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Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

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Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#921

Post by frozenport »

cco wrote: post #875
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is my favorite comment of the year. We've all become so inured to the idea, especially in startup land, that the purpose of building a business is just the exit (and hopefully we can get out soon enough with someone else "holding the bag"). As you point out, if Figma can build a growing, profitable business, there is no reason they can't IPO at some point. But still, this shows how even the purpose of an…

That's the intended outcome of the incentive structure of startup compensation. Sometimes more than half of your expected compensation at a startup is in equity upside, either from an IPO or acquisition. If that is to no longer be the expectation, then hiring at startups will be _much_ more challenging because startups cannot generally afford the salaries or benefits that larger companies can offer.

that is already the case, with unlimited equity you're basically working on the founders dream in exchange for dilution

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#922

Post by todd-davies »

tqi wrote: post #709
todd-davies wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of a good example for a sass product. I'm sure it goes on though and I'm always interested in hearing about examples! A similar strategy which seems to be quite common these days is to cross-subsidise, which is when a firm sells one product at an artificially low price by using profits it makes from selling another product. If we think about cross-subsidisation, then lots of multi-product sass offerings…

It seems like the implicit assumption is that there must be a harm somewhere, we just haven't found it yet. But as a consumer, I'm not sure that is true? Even the Amazon paper seems to admit that there isn't any consumer harm to be found, only harm to smaller competitors' businesses. But that feels like an odd standard to apply since isn't any business's primary purpose to compete with / harm competitors?

> It seems like the implicit assumption is that there must be a harm somewhere, we just haven't found it yet... isn't any business's primary purpose to compete with / harm competitors?

As a general rule, firms want to escape competition in order to make higher profits. There's nothing wrong with that! Indeed, the mechanism by which economic competition generates many of its benefits is that firms innovate in order to escape competition, and for those innovations to be useful for us all. So, where does competition/antitrust law come in? In part, it's about ensuring that firms escape competition in the way that we want. Innovation and competition on the merits is good, underhanded tactics to harm competitors is bad. All competitions need these kind of rules, regardless of whether they're economic, political, sporting, etc. When you have a large population of thousands of firms, you can be sure that some of them will be trying to compete unfairly, hence the assumption that there is some harm that we're yet to find.

> there isn't any consumer harm to be found, only harm to smaller competitors' businesses

We can distinguish between 'static' and 'dynamic' harms. Static harms are those which happen in the short run, such as a cartel agreeing to increase prices or not innovate. These harms are quite concrete and easy to define. Dynamic harms are those which affect the way a market might function in the future. For instance, a harm to innovation may result in people not having access to new products. It's hard to say for sure whether these harms will actually manifest, so we're usually talking about tendencies instead of certainties. It's perfectly reasonable to consider tendencies under the law though (e.g. we might prohibit drink-driving for the same reason). Dynamic harms usually have harm to consumers as a second order effect (e.g. reduced innovation or choice).

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#923

Post by weebull »

yawnxyz wrote: post #790
doctorpangloss wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a stylized comment. It is a bunch of lists, but the UI is sometimes the lists are scrolling horizontally album covers, sometimes they are popping up from menu buttons, sometimes they go full screen and scroll normally, sometimes they are cut short to 5 elements and you cannot see more, sometimes they continue to 20 elements and you can press to see more, sometimes it's a list with headers that all contain mor…

(I’m a UX engineer but not at Spotify) It’s always been wild to me how incongruous / inconsistent the experience of using Spotify’s web/ios/android apps have been. It points to an organizational mess rather than a Figma mess, but maybe it also shows that Figma doesn’t address the entire picture yet of addressing org level communication and syncing with prod assets

None of the things you've highlighted have ever, as a user, registered with me. What I want from a music app UI is a good search function, playlists, and then it's really down to content, content, content.

For an app like that I just need the UX to be "good enough".

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#924

Post by robertlagrant »

itishappy wrote: post #823
robertlagrant wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is that ideology? "Government shouldn't be involved unless there's a great reason to do so"? If you think preventing company towns isn't a great reason to need approval, fair enough, but then why are you saying company towns are bad?

No. I think anti-trust regulations are really important. Don't you?

"unless there's a great reason to do so"

I'm really struggling to understand why you're asking questions tartly instead of just reading what I said, which I tried to make very simple to understand, and replying just as simply.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#925

Post by quitit »

maroonblazer wrote: post #890
quitit wrote: post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but for a slightly different reason. UX is going to get a shake up from AI. We're already seeing a bit of the new paradigm of on-demand UI/UX with Gemini (and the various me-too demos). Both Figma and Adobe are now vulnerable to disruption in this space. Adobe can use the time to ape Figma while flexing their rather good AI expertise.

I dunno. I work with a lot of designers and there's so much substantive back and forth in terms of clarifying goals, objectives, understanding design choices, and business priorities. I.e., there's a ton of nuance that is uncovered and deconstructed in those conversations. I'm skeptical that AI, at least in its current and foreseeable form, can fill those shoes in any meaningful way. I liken it to engineers who respo…

Oh don’t get me wrong. You’re 100% right - but this provides a level of disruption that would make the Figma buy out not as competitive as originally imagined. Neither are, of course, in the on-demand UX space, but both will need to be. Until then AI concept building is coming, this being the idea of freeing the designers from repetition and ground work, while speeding up concept development. (I.e pretty much what copilot is for coding.)

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#926

Post by dolmen »

tsycho wrote: post #549

[Pure speculation; I don't work in the UI space at all, and at neither of these companies] I wonder if Adobe is secretly happy about this. They were acquiring Figma at the peak of the market (for growth stock/startup valuations) because of the existential risks that Figma was threatening, due to their collaborative development UX. But since then: * Startup valuations have fallen. Ignoring regulatory concerns, a new a…

As I've been involved in 3 successive acquisitions of the company I work for, I can tell you that no integration happens at all until the deal is signed. Some plans may have been draws at the top executive level, but that stops here. Everything is done under the legal department supervision and "mitigate risks" is the primary concern. The time before signing the deal is spent mostly dealing with writing the contract between the 2 parties, not integrating.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#927

Post by berkes »

RickS wrote: post #622
tsycho wrote: post #549

[Pure speculation; I don't work in the UI space at all, and at neither of these companies] I wonder if Adobe is secretly happy about this. They were acquiring Figma at the peak of the market (for growth stock/startup valuations) because of the existential risks that Figma was threatening, due to their collaborative development UX. But since then: * Startup valuations have fallen. Ignoring regulatory concerns, a new a…

(ex-Adobe, on a team highly related to an area where Figma out-executed XD, less knowledge about genAI stuff) > Adobe has probably captured back both mental and market share from Figma GenAI/Firefly's success is in a totally different domain to what Figma's doing. Figma's equivalent at Adobe is XD, which has never held a candle to Figma. The existential problem Adobe tried to buy their way out of still exists in the…

Anecdotally, but at least three studio's and designers I work with switched to Figma because "it became Adobe". They made the switch because Adobe gave it some sort of "stamp of approval". From two, I'm certain they'll never go back to XD and/or illustrator. One, I'm not too sure because all their onboarding, libraries and education is around "adobe products".

So, at least from N=3, I dare say that the attempted merger only made the existential problem for Adobe worse.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#928

Post by locallost »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #645
Ericson2314 wrote: post #495

Renewed anti-trust is an interesting experiment. I don't what the consequences will be, but I am excited to find out! If a nothing else, I want people to think "we should try more policy experiments to become wiser" rather than "oh no, effect uncertain, better stick with status quo".

How is this an experiment? Don't we remember Standard Oil, AT&T, DOJ vs MS, etc?

Renewed anti-trust. It hasn't been enforced in a long time.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#929

Post by lloydatkinson »

tsycho wrote: post #549

[Pure speculation; I don't work in the UI space at all, and at neither of these companies] I wonder if Adobe is secretly happy about this. They were acquiring Figma at the peak of the market (for growth stock/startup valuations) because of the existential risks that Figma was threatening, due to their collaborative development UX. But since then: * Startup valuations have fallen. Ignoring regulatory concerns, a new a…

> I don't work in the UI space at all

> Adobe has probably captured back both mental and market share from Figma

I agree with your initial point - only someone not in the UI space could make such an outlandish, and honestly deranged, claim.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#930

Post by blagie »

alephnan wrote: post #445
542458 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adobe is very good at building software. Is that actually true? XD attempted to directly compete with Sketch and Figma, and was not generally considered to be a success at that primarily because they couldn’t ship features fast enough to catch up.

Photoshop is one of the best pieces of software, period. Premier is, well, the premier photo editing app. Every designer knows illustrator. UX/UI is just a subset of design. Many web developers who were around before the HTML5 era will swear by Dreamweaver.

> Photoshop is one of the best pieces of software, period.

FWIW, painting is one of the easiest pieces of software to get right. As much as I couldn't replicate the volume of stuff Adobe has done in 30+ years, I could build the bones of Photoshop in a few months, with modular extensibility frameworks to slot everything else in.

Indeed, GIMP did much the same thing. They messed up a few things (like color models), which continue to haunt it (even the ones which were retroactively fit back in), but it's not any more work to do it right. If they had, it'd be very competitive with Photoshop today.

The basic data model is a grid of pixels, organized with layers, and having masks, and an extensible set of tools to operate on them. You also need a little bit of "other" for things like editable text, before it is flattened into the above. Add modular tools and filters, and you're 90% of the way there.

Most of the value-add of Photoshop is simply developer time to add a comprehensive set of tools. Adobe can hire a researcher to tweak some algorithm for years, and at this point they've got a lot.

Basic video editing is similar. Linear streams, in layers, with modular filters and effects.

I'm much more impressed with Adobe drawing tools, page layout, and animation. That's HARD because there aren't the same kinds of clean data models and abstractions. These are harder to use, and don't feel as polished, but that's not because they're less well-written, but because they solve a harder problem. I could NOT build the core of that myself in a reasonable amount of time.

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