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Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

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Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#981

Post by alephnan »

blagie wrote: post #930
alephnan wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), whi…

> 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.

Ask any designer and they’ll laugh at you for bringing up in Gimp compared to Photoshop. Photoshop is 10x better. It’s easy to say it’s easy to make Photoshop, but they didn’t. It’s like a poor person saying it’s easy to be a millionaire if they wanted to.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#983

Post by noobermin »

occamsrazorwit wrote: post #751
sackfield wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The employees are sold shares in the business that they expect to accrue a certain amount of value and with scale get very serious multiples in a liquidity event. With that promise broken the value proposition they originally signed up for no longer holds, some perhaps wasted the best years of their lives here when other options were on the table. If all you want to do is sell goods and services for more than they co…

> If all you want to do is sell goods and services for more than they cost, then open up a bakery. What's the endgame to ever-increasing share value exactly? It's easy to say that a company should never stop growing, but there's no way that's a realistic ideal.

Being downvoted is a great example of ideological thinking on HN because people get mad when you challenge underlying assumptions in their thinking. Remember that when e/acc nerds on twitter pretend they're just rational thinkere or whatever else they claim

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#984

Post by dolmen »

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?

Figma will now have $1B of break-up fees. They could distribute part of that cash to stakeholders and employees without diluting the shares.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#985

Post by dolmen »

EricDeb wrote: post #594
endtime wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that the purpose of building a business is just the exit The majority of those affected negatively by this are not the founders, but the employees. Many of them may have turned down FAANG positions that come with predictable liquid RSUs. Some may have kids (in fact, I know someone at Figma who had a kid in the past year). Liquidity's not necessarily about opportunistically passing on risk...sometimes it's just abou…

Any chance figma can go public?

Figma employees should instead ask for a share of the $1B break-up fees.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#986

Post by ramijames »

ricardonunez wrote: post #948
sgammon wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macromedia was amazing and this is such a real comment

Until Afinity came out with their products I was still missing fireworks.

I like and use Affinity products. They are a decent alternative. In particular Publisher is an excellent alternative to Indesign.

I do wish the default shortcuts weren't so wonky though.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#987

Post by Redster »

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…

Quick note on Audition. It's not 100% the same, but Davinci Resolve comes with Fairlight included.

And Davinci Resolve is free.

It's an DAW that is definitely at a professional level and isn't too hard to learn as someone who was used to multitrack editing in Audition. All my VST3 plugins carry over and some of the builtin effects are just as good or better than those in Audition. It's not a light-weight program at all, but comparable to Audition.

I only find myself missing Audition when it comes to repairing original .wav files. But I haven't actually had to do that in many years at this point.

If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend giving it a try.

(I've heard good things about Reaper as a DAW and think I'll try it on my next project.)

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#988

Post by quickthrower2 »

015a wrote: post #845
vlovich123 wrote: post #775

I think this is great. Figma gets a free undiluted infusion of 1B cash. I’m surprised break-up fees aren’t negotiated as an investment instead of a pure cash transfer. Sure it may have impacted company focus, it didn’t impact their revenue that much (1.5x growth vs 2x growth in previous years although that could have also been caused by an adverse economic climate with sales slowing across many companies and industri…

Fun fact: Figma's ARR in 2022 was around $400M. That $1B cash infusion could be invested in treasuries with an ARR of ~$50M; this isn't just a liquidity infusion of a billion dollars, it increases their net income by like 10%, basically free of charge.

Weird comparison. High growth unicorn revenue and income from a bond.

Probably should just compare $1bn cash to their company valuation and what another round of investment might look like. How much equity did they get to “keep”.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#990

Post by adfm »

The core of what Adobe offers is centered around a deteriorating print paradigm with digital capabilities tacked-on. Figma is of the Web whole cloth. They may look similar and do similar things, but there's a reason they made a move. Adobe has done a few cool things in the interim, but nothing that truly compensates for the jank eroding their cloud bundle, which is mostly smoke and mirrors (and if that's your thing, davinci or blender are probably what you're reaching for).
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