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Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

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Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#931

Post by mkl »

mrandish wrote: post #814
mkl wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's about the size of the business, not about being new and rapidly growing. I think the large majority of small businesses are not startups.

> "18% of small businesses fail within their first year, while 50% fail after five years and approximately 65% by their tenth year in business. This information is as per the Bureau of Labor Statistics." https://www.chamberofcommerce.org/small-business-statistics/ Combined with the long-term (25-year) data I cited further above, this indicates the majority of small businesses are started up recently. The pool of smal…

Well, I'd just call those new businesses, but dictionaries agree with you. I was using Paul Graham's definition of "startup", which is something more specific: http://paulgraham.com/growth.html. That's about growth, not tech, so feed distributors could qualify.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#932

Post by matwood »

theultdev wrote: post #799
gkoberger wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be negotiated as an investment, but that only benefits Adobe. Figma wouldn't want it (would you want your biggest competitor to be an investor? they'd have information and leverage you wouldn't want them to have), and it defeats the purpose of a break-up fee (Figma negotiated for it because they didn't want to spend a year of their lives focusing on something that would benefit their competitor if it's all f…

And in reality, Adobe actually lost progress on XD and Figma has come out with an incredible amount of features this year. Now Figma has an extra billion for development and Adobe has to start back up the thing they couldn't catch Figma with in the first place. It was pretty much a win/win for Figma regardless of outcome. Though this outcome is a win for Figma and it's users.

> And in reality, Adobe actually lost progress on XD and Figma has come out with an incredible amount of features this year.

Features and free advertising. Many people knew of Figma, but now everyone knows of Figma. It's the tool that was good enough to scare Adobe into paying 20B and stopped by regulators.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#933

Post by mercurialsolo »

What about this playing a role?

Is the role of anti-trust, big tech regulation and regulatory fees playing a bigger role here?

Is the era of AI more in favour of say both Figma / Adobe competing vs collaborating - similar datasets?

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/19/tech/google-play-store-se...

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#936

Post by coldtea »

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #894
coldtea wrote: post #889

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am incredibly happy about this. Otherwise it's like lamenting the invention of the car because it would eliminate all the jobs making buggies and whips. Between road accidents, air pollution, noise, horrendous cities and suburbs built around car use, and so on, I don't mind lamenting the invetion of the car either... In general it's pretty naive to celebrate new technologies without considering drawbacks. Especia…

> even more so if the technology has the potential to eliminate human creativity This is completely overboard. People will always be creative. There is no way in which this stops anyone from being creative but actually allows not artists to be much more creative. It also allows the same for artists as they can now create in styles they aren't skilled in. > killing off graphic design as a profession? It likely will dr…

>This is completely overboard. People will always be creative.

Just not in the fields where AI will replace them? Hardly a consolation that "people will always be creative" in e.g. interpretive dancing, if the music in our culture end ups being dominated by AI musak.

And I don't just care for my own music consumption, to be consoled that "some people will still be doing human music". I also care about the role of music in society in general.

I'd say the same for graphic design and illustration. Yeah, some people will be creative in those fields still. But I don't care for a world where 90% of the illustrations and graphic design we see are AI crap.

And I'm not saying it because AI does great illustrations, but because it does crap illustrations cheaper - which for the undiscerning manager will be "good enough", and for spam farms and the like will be a godsend.

>It likely will dramatically kill it and free up those people for other types of jobs as they can now be more productive.

>Humans will still continue to be creative and draw and paint. That won't change.

No, just the ability to make a living out of it, as opposed to getting a drab office or factory job will. That, and being confronted 24/7 by AI "art", would be the changes.

>No reason to hold society back just to hold on to some jobs

Who exactly did sign up for that, and who said this is "forward" and not following it's "holding back"?

Not every BS we invent is a possitive. Nor is "increased technology" == "better".

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#937

Post by virtualritz »

chefandy wrote: post #861
krsdcbl wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a graphics designer of almost 20 years i have to heavily agree. Firefly is nice for drafting and dabbling with stuff that once would've been served by stock sites, but aside picking a few demo images or making some abstract pattern backgrounds here and there, this has close to zero overlap with the UI/UX into development & design system management process Figma serves. It's almost like saying the Bing bot eats awa…

Curious: what do you find missing in the affinity stuff? I see a bunch of people referring to it generally lacking 'stuff' but I'm curious about the sort of stuff it lacks. Maybe my use case won't be impacted much. I'm grandfathered in with the introductory CC pricing but there aren't too many threads left in the rope anchoring me to that. I rarely do print design anymore so InDesign isn't the huge sell it used to be…

Alpha channel/mask handling still sucks in Affinity and keeps sucking.[1]

For me this is already yet another app I paid for that is on the way to the famous 'enshittification'.

It's been years since I saw it mentioned in the Affinity forums first. And still a workflow so essential hasn't been addressed by the devs.

[1] https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/187070-alp...

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#939

Post by codeptualize »

kpandit wrote: post #826
codeptualize wrote: post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of pump and dumps but this one isn't a pump and dump. Figma was founded in 2012, they pretty much took over UI design, did $400M ARR in 2022, great retention, rapid growth, great margins, there is a lots of actual value there and still quite a bit of potential left. A "proper" startup does indeed include an exit as that's the point where they give a return on investment to their VC's. That is the start…

My bad. I was just responding to the parent comment and the comment(by showbug) they were replying to in isolation. Figma is a product I liked and was so terribly disappointed with the news of acquisition by adobe. Regarding startups, I just did google "define: startup" and in the dictionary definition there has no VC and no exit.

We can debate definitions and labels but that's not really relevant to the discussion imo, name it whatever you want, what I'm referring to is a company taking VC money to accelerate growth.

Once you take VC money, like Figma did, your goal is a lucrative exit.

It's high risk, high reward. It's a different way to build a company, and it's not really possible to change that once you take that route.

Doesn't mean you have to do this. I am all for building steady profitable private companies that aim for the long run, I think it's a great way to build great companies, but then you should stay far away from VC money, take a lot less risk, have different compensation strategies etc etc.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#940

Post by Applejinx »

sowbug wrote: post #196
codeptualize wrote: post #126

That is wild. It's a good thing as it means Adobe won't ruin Figma like they did with so many great software products before, but just imagine founders, investors and employees, thinking they had a really good exit.. That must hurt, I hope they can stay motivated. If Adobe can't buy them, what other exit options do they have? Go public?

What's wrong with selling goods and services for more than they cost?

Yes, thank you…

I could even prune that down some more. What's wrong with selling goods and services?

Not as a means to the accumulation of enough wealth to cash out and cease selling goods and services, which is what the startup world is trained to do. There's this hyper-focus on financialization, in that nothing means anything beyond the eventual payout, and all things are designed to either succeed or fail at going public and delivering that jackpot.

What about… doing the thing? Making a good, doing a service? What if that thing is in itself a thing to do, a purpose to have? In that case if you are either breaking even and retaining control, or amortizing the cost against something else, then you're pursuing some kind of idea that is not itself 'money'.

Why not that? Why not, directly, a thing that isn't money? I'm given to understand the idea of money is to accumulate the power and resources to do whatever thing your dream envisions. Well, how about cut out the middlemoney and do the thing?

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