post #180
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…

I still run a 22 year old copy Fireworks 4 because of Adobe's shenanigans. Just this morning I had to crop and resize a 1 MB image for display on a website and was able to do that in Fireworks in about 2 minutes resulting in 15k PNG and was on to my next task.

https://squoosh.app/ Web app that has much better encoders.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#794

Post by girvo »

Tagbert wrote: post #617
derefr wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always wondered why an indie app developer hasn't just decided to work their image-editor app up as "the new Fireworks." Many other image-editor apps do now take Fireworks' same non-destructive hybrid editing approach... kind of . But they're always missing one thing or another. Either: 1. they aren't multiplatform (can't get "standard" adoption like Fireworks if you're macOS-only) 2. they don't go far enough with th…

Affinity Designer is a good vector/bitmap combo app. It closely parallels Illustrator features but adds in basic bitmap editing. If you pair it with Affinity Photo you get most of the Photoshop features. The same files can be shared with both without any loss of fidelity.

I adore Affinity’s tools, but none of them are a replacement for Fireworks.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#795

Post by Sakos »

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…

Really? I pretty much hate the idea of tech acquisitions entirely now. It generally ends up in the loss of innovation and competition on the market.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#796

Post by nradov »

TheCondor wrote: post #699
ortusdux wrote: post #682

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…

MS's Office collaborative cloudish stuff is a prime example of this. I don't know how many times my team has ganged up on a document in Google Cloud and collaboratively banged it out. Likewise, I can only remember a couple times I've done it with Office and not ended up with n different copies of the doc that we had to manually merge back together, if we even could.

You must have been using an old version of MS Office, or had it improperly configured. We use Office for real time collaboration on documents all the time. You can put a file on SharePoint, then have multiple users edit live using a mix of desktop, mobile, and web applications. The changes are immediately visible and this doesn't create different copies.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#798

Post by zeruch »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #733
GuB-42 wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their tools were unsurpassed Why the past tense? Which tools have been surpassed? Have Photoshop been surpassed? I am genuinely curious here. I take note of Capture One, but is it an "acceptable yet technically inferior alternative that I picked because I don't agree with Adobe business practices" (which I think is a valid reason) or a viable alternative even for someone who doesn't have a problem dealing with Adob…

"Which tools have been surpassed? " Davinci Resolve is, for my use case, just as good as Premiere and Afx. It's also free. I wish gimp was as good as Ps.

I gave up GIMP for Krita years ago and have yet to see a reason to change (I still use Adobe as well, but for FOSS tools, Krita has stayed at the top for me)

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#799

Post by noelsusman »

oyeanuj wrote: post #782
noelsusman wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a good point, it's important to note the current FTC chair is working to change the standards that are used. I'm excited to see how that pans out. I think the lack of antitrust enforcement in recent decades is a really underrated problem in American governance.
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