because it means they stayed independent and didnt get absorbed by a major megacorp that is already notorious for trying to corner the market of an entire industry and then over-charging
They were independent the whole time and it wasn't considered a success. I suppose IPO is an indicator they might stay independent longer. Now that they are in the public markets even Adobe can buy a few shares. I just don't feel like the IPO event has brought any particular benefits to the consumer and Khan is incorrectly looking at post IPO stock price bounce as some kind of financial indicator that it was a better deal for the company.
Figma is a web app. Web apps are fundamentally a hyper-competitive market because literally anyone can just throw something up on the internet if they think there is a need for it. The risk here of Adobe overcharging for it is rather low - someone would build a cheap clone.
People keep coming up with theories that companies are about to corner the market then over-charge, but the theories vastly outnumber the cases where it ever happens in practice. It is almost always that the biggest companies in the market are just more competitive (lower prices or higher quality) than all the others.
That is not what would happen. Figma has built a huge moat through its brand by now, and most customers would continue to use it; some of them probably already have an Adobe subscription anyway, so Adobe would naturally try to make it easier or more integrated for these customers.
A clone would need to start from scratch and compete against a huge corporation with virtually unlimited funds.
> It is almost always that the biggest companies in the market are just more competitive (lower prices or higher quality) than all the others.
That is almost always not what is happening. The big players extinguish any would-be competition early by buying them or throwing sticks into their wheels. They can afford to strategically make a loss in a given area to underbid the competition by overcharging in others, or relying on synergies. There are numerous examples where small teams built highly qualitative alternatives to corpo stuff, but had to compete against the network effects and brand names instead.
mattmcknight|7 months ago
alchemyzach|7 months ago
[deleted]
austhrow743|7 months ago
littlestymaar|7 months ago
- sell the company to a bigger player, reinforcing their dominant position (often close to monopolistic in tech).
- go to IPO, keeping the company independence and fighting power concentration.
roenxi|7 months ago
People keep coming up with theories that companies are about to corner the market then over-charge, but the theories vastly outnumber the cases where it ever happens in practice. It is almost always that the biggest companies in the market are just more competitive (lower prices or higher quality) than all the others.
9dev|7 months ago
A clone would need to start from scratch and compete against a huge corporation with virtually unlimited funds.
> It is almost always that the biggest companies in the market are just more competitive (lower prices or higher quality) than all the others.
That is almost always not what is happening. The big players extinguish any would-be competition early by buying them or throwing sticks into their wheels. They can afford to strategically make a loss in a given area to underbid the competition by overcharging in others, or relying on synergies. There are numerous examples where small teams built highly qualitative alternatives to corpo stuff, but had to compete against the network effects and brand names instead.