As a current software engineer at Adobe, I was really disappointed when I got the internal email announcing this this morning. It's reminiscent of Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior in the early 00s. Figma is the better product and Adobe knows it - but instead of using that to light a fire under them and work harder to create a better product, Adobe just used its deep pockets to make the problem go away. I was already planning on leaving the company for other reasons but this is the nail in the coffin for me.
So smart for both Adobe and Figma. Figma posed a serious threat to Adobe and it makes sense for them to do it. The losers are all of us poor sods who were happy Figma customers.
Just goes to show that if you want an outsized exit multiple the best way is to put a gun to a $100B company's head.
I 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.
I don't think "the government" does anything unless someone complains. In this case, the process is to send a letter requesting a "Business Review" [1]. It's probably a "fill out this simple 30 page form, wait 2.5 years (max!) and then have your review request politely declined" situation, but I suppose it's foolish to complain before trying. It feels like one of those processes that costs lawyer money that another business would usually pay for; however it's not clear what business would pay for this - maybe a heavy user of Figma? But then even if you 'win' and stop the sale, doesn't that alienate you from the founders?
Acquiring a competitor isn't going to automatically trigger antitrust laws. For one, web design is so far from critical infrastructure that it's just unlikely to be on their radar. And secondly, there's still a ton of competition. Even if Adobe and Figma are the two leaders, there's still loads of alternatives available. You can still use Sketch or Canva or any of the all-in-one beginner tools like Squarespace.
It's not anti-competitive because there are plenty of other options available (and anyone can go and make their own if they're willing to invest the time).
Anti-competitive would assume that there's no other viable option or means for replacement.
FWIW, I think Adobe is a shit company but calling daddy government in to thump them for (presumably) taking away or breaking the favorite toy sets a terrible precedent. If anything, this is pro-competitive because it should light a fire under the ass of indie's to replace it (which is already underway by the looks of Penpot).
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 for photography.
I'm not enough of a power user to use a lot of the more advanced & unique features of photoshop, but a few years back I switched to Gimp & Inkscape for managing product photos & wire diagrams of things I need to laser cut. It's a bit more clunky and too a few weeks to learn the differences enough to get done what I needed to, but by now I have no need for any paid product much less one from a corporation that was a nightmare to deal with.
For anyone looking for an alternative I'd highly recommend checking out these alternatives. Especially with the devoted communities that provide a wide range of plugins it's possible to map a lot (not all) use cases onto these alternatives.
I'm not sure there are similar alternative to things like lightroom & after effects, and it may be that Adobe's ability to have a tight integration of the production pipeline through these produces can't easily be duplicated. But if your needs a little simpler, check these out.
Premiere and After Effects are also industry standards for video, Illustrator is the industry standard for illustrators, and I'm sure there's more I don't know about. As far as producing industry-standard products in the creative sphere, who is better than Adobe?
I try to avoid them like the plague. Affinity while not nearly as supported and feature rich....it doesn't stab and bleed me monthly for the privilege of bloatware...
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)
While it's true that Gimp can't compete with Photoshop, Lightroom has some very stiff competition in Darktable, RawTherapee and ART. In fact, depending on how you look at it, Darktable may actually be the better/more powerful raw editor.
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 been so happy to have Adobe out of my life these last 10 years. I never even cared about the cost.
And figma has been so admirable, one of the best browser based apps. Always squeezing incredible performance out of the web with their crazy c++ engine. And their fast pace of delivering new features, often reworking ui just for the craft of it. It's been fun to just read the release notes.
Although it’s still great software I’m stopping usage today because a) I refuse to support adobe and b) I’m confident the software will progressively get much worse, so any investment today is a waste of time I should spend finding and learning something else.
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 and flows people love in Figma and Sketch were pioneered years earlier in Fireworks.
After the acquisition, Adobe starved Fireworks of resources and marketing. They broke things, left major bugs and performance regressions unfixed, and eventually discontinued it altogether. I'd argue this wasn't simply negligence, but a calculated decision to kill an innovative product because it threatened the profits of their cash cows.
As much as I hope otherwise, I believe the acquisition of Figma will go the same way. Once it's under the Adobe umbrella, the simple mathematics of profits from Photoshop and Illustrator vs. those from Figma will result in the latter being starved, stripped of functionality, and eventually left broken.
According 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.
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.
Just checked out Penpot, it's pretty good! Definitely usable for daily driving although I'm sure looking deeper there will be some features I miss. Going to try importing some Figma designs...
Congrats Dylan. I remember riding caltrain with you from south bay to SF, watching you sit on the floor of the train coding a "photoshop alternative" thinking your idea was crazy!
RIP Figma, I've been trying to avoid Adobe products since they charge the earth for their products and free open source options are solid alternatives. I'm expecting Adobe to eventually price gouge us to the point where we are forced to find a Figma alternative.
As a long time Figma champion, this breaks my heart. Every time I am forced to go back to an Adobe product I find it worse off than I left it. I worry that I will no longer see rapid updates and features that benefit me as a user and not the grater "cloud ecosystem".
I’d put the odds at about 95% that Adobe will ruin Figma with bloat, 14 different “Creative Cloud” background processes, and hostile pricing models within 5 years.
This is huge news for Sketch.
However, to be honest, this is the type of acquisition that should be blocked IMO. Adobe is literally acquiring a direct competitor here.
To me the consumer harm is pretty clear. Instead of a more competent org (Figma) growing further to disrupt more of Adobe’s business, we’re going to be stuck with Adobe forever.
Great outcome for the founders and investors in Figma, terrible outcome for consumers.
Oh well, so dies an amazing product to be locked up behind a massively customer-unfriendly organization.
I'd even rather it have been acquired by Google where it could end up being graveyarded, there at least it would, if it survived, have been more easily available. I consider it for practical purposes no less survived now than if Google had killed it.
Is there anyone who could have acquired them that would have been a better custodian for such a great product?
Agreed, that is very strange positioning. Clearly they understood how Figma users would take this news, but trying to obfuscate or spin it is a mistake.
If true, congratulations for Figma founders, and a bad day for designers that were looking for a way to escape from Adobe.
I don’t think that in the long term this will give Figma as an ecosystem any benefit — unless Adobe will keep it separate from the main Creative Cloud.
This reminds me of the Trello acquisition.
As a loyal Figma user I’m pretty sceptical of the future. Hope to be wrong.
> Adobe is deeply committed to keeping Figma operating autonomously and I will continue to serve as CEO, reporting to David Wadhwani.
As others have said, there’s really a missing OSS version out there that can compete feature-by-feature with Sketch / Figma / XD. Layout engine capabilities are the biggest missing feature in competitors.
Big win for the Figma team. Big loss for consumers who have benefitted from the competitive market. I really hope this incentives Krita, Ink, Gimp or other OSS to focus more on UI design features.
I think there is a value for Adobe to add Figma to CC, Photoshop can fully focus on photo manipulation while Figma (perhaps merged with XD?) will be target UI designers.
I'm a long time user of Trello. After the acquisition, Atlassian foisted their login system on Trello users, but otherwise didn't substantially degrade the product.
The integration with other Atlassian services improved. There is a variety of plug-ins now, and new ways to display the data for paid plans.
Do you feel different? Any specific examples of what became worse?
[+] [-] bears-n-beets|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tus666|3 years ago|reply
Big payoffs create massive incentives for people to create great products in the hope they will be bought out.
Adobe may have "destroyed" one great product, but think of the hundreds of new ones they have incentivized to be created.
People look at this all wrong and ignore the downstream effect.
[+] [-] isnhp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ulfw|3 years ago|reply
Microsoft bought Powerpoint, bought Excel basically too. There wouldn't be an Office suite otherwise.
Google bought Keyhole, there wouldn't be a Google Maps otherwise. Google bought Youtube. They couldn't win with Google Video. Google bought Android.
etc etc etc
This is how the industry works. In general.
[+] [-] homarp|3 years ago|reply
What investors first paid for @Figma , which @adobe buying for ~$40.20 per share:
$0.088: @dannyrimer/@IndexVentures , Jacobsen/OATV
A $0.199: @johnolilly /@GreylockVC, @semil
B $0.332: @mamoonha/@kleinerperkins
C $1.098: @andrew__reed/@sequoia
D $4.619: Peter Levine/@a16z
[+] [-] arbuge|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackitup7|3 years ago|reply
Just goes to show that if you want an outsized exit multiple the best way is to put a gun to a $100B company's head.
[+] [-] lioeters|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc.#Anti-competitive_pr...
[+] [-] javajosh|3 years ago|reply
1 - https://www.justice.gov/atr/business-reviews
[+] [-] tootie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicoburns|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rglover|3 years ago|reply
Anti-competitive would assume that there's no other viable option or means for replacement.
FWIW, I think Adobe is a shit company but calling daddy government in to thump them for (presumably) taking away or breaking the favorite toy sets a terrible precedent. If anything, this is pro-competitive because it should light a fire under the ass of indie's to replace it (which is already underway by the looks of Penpot).
[+] [-] mikece|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ineedasername|3 years ago|reply
For anyone looking for an alternative I'd highly recommend checking out these alternatives. Especially with the devoted communities that provide a wide range of plugins it's possible to map a lot (not all) use cases onto these alternatives.
I'm not sure there are similar alternative to things like lightroom & after effects, and it may be that Adobe's ability to have a tight integration of the production pipeline through these produces can't easily be duplicated. But if your needs a little simpler, check these out.
[+] [-] silent_cal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kderbyma|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marpstar|3 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] huslage|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donatzsky|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshe|3 years ago|reply
I've been so happy to have Adobe out of my life these last 10 years. I never even cared about the cost.
And figma has been so admirable, one of the best browser based apps. Always squeezing incredible performance out of the web with their crazy c++ engine. And their fast pace of delivering new features, often reworking ui just for the craft of it. It's been fun to just read the release notes.
https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...
Perhaps the silver lining will be the talent scattering, moving to and founding other companies, but for today this sucks.
[+] [-] ilmiont|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steve_adams_86|3 years ago|reply
Is there a blender of tools like this?
[+] [-] hgs3|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nayroclade|3 years ago|reply
After the acquisition, Adobe starved Fireworks of resources and marketing. They broke things, left major bugs and performance regressions unfixed, and eventually discontinued it altogether. I'd argue this wasn't simply negligence, but a calculated decision to kill an innovative product because it threatened the profits of their cash cows.
As much as I hope otherwise, I believe the acquisition of Figma will go the same way. Once it's under the Adobe umbrella, the simple mathematics of profits from Photoshop and Illustrator vs. those from Figma will result in the latter being starved, stripped of functionality, and eventually left broken.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks
[+] [-] connor11528|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] noelsusman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChildOfChaos|3 years ago|reply
I guess it all comes down to who defines what ‘substantially lessen competition” means
[+] [-] eagsalazar2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pilingual|3 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4744877
[+] [-] pelagic_sky|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pembrook|3 years ago|reply
This is huge news for Sketch.
However, to be honest, this is the type of acquisition that should be blocked IMO. Adobe is literally acquiring a direct competitor here.
To me the consumer harm is pretty clear. Instead of a more competent org (Figma) growing further to disrupt more of Adobe’s business, we’re going to be stuck with Adobe forever.
Great outcome for the founders and investors in Figma, terrible outcome for consumers.
[+] [-] ineedasername|3 years ago|reply
I'd even rather it have been acquired by Google where it could end up being graveyarded, there at least it would, if it survived, have been more easily available. I consider it for practical purposes no less survived now than if Google had killed it.
Is there anyone who could have acquired them that would have been a better custodian for such a great product?
[+] [-] bongobingo1|3 years ago|reply
https://github.com/penpot/penpot
https://penpot.app/
https://help.penpot.app/technical-guide/getting-started/#sta...
[+] [-] city17|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.figma.com/blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/
[+] [-] CharlesW|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuchi|3 years ago|reply
I don’t think that in the long term this will give Figma as an ecosystem any benefit — unless Adobe will keep it separate from the main Creative Cloud.
This reminds me of the Trello acquisition.
As a loyal Figma user I’m pretty sceptical of the future. Hope to be wrong.
UPDATE: Looks like it is indeed true… https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2022/Adobe-to-Acqui...
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|3 years ago|reply
I refuse to pay a monthly fee for something I use on a scattershot basis.
[+] [-] yuchi|3 years ago|reply
Citing him:
> Adobe is deeply committed to keeping Figma operating autonomously and I will continue to serve as CEO, reporting to David Wadhwani.
As others have said, there’s really a missing OSS version out there that can compete feature-by-feature with Sketch / Figma / XD. Layout engine capabilities are the biggest missing feature in competitors.
[+] [-] Bilal_io|3 years ago|reply
I think there is a value for Adobe to add Figma to CC, Photoshop can fully focus on photo manipulation while Figma (perhaps merged with XD?) will be target UI designers.
[+] [-] torton|3 years ago|reply
The integration with other Atlassian services improved. There is a variety of plug-ins now, and new ways to display the data for paid plans.
Do you feel different? Any specific examples of what became worse?
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] addicted|3 years ago|reply