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.
Would agree in large part. I think the ones that were successful, they're successful enough that you forget it was an acquisition.
One off the top my head is Google Docs[1] which, for the longest time, I was pretty sure it was in-house tech. It's actually a number of acquisitions for the collaborative editor tech and then MS Office support.
It seems now that most incumbents have enough cash to not care about being that strategic about acquisitions.
The "used to" is a long long time ago. Before FAANG there was, for example Intel, Microsoft and Cisco, and they were very happy to vacuum up companies instead of holding a big r&d bag. Cisco got to be very good at it, in particular. And of course this is very much standard practice in pharma drug discovery.
I think the Golden Age of internal R&D was probably 1960-1980 at Bell Labs, IBM and the really large engineering cos like Boeing?
It seems like the model here is just a series of temporary alternatives (if we're lucky, creating value isn't easy). But people need software to be long-term viable to invest in learning and locking into the ecosystem. Seems good for the founders though.
Adobe got the money in the first place via skill. Photoshop has been the leading photo editing software for a generation. Hundreds of companies over decades, some with deep pockets, have tried to knock them off and have failed.
Figma didn't lose the money game, they sold out specifically to reap the money. The owners of Figma - where the profits tend to go in a business - are extracting at an epic scale. They sold out at a valuation far beyond anything sane. They won the money game big time.
Makes you wonder whether all of this makes any sense, since the end result isn't humanity ending up with great tools to assist human lives, but a select few with capital getting even more capital, to the detriment of the former goal.
They have not failed because they couldn’t get a great product out. They have failed because so many people are trained on Adobe products an just use those.
Yes. At an individual level, they ask the question: "Delay my deliverables a week or two in frustration as I retrain; or, pay $300". User by user, the decision is obvious: pay the ransom and move on with your life.
I did not mean it this way. The user will always ask the question: „Can i use another software for less money/more value“. Those who can will turn their back on adobe as the company is greedy and lazy. Problem is: if your company/client is a large cooperation you dont have any choice. Never underestimate professional users.
> It's that Adobe was likely seeing subscription revenue take hit from customers
While being pummeled by public markets, and being forced to make a move that might keep shareholders from calling for blood.
This is certainly not the first time that Adobe has presented a number to Figma's board — but it has to be the biggest number yet, by far.
From Figma's position: take your chances on an IPO while the Fed is cracking skulls around inflation — or flip the bit on that liability, and cash out to a desperate Adobe?
Another interesting layer to this is that Adobe only has $5b in cash according to their balance sheet, so the overwhelming majority of this deal is probably in Adobe stock with a long vesting period. Also the deal being done in a downturn means that the difference between this and an IPO is academic in my view
PowerPoint, Excel, Keyhole, YouTube, Google Maps and Android could be significantly better. There’s no competition, which means they keep their users, which means they’re not incentivised to find those ways in which those products could be significantly better.
Okay wait, Excel does have some competition now, with Google Sheets, and that can be seen in Microsoft’s recent push to distinguish Excel from Google Sheets with new features like the ‘LET’ and ‘XLOOKUP’ formula functions.
Android has no competition? I could swear there is iOS. Same with Maps - Bing, Here, Waze, Apple, Yandex even OSM provide their own maps. Do I fail to recognize a point you're making here?
Fuck yeah, let's have 50 different websites doing the exact same thing. The problem with your utopic vision of competition is the fact that people need to get paid for their work.
The result of this little competition means that Huawei is now struggling to build its own reliable push notification server because it is not allowed to use Google's one. I'm not saying they should use different code bases and I'm not saying they shouldn't get paid for their work, also not saying that there should be 50 different websites, but I think another 4-5 would be healthy for everyone.
Why are we just taking for granted that the Youtube acquisition wasn't anti-competitive? There is a reason that Youtube hasn't had any competitors in the 15 years that Google bought it. It's because video can't be done as cheaply as Youtube does it, unless you have an entirely separate industry propping it up. Selling on product at a massive loss and propping it up with a separate industry is anti-competitive.
Nobody can compete on Youtube-style video unless they first create Google. If that isn't true, where are the competitors? TikTok is the first one to even resemble a competitor, but it took 17 years and even that isn't really the same thing.
Adobe shouldn't be compared to Microsoft or Google, or hell even Salesforce, which are really good at integrating new companies into their existing suite of tools.
Adobe is comparable to Oracle or IBM, where acquisitions mean the death of product innovation as Adobe has a hard time attracting and retaining engineers to the same degree as the above companies.
If there had been no dilution. Co-founders appear to have been diluted 80% so assuming seed investors were diluted 75% it’s more like a $10-12M valuation at the seed.
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.
> 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.
It's utterly fucked up that "so smart for the companies: the losers are the customers" is baked into the system we use to transact culture.
Somehow, the dynamic where a company is an organization of humans to be used to further some human cause was reversed, so now humans are elements of a corporation to be used to further the cause of the corporation. We've gone from running companies in service of humans to running humans in service of companies.
Except that all the engineers working at Figma and getting paid huge salaries, and many of whom will now get a huge exit pay day if they want it, may not have had this opportunity without the company existing. It's well and good to trash talk the idea of companies raking in huge profits, but we as a software industry and incredibly privileged to be making the salaries we do, and this would not be possible without the existence of these companies, and the constant cycle of start-ups and buyouts.
> we as a software industry and incredibly privileged to be making the salaries we do, and this would not be possible without the existence of these companies, and the constant cycle of start-ups and buyouts
Unless you have seen another economy with functional alternatives, this is only ever a statement of faith.
Can someone plz enlighten me how Figma competes with Adobe? AFAIK Web/app designers use either Sketch or Figma, publishers use Illustrator and photographers use Photoshop/Lightroom. At least that's how it's been back in the day. Is that no longer the case?
That whole market was Photoshop and Illustrator for a long time. That changed because of better and cheaper alternatives (like Sketch).
They have tried and failed to get it back and now seem to have given up on competing and just bought the competition instead.
It's also not just UI. Figma is a very capable vector and general purpose graphic tool. Figma made a lot of common things much easier than they are in Illustrator and Photoshop. While being online and fully collaborative. It's really an amazing tool and imo Adobe was rightfully threatened by it as I don't believe they could deliver anything close. It would just continue taking over more use cases.
While Figma is a great vector tool it doesn't hold a candle to Photoshop when it comes to image editing. There's a reason photographers use Photoshop for retouching photos.
Thanks, I've never actually seen anyone use it in practice but turns out that Figma has a 31.73% market share in the Collaborative Design And Prototyping category, while Adobe XD has a 15.14% market share in the same space
you seem to think that vector vs. bitmap is a design concern. it isn't. designers care about their form and their function. a better tool means an easier path in the design process, it doesn't matter the tool, vector or bitmap.
No, the interests of companies and customers are usually at odds with big mergers.
Competition is good for customers, it means different things get tried so there’s more diversity in products and pressure to compete on lower prices.
Figma is not selling to gain any efficiency or benefit from being included in Adobe, people are just looking for a pay day.
These kind of just payday mergers along with private equity profit by destruction mergers need a lot of regulatory backpressure because they simply aren’t in the interests of anybody but the people profiting from them.
what's truly been mind-boggling is how companies ARE made out of people... people who may well be your friends; and yet, what you said remains true, that the company wont be your friend.
If a company fires all human customer service and leaves you only with bots to interact with, it's a great saving for them, it's the worst case scenario for human customers.
I find it odd that sometimes, founders want only one thing, to be number 1. At first its a good thing, but if that doesn't work their goal is destroying their company. When you can sell your company for X billions instead of XX billions ... you succeeded in life.
Show me one real thing that you can do with XX billions, that is not possible with X billions. Excluding a star destroyer ;-)
This type of multiples is only possible when rates are low. Likely their last infusion of capital made their valuations possible but I reckon it is reduced as rates are ticking up fast.
I figured the dynamic here is market gets a checkpoint where the acquirer has admitted they're moving into maturity and so switching from build to buy.
But my first check was MSFT acquisition of GutHub.. was up on the day. Nadella had been turning the ship for a while and MS was certainly looking revived by that point.
So, not always down. There are win-win acquisitions
How can you tell what the market thinks about this decision when a company's stock price is a function of what is happening publicly at the company AND externally in the economy? How do you separate the 2 drivers?
Compare stocks with the highest correlated log returns. Anything that's economic should impact the correlated group the same, if it's company specific then that company will stand out.
Most correlated with ADBE (all have > 0.8 correlation) that I see with there price change today are:
ANSS (-0.77%)
INTU (-1.94%)
CRM (-1.73%)
MSFT (-1.77%)
ADSK (-2.61%)
As you can see none of these stocks are experiencing anywhere near the drop today that ADBE is, so you can pretty reasonably explain the drop as company specific.
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?
"Some mergers change market dynamics in ways that can lead to higher prices, fewer or lower-quality goods or services, or less innovation.
Section 7 of the Clayton Act prohibits mergers and acquisitions when the effect "may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly." "
Just filed a complaint! I didn't know this form existed, as I've never genuinely wanted to file an antitrust complaint before, but there's a first time for everything and I despise Adobe so it gets the honor of being in my first FTC complaint.
I'm happy to submit a form or complaint. I stopped doing business with Adobe years ago and this is the second product they've bought out from underneath me since then, the first being Substance.
That said, I don't know a ton about antitrust laws and imagine they need something specific. Does anybody have a clear idea what the actual breaches that I should be complaining about are?
This is not correct. There will almost certainly be a second request issued by the FTC or DOJ in this matter, and my guess is that it will almost certainly get challenged by one of those agencies. [1] In building their case, the agencies will reach out to users and competitors of the companies. Adobe and Figma know that this merger will certainly be contentious on antitrust issues, and I bet there is a large breakup fee that Adobe would have to pay for Figma if the merger was blocked for this reason.
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).
Giving them more power isn't the way to do that. It hurts you long-term because you're basically saying that individuals/companies are not responsible enough to make decisions on their own (and need the government to step in).
Today they're helping you, tomorrow they're increasing your taxes to pay for their "increased efforts in policing anti-competitive behavior in private industry."
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?
Davinci Resolve is quickly eating up Premiere/After Effects in VFX/film. Currently getting popular in small studios, but that's how it starts. Just like Blender is now a real competitor in 3D.
After Effects was one of the best pieces of software ever made around the CS6 era, it was insane how powerful it felt and how solid it was to work with while being so modular.
It's a shadow of its former self now and can't even play the timeline without the audio cutting out and pitch shifting. My Core 2 Duo laptop could do that a decade ago, my M1 Max and high end PC can't because Adobe broke playback years ago and never fixed it.
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...
How is Affinity Designer less feature rich? It has great features like corner rounding and interactive path offsetting that I cannot find in Figma? Also, Last time I looked Figma did not even allow skewing of objects.
Well, for a start, you can't set a stroke width less than 0.1mm, which may sound like a useless edge-case, but makes it useless as a single-point tool for designs to be sent to Lasers or CNC machines that run off a print driver.
Also, the workflow's quite clunky.
Still, I've bought it and Photo, just because I want them to one day better Illustrator and Photoshop.
- ed Sorry - 'less than 0.1pt', not 0.1mm. Samediff ultimately.
I agree. It depends on what you do with the program as to how it compares to Illustrator. From a prepress perspective where I would use it to rip apart and fix graphic files so they print properly, Affinity Designer has a long way to go. For designing it's not too bad and slowly catching up. It is also the only one I have found so far that supports Pantone....
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.
I can't think of any other company to which my relationship as a customer has swung so completely as Adobe. In the 2000s, their tools were unsurpassed, and I was happy to pay the premium prices they asked (though I'd skip versions to save money). When Creative Suite was discontinued, that was a pretty abrupt turn, as I had no interest in a subscription for software I only used for personal projects.
And yet, I stayed on with Lightroom, thinking that so long as Adobe still had competition in that market, they'd keep it a one-off license. Then, one day, upon discovering some compatibility issues with the latest MacOS and the version of Lightroom I was using, I thought I'd check what the latest version of LR had to offer – and discovered it had gone subscription-only as well, meaning my entire photo library would now be trapped on my old laptop unless I paid a monthly fee forever.
It was painful researching and trialing alternatives, ultimately migrating my library over to Capture One, but it turned me so completely against Adobe that I've actively requested employers not assign me a Creative Cloud license (the tools fortunately only being tangential to my role).
I find myself coming back to this Steve Jobs quote more and more:
"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
Creatives build companies, and if you are not careful, sales will destroy them.
MS's Office collaborative cloudish stuff is a prime example of this.
I don't know how many times my team has ganged up on a document in Google Cloud and collaboratively banged it out. Likewise, I can only remember a couple times I've done it with Office and not ended up with n different copies of the doc that we had to manually merge back together, if we even could.
Office on the web actually does this really well now. The desktop app is a little more glitchy, but Google doesn't even have one of those. I really like tracked changes in Word on the web. Microsoft has come a real long way in the last three years.
Does this include products like Word Online? Because that product is awful.
The visual bugs are annoying and the document-syncing with multiple editing people feels like 2005. As of last year, it couldn't even render a .docx file properly. It tried to render input fields as images. LibreOffice Writer opened the doc better than /Word/ Online.
I am a student who has access to office online and have tried to encourage my peers to use it for group projects so that we don't have to use Google. However after repeatedly having to make up excuses for their neglected product, I have given up and just request anonymous editing links for Google Docs.
Completely different experience for me. The desktop app is solid (although latest patches made it unstable + the visual change is just not good), but the collaboration tools are horrible to use.
You dont know where files are saved, you cannot connect a file to a file, lots of options seem to be disabled (e.g. collaborative Excel on Teams).
> Office on the web actually does this really well now.
Did you miss an /s? I just tried using this again and it's slow and buggy. Office has a lot of advantages, but collaborative document editing is not one of them.
I won't touch any web app because I'm perfectly fine using my Vimium shortcuts that I don't need them to interfere with a web app that could have been just a native app...
You must have been using an old version of MS Office, or had it improperly configured. We use Office for real time collaboration on documents all the time. You can put a file on SharePoint, then have multiple users edit live using a mix of desktop, mobile, and web applications. The changes are immediately visible and this doesn't create different copies.
Microsoft Office, Teams, and SharePoint have comprehensive APIs so you can export any metadata you want. It's no different from competing Google products in that regard.
MS Office is actually a counter example of this. It was much worse than Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Notes, and WordPerfect. They crushed the competition because of vampiric sales strategies.
Early versions of the individual Microsoft Office products might have lacked some features compared to competitors. Their real innovation was building an integrated suite with consistent user experience. That was tremendously valuable to casual users.
Microsoft certainly did some shitty things in terms of unethical and monopolistic sales practices, but their competitors also made some amazingly stupid strategic errors. In particular WordPerfect was slow to port their product to Windows. And when they finally did, they kept it too similar to the legacy MS-DOS version which was poison for gaining new sales.
Word for Windows was NOT worse than WordPerfect. WordPerfect continued using their primitive inline codes after GUIs were the norm.
Word integrated an entire programming language (WordBasic), with which you could not just create macros, but entire applications complete with dialog boxes. I used WordBasic to add features to Word years before they were offered, such as page numbering that spanned documents.
They crushed the competition, because competition management was quite bad with their decisions, a good example of their bad decisions was sticking to MS-DOS until it was too late.
Josh from the Game Helpin' Squad actually tries to get some work done. Or, rather, he complains about how people didn't appreciate it when he got some work done.
It is also interesting to see what designers actually think about the future of Figma. I think, the market is always in move. https://youtu.be/hDHByVS2I6Q
There is a lesson to be had there for sure. It all started when they bought Macromedia. Happens to many if the greats, look at Cisco,IBM, AT&T they all have that happen to them after which the only way decision makers know how to make great products is to buy other companies.
There is a difference between taking out the competition on acquiring IP by taking over vs doing it to innovate. Google has gone down this road already from what I've seen but Microsoft impresses me how they are keeping balance.
From 2015-2019 I found this quote massively ironic as it seemed Apple had fallen prey to the same thing. They were trying to sell Gimpbooks with 2 ports and unreliable keyboards for a €1700 base price, and iPhones that were milquetoast iterations of past one's kept creeping up €75-150 per year. Their sales growth was cratering.
People love to say that reducing Ive's involvement is what righted the ship, but I feel internally there must have been way more management house cleaning that they so massively reversed course with the Macbook line, and the price reduction + increased innovation on the iPhone line.
> ...Genzo Hattori, the son of founder Kintaro, recognized that the existing company structure of both factories was limiting their ability to innovate. In 1953 he decided to install different management groups for the Kameido and Nagano factories and have them perform their research and development independently....
It's a great quote for what has happened to the USA in almost every single area, industry, government, education, religious thought, political thought.
I recently found out MARS yes the candy company has become the largest owner of Veterinarian offices in the USA. It really is palpable how everything is on a runaway train and we can all see it yet are powerless to stop it.
Also cat food. They invest in a reef conservation technique too, and named a reef in Indo - where they were trialing said technique - after one of their catfood brands. The logo says "more coral today, more fish tomorrow" and there's a picture of a cat.
Started in Europe with pet food (90's). Slowly moved into pet pharma and scientific research. Then in 2007 they started moving into the vet game. Seems like a pretty natural evolution. Wonder if they'll try to buy Chewy.
It happens here in a unique way, partly because of the legal structure we have around public corporations. In the US, institutional investors want to see revenue growth, even over profits. Way more sexy. And they have ways to arm-twist management by influencing the board, agitating for new board members, etc. They work to frighten other stockholders into supporting them and then management has to go along. Sarbanes-Oxley might be waved around, too.
Normally, a cash-cow business would be a great thing to own. Unfortunately the accumulated cash plus (feared or actual) slowing of growth equal a big red flag.
Ironically when Apple acquired NeXT, it was essentially a reverse take over, since almost every significant executive and technical position of the merged company was from NeXT.
It was NeXT that saved Apple with their tools (including Interface Builder and the use of Objective-C) that gave Apple the technological lead that allowed them to grow into the company they are today.
Scott Forstall was the NeXT guy that headed the iOS (née iPhone OS)team and we know how that turned out.
I think BeOS was a serious contender as the next generation MacOS. But BeOS didn't have Steve Jobs. Buying NeXT meant bringing Jobs back at the helm of Apple.
It could have gone the other way too, like how Boeing's purchase of McDonnell Douglas, and McDonnel Douglas's takeover of key Boeing positions ended up eroding Boeing's culture of engineering excellence.
It was also market timing too. The iPhone was not Forstall's first attempt at a device like this. He was part of the team that was trying to develop something similar back in the era of the Apple Newton in the late 90s. And all of that were seeded from two of the three form factors (tab, pad, and board) that Xerox Parc experimented with back in the 70s, along with the mouse, the GUI, and OOP.
Compared to NeXTStep, BeOS was a wildly incomplete tech demo of a relatively incremental improvement to the classic MacOS formula. It was only a “serious contender” in the media and in the headcanon of Apple’s fan base.
BeOS was also multi-platform (PPC and later IA-32), like NeXTStep. Anyway, yes, it was rough around the edges, but it was way more accessible; the hardware was a lot less expensive, and when sold as a standalone OS, was also reasonably priced for a hobbyist. There were a lot of great ideas in there, especially compared to the Windows, MacOS, and the various other *nixes of the time.
I'm not saying Apple made the wrong choice to be reverse-acquired by NeXT, obviously, they've done pretty well. But an alternate universe where Apple acquired BeOS is well within the imagination.
In an alternate universe where Apple acquired Be, we'd see another Copland-esque slow moving catastrophe as the skeletal and unproven Be technology was cobbled together with everything needed to execute a plausible transition plan for the existing System 7 platform. This had every prospect of turning the Macintosh into another Amiga: even if a BeOS technology transition was a miraculous success, Apple's prospects as a company would be largely unchanged, because the real problems at Apple wasn't technology, it was a lack of leadership.
Would a Be acquisition do anything about the hundreds of engineers fritting away at dead ends like Pippin, OpenDoc and NewtonOS? Would it have stopped Apple from selling awful flawed hardware like the Power Macintosh 5000 and 6000 series? Unlikely. It's easy to forget just how ridiculous the Apple Computer of 1996 was. It was a company destined to — and deserved to — be consigned to the history books.
As valuable as the NeXT technology was to Apple, its importance is utterly dwarfed by the actions of Steve Jobs to rip away at the junk and rebuild the company in every sense of the word.
Compared to NeXTStep, BeOS was a wildly incomplete tech demo
So true. Even though the market share of NeXTStep never got very high, it was a robust, battle-tested operating system that ran on multiple processor architectures with real software like FreeHand and Lotus Improv, an amazing spreadsheet for the time that would hold up pretty well today.
And interestingly enough, one of the main BeOS guys ended up at Apple and worked on APFS.
I tried both back in the day, and tech demo is exactly right (a really cool tech demo, to be sure! but still). The OS came with a simple task manager-type app that had two buttons on it that could be used to disable either processor (to demonstrate how it affected system performance, I guess?). Thought I, "Hmm, surely they wouldn't let you turn off both.." But nope; everything immediately halted.
By comparison, NeXTStep was quite polished, certainly by the time it was available for x86, which is when I used it.
Agree; while they had some very nice ideas (like taking their filesystem capabilities and tracker and make it into basic email), they did some things that would be fatal: like locking their ABI into gcc 2.95 C++ ABI. Which was immediately a problem, when gcc 3.0 came out. Ugh.
My friend had an Newton and I was in awe. It made Palm look like a pocket calculator.
Got killed when Jobs left out of spite.
But that was back when Apple could make very simple hardware do amazing things.
NeXT was mind blowing when you look back. All of that just turned into OSX, iOS, etc. Don’t know that my computer is really any more empowering now. I still mostly just use a browser, mail client, and terminal.
Yes indeed it was. I ran OS X in beta on a G4 for a year as my main OS. It was that innovative and great. Like magically having the “Linux on the desktop” dream come true overnight.
It was clunky and slow at the time but it was so awesome it hardly mattered.
Reminds me of the Simpsons when the Newton is used to make a note to beat up Martin and the hand writing recognition is slightly off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6qxixgQJ4M
When 2007 rolled around, broadband internet was widely available; search, mapping, social media had caught on. People were ready to take the internet with them in their pocket.
To echo the sibling comments, this is incorrect. NeXT lives on today in every Mac, iPhone, iPad, and every other Apple device. When Apple bought NeXT they used it as a foundation for OS X, which went on to power every device Apple makes or has made.
The kind of creatives we're talking about, kind of by definition, do things differently (not to ape Apple's old slogan too much). That's AKA risk, and, yes, sometimes it will lead to ruin.
But it's also the only way to move the area forward.
It's interesting to consider how Apple and NeXT were both nearing collapse in the late 1990s, and yet combining the two resulted, over the next 20 years, in perhaps the most successful tech company of all time.
Apple needed Steve Jobs back then. It needs another Steve Jobs now as well. Under Tim Cook, Apple has been great in terms of stock-market price and profitability, but the company clearly lacks a unifying vision for the future. They've bought themself time, but sooner rather than later, we'll see Apple decline and it won't look good.
The Xerox PARC vision (tabs, pads, boards, gui, mouse, OOP) have largely played out. Smart TVs have not fulfilled the the potential for boards. As an industry, we collectively turned away from the potential of user-modifiable software (Smalltalk, Hypercard).
AI/ML, VR, AR, as far as I know, wasn’t coming out of PARC. I am not sure they have the same kind of mass market appeal … or maybe, we do not have someone like a Steve Jobs that could bring it to the masses.
Just because you don't see any Apple skunkworks VR/AR headsets getting left in a motel room [1] and they don't report how much they are investing in that new product line (rumored to be more in total than Meta's 10B/y) - you should not underestimate the potential for immersive spatial computing to do to the iPhone what the iPhone did to the iPod.
this is true, to be fair .. anyone remember "Xaos Tools" (video effects), Audion or when Marc Cantor became so personally offensive that the business people paid him to leave? it is true.. end of innocence stories here
This is mere hand-wringing; Steve Jobs never cared to consider the aspects of our political system that leads to this, on the contrary, he positively exploited them for his own gain, e.g. patents and his app store tyranny. Steve Jobs is among the worst people to talk about this kind of neo-feudalism.
I used to beta test for them. A few months back I took at look at the current version of Audition to see what I'd been missing out on since the days of CS6 nearly a decade ago.
Three things have changed. It now includes one third-party plugin (that anyone could purchase) offering an alternative volume meter - the equivalent of a slightly different color histogram for photo/video software. It offers some new presets with friendlier names, for a feature that already existed. And they unified version numbers with other products. EDIT: Also some bug fixes, but poorly documented and tbh pretty rare edge cases. I still use CS6 in production and bugs are not a source of worry.
That's it. Anyone who has been paying a subscription for this has been getting ripped off wholesale. The product is great - but it was great before Adobe acquired it (when it used to be called CoolEdit) and Adobe actually removed functionality from it along the way, like dumping MIDI support because they didn't want to cater to musicians.
Any designers/engineers that understand or use the product left long ago. A standout example of this in their playlists feature - you can select a bunch of marked regions in a waveform or project and add them to a separate list, where you can rearrange their playback order freely - very useful if you are structuring a radio program or a podcast. Except...once you've found an arrangement you like, you can't do anything else with it. You can't render the audio to a new file, generate a new project, export it, save the list to a text file, or copy it to the clipboard, or anything else. They started building it 10 years ago and then never bothered to finish it.
I don't really think of Adobe as a software company any more. They're IP landlords who spend the bare minimum on integration and maintenance of their properties while continuously jacking up the rent.
CoolEdit! haven't heard that name in a while. Yeah, Adobe used to be ultra-respected, especially in the 90's as Photoshop took the world by storm. These days, as you can see, the response to "X acquired by Adobe" is met with universal disappointment (except by those who have Adobe stock, I guess).
Acid 2.0 was for loops and basically a DAW vs the SoundForge sound design angle. I made some wicked tracks in Acid back in the day. Also became a Sony product, still works pretty much the same.
Why the past tense? Which tools have been surpassed? Have Photoshop been surpassed? I am genuinely curious here.
I take note of Capture One, but is it an "acceptable yet technically inferior alternative that I picked because I don't agree with Adobe business practices" (which I think is a valid reason) or a viable alternative even for someone who doesn't have a problem dealing with Adobe and their subscription model.
Affinity Designer, Photo, and Publisher have been a breath of fresh air for the last few years. They have you pay once, not a subscription. The features keep coming at a great pace while retaining a very sensible UI.
Reminds me of the early days when pro Mac software was well designed and reasonably priced; not the bloatware we get from Adobe
and Microsoft today, for example.
I’ve been a Capture One user for several years and it’s a more powerful tool than Lightroom for sure. Layer capability removes the need to go to PS for most simple use cases. Their color tools were much better previously as well but LR has some major recent updates. I also like their session catalog model, but that’s optional and mostly personal preference. It’s not as well designed IMO, a bit more of a power user tool where you can tweak the UI to your liking, but in terms of functionality it’s as good or better than LR.
Affinity Photo is also on the same level as PS, I don’t know about “surpassed” but Adobe is no longer the clear leader.
I gave up GIMP for Krita years ago and have yet to see a reason to change (I still use Adobe as well, but for FOSS tools, Krita has stayed at the top for me)
Actually I'm using Darktable with great success for post processing my raw files on Linux and Mac. On the paid side Affinity & CaptureOne provide great alternatives.
I’ve tried it for years and years, paid customer. Had issues with Sony files and now have issues with Nikon Z raw files. C1 generates artifacts in transitions, terrible ones. Filed a bug report and got met with the worst customer support in my life, “devs don’t wanna fix this, use ICC profiles”, as if ICC profiles would fix bad processing of the files…
Which is sad because the software in general is a lot better than Lightroom, but your first point just isn’t true and that should be the primary thing to get right in a raw processor. Also, don’t conflate over sharpening and extra saturation for better quality (C1 defaults)
Is there some sort of cloud storage integration? One thing I like about Lightroom CC is how seemlessly I can move between devices and not have to worry about having large HDDs and backups.
I'm not a designer full time, but have dabbled over my career and in my youth used Photoshop and Premiere heavily. I'd say Pixelmator and Sketch were more approachable, discoverable and had better workflows. This made the combo of being easier to pick up than Adobe tools and more powerful for professionals.
I was able to use Figma productively in my first day of using it. The added collaboration features with Figma's App preview mode and collaboration in the tool made me never look at anything else when I needed to design something.
Capture One and Lightroom are definitely fighting in the same class. Both are true pro-grade tools. Some people and some workflows will prefer one of the two, but that's how preferences work.
So, in double-blind tests, most people prefer the 'Pepsi' analogue, but when they know or think they know which one is the 'Coke' analogue, the choose that one?
. o O ( I don't really know which is the Pepsi and which is the Coke, in this matchup. )
> discovered it had gone subscription-only as well, meaning my entire photo library would now be trapped on my old laptop unless I paid a monthly fee forever.
I empathize, but isn't all this the reason they would fork out so much for figma?
I mean, people hated them for going subscription with the tools that used to be desktop, but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription. It's confusing psychology at play here...
> people hated them for going subscription with the tools that used to be desktop, but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription
I think a big part of it is exactly that, that Figma's value proposition as a subscription was always clear from the beginning, that it's not just a design tool but a real-time, collaborative design environment. Sketch was always the better choice for solo, side-project work, because it was a one-off purchase with no need for a cloud component (its more recent direction to try to become a cloud-first service has unfortunately only served to highlight its shortcomings versus Figma).
Creative Suite never had a value proposition as a subscription apart from becoming a predictable cost center for businesses. Tacking on an inferior version of Dropbox, making the whole suite subscription-only, and calling it Creative Cloud did a pretty decent job of alienating those who didn't fall into that "predictable cost center" market.
A lot of amateur photographers used Lightroom and were willing to pay a one off purchase price whereas a monthly cost for something you might hardly use in a month is too expensive. Figma has a high percentage of users who use it regularly as part of their paying jobs. It also has online features, which you expect to pay continuously for. Lightroom Classic had no online features.
I still use Lightroom 6, the last standalone version, so I haven’t found anything else with such good combination of library organisation & editing. But no way I’ll ever pay a monthly subscription for the current, slightly better version or the less capable cloud version.
And the cloud version of LR does offer cool features if you use them. I just need my iPad now when traveling. Can proof and start edits right there, then continue on the computer. I pull my images onto the iPad and let the cloud sync and back them up.
The only system that might be able to replace the workflow I currently use is Apple Photos, but it doesn't deal that well with RAWs and editing outside of the Photos.app.
> I can't think of any other company to which my relationship as a customer has swung so completely as Adobe.
Autodesk is very similar in many ways to Adobe, just in a slightly different software market. Wouldn't at all surprise me if they merge up at some future point into some evil monstrosity of user-hostility + borderline useful software.
I hope they go at each other like two big evil flaming titans in a massive battle that mortally wounds both of them.
I sometimes sit and weigh out which one of them does more evil to stop innovation in the “digital creativity” space in the name of monopolistic greed.
So far I think Adobe is winning because their products are more average consumer facing. But Autodesk sure seems to be racing to the bottom with its complete monopoly on 3D everything.
I can't believe I'm not the only one. Something similar happened to me with one of their iPad painting apps. They told me it would be completely free for artists. Went to save my files and put them on my computer for printing, only to learn they were locked within the adobe cloud cage of despair
The Lightroom subscription is particularly painful because not only did Lightroom move to a subscription, they also “updated” it to a version with fewer features.
I really want to move off Lightroom, to something that doesn’t change a subscription, but getting close to a terabyte of data out of that cloud with all the edits and into something else is painful.
For a large company, they also have pretty shady pricing. Like their “annual plan, paid monthly”. You’d think you’re just paying for the monthly subscription, but they hide the fact that you have to pay a penalty for early cancellation in the fine print.
There are dark patterns in Adobe's pricing plans up the wazoo. And each year it seems that they change their UI just a little more to try to lock your data into their Creative Cloud. Photoshop now tries to save your files to the Creative Cloud (instead of your computer) by default.
I think the concern has definitely gone to an anti-trust level. Adobe packages Lightroom for free with Photoshop, probably with Capture One directly in their sights. Anti-trust definitely needs a reinvigoration.
Sounds like Adobe has taken a page out of Microsoft’s book. That is, defaulting saving to their paid cloud storage solution instead of the user’s local system.
It’s a scummy tactic but it must pay if companies keep doing it. I suspect it preys mostly on the vulnerable less-tech-savvy users.
That pissed me off so much when it got me. I can count the number of dark patterns I've ever fallen for (well, and eventually found out about) on one finger.
It's so stupid too, I'm happy paying subscriptions for things and happy paying a fair price but being tricked into doing it - never again, Adobe. They target their own customers with it to scrape a few more dollars into the current quarter, I guess. Probably some executive bonus targets or something.
Literally the only time I've ever fallen for a dark pattern.
Shame that I've managed to avoid the most aggressive dark patterns used by scammers and shady practioners. The one that got me was from a $150B company.
And depending on your use case, bloated. In all the features Photoshop has gained since 6.0, 7.0, and CS1, only a tiny handful add anything of value for my usage. If 7.0 or CS1 were ported to modern operating systems they would fill my needs well and then some.
This is another reason why alternatives such as Affinity Photo and Pixelmator are increasingly enticing; their core feature sets have reached near-parity with that of Photoshop for many and so Photoshop offers very little extra value.
My wife tried to cancel her subscription but the agent on the live chat just quickly and out of the blue gave her 4 months of free subscription. Not sure if this is unusual or part of their playbook.
Part of their retention playbook. I needed Illustrator for a short term project. Only needed it for less than a month so paid for a 30 day term. Almost forgot about it but went to cancel it on the last day. They gave me a month for free automatically. No customer service rep was involved.
- It was rather annoying I had to check & double-check that I was only paying for 30 days and not getting ensnared in the annual plan with monthly payments & a big cancellation fee. Next time I need a vector editor, I'll just buy one from the app store.
Yes, their "3 months for 3" and then: oh, now you're locked into a paying 12 month contract was absolutely the last straw for me. Swore off their products.
Always wondered why an indie app developer hasn't just decided to work their image-editor app up as "the new Fireworks."
Many other image-editor apps do now take Fireworks' same non-destructive hybrid editing approach... kind of. But they're always missing one thing or another. Either:
1. they aren't multiplatform (can't get "standard" adoption like Fireworks if you're macOS-only)
2. they don't go far enough with the vector editing capabilities (e.g. Fireworks allows you to apply arbitrary gradients/textures/other image assets as the stroke and fill of vector shapes)
3. they don't go far enough with the non-destructiveness (e.g. Fireworks applies filter-effects to both vector and raster layers, as non-destructive "filter layers" bound to a parent layer — effectively "functional lenses" for images; can edit the base layer "underneath" these transformation layers, and see the transformed output change as a result. Of course, you can always "flatten" the transformations into the layer, to then edit the post-transformed version of the layer. Though IMHO this could be taken even further, with "brush modifications" being just another kind of transformation layer!)
4. they use project file formats that consist of entire directory bundles, or file formats opaque to the OS preview mechanism. Fireworks just stored projects as an extension chunk of a PNG file; and every OS knows how to preview PNG files. (And, if you didn't care about the project, you could just treat the PNG file as a PNG file, putting it through ImageMagick or MSPaint or whatever, which would strip the optional chunks, thus "exporting" the project to PNG without needing the program that created it!)
Affinity Designer is a good vector/bitmap combo app. It closely parallels Illustrator features but adds in basic bitmap editing. If you pair it with Affinity Photo you get most of the Photoshop features. The same files can be shared with both without any loss of fidelity.
I’ve had the same question for years! There are a few tools that have tried over the years, but nothing that has stuck around.
And I get that the pixel-perfect design and slicing from the Fireworks era isn’t as useful in today’s world of responsive design and multiple screen sizes and variable screen densities, where CSS and JavaScript plays a much larger role, but I still wish we had a successor.
Because as you said, although most apps now do the hybrid vector/faster thing, nothing really matches what we had with Fireworks.
The only program I ever used that felt like it was really gunning for Fireworks was, weirdly, a BeOS-exclusive app called e-Picture. It was a little buggy, but still terrific. (That last sentence sums up the entire BeOS ecosystem circa 1999, granted, which was tiny yet still bigger than I suspect most people know.)
PNG format has a space for arbitrary metadata. Fireworks stored their proprietary save format inside this, and also rendered the file to flat PNG on save, meaning that you could preview fireworks files in anything that could read PNGs (although the file size would be huge).
Unfortunately not...For one, combining bitmap and vector editing is just not there...Also, while I like Sketch and have used it extensively, I haven't missed anything of it with Figma.
Agree. Macromedia products were amazing for their time. Dreamweaver, Flash (Creating flash apps including ActionScript), Fireworks with vector + bitmap, were all very cool until Adobe acquired them
The largest Pictionary-like web app for the good part of a decade or so (early 2000s to early 2010s) was a Shockwave/Director app. Newer clones are yet to match its amazing features. Unfortunately isketch.net got too old for the newer generations to pick it up. I can only guess what happened to the site. The technical debt must have been too great to port it to a newer platform, or perhaps the devs/maintainers moved on.
This was already basically Sketch years and years before Sketch even existed. They killed it because Adobe as a company has a complete lack of vision and even understanding of the tools they own.
This is 100% right. Fireworks was Sketch with better bitmap/filter/styling support. Removing it was a cost saving move right as Sketch/Figma were coming to own UI design.
I still use my copy of Fireworks for everything graphics related that I need. Yes, it doesn't do everything as well compared to modern suites but the UI was just so easy for a developer to use. Even Homesite is still better than most editors I've ever used.
To me, Sketch is a spiritual successor of Fireworks.
I loved Fireworks, but it had far too many quirks that weren't improved, and when I discovered Sketch I was amazed how many thing that did bother me a lot in Fireworks were made just right in Sketch.
I considered putting Adobe in a VM because i didn't want the 30,000 extra processes running when I install it. Its embarrassingly fragmented and bad. I absolutely dread the moment when I need to install CS on my new machine.
I went a step further, or maybe backward, and I have a separate computer that I connect to with AnyDesk and it has all the Adobe crap installed on it.
Also, our company credit card got replaced, and the process of updating the card and re-activating Creative Cloud took two weeks. It got canceled August 29 and only yesterday, September 14, was I able to launch Illustrator without a nag window. I hate Adobe.
How the hell did Photoshop get so bloated? The featureset hasn't changed all that much since CS3 era, and yet CS3 ran at half the memory and at twice the speed. What the hell happened?
Adobe Photoshop has always been bloated. It’s the professional standard so artists will literally buy a fast computer just to run it. There’s worse examples of professional software like Autodesk where a workstation class PC is only a fraction of the software licensing cost. And is more crash prone.
I've been running ACad daily on a 3rd gen i5 with no dGPU. FWIW I don't use the 3D things as I use it for architectural works but I don't see any issues, runs fine.
Maybe 15 years ago I ended up fencing the CC stuff off with firewall rules because it was the fastest way to deal with its awfulness.
With the next computer for half a year it was always this queasy, i should probably install illustrator now, but once I do I can never go back. Maybe I can hold out another few weeks. This is for a corporate paid for version that would make my work easier. Eventually I buckled and it ruined another computer.
I’m not terribly upset because I think it could be worse if others bought them, but I think they’ve stagnated and had lots of stability problems since the purchase.
I don't agree on the 'stagnated' part. A lot has come out of Github since that acquisition. I am actually impressed how it has managed to mature into a fully enterprise grade ecosystem yet somehow maintaining its allure and user friendliness that smaller developer teams enjoy.
I don’t think it’s enterprise at all. I can’t create groups to sync with AD. I can’t link organizations. I can’t link accounts to AD to pull even info like name.
They’ve added a lot of “social media” functions like feeds and stuff.
I like what they’ve done with Actions though, that’s neat.
I'm a very heavy slack user for work and personal workspaces and haven't seen anything bad yet, though I also don't pay the bill for those organizations. Im sure over time it may get worse, but for the meantime this seems to be one of those rare acquisitions where the child company is doing so well the parent may be afraid to touch it (rightfully so).
> Microsoft buying Github
This one haunts my dreams. Microsoft is drawing a huuuuge moat around the developer experience. I have to imagine they will tighten the noose within the next 5 years. Ditto for Gaming as they now own half the games industry: EA, Activision/Blizzard, Obsidian, and many many more.
Tried to run away from Adobe and they still got me, RIP... Will have to move again once they ruin Figma with feature overload.
Simplicity is so hard to achieve with design and Figma has done a great job striking the balance with feature set and simplicity. All the while delivering a super responsive platform.
Still running Creative Suite 6 in a virtual machine (for security isolation and compatibility) as I only use the product 2-3 times a year and refuse to give in to Adobe's rent-seeking.
Adobe's stock is down 17% on the news. So, it's bad for consumers. Bad for Adobe. Probably only good for the ego of a few executives and investment bankers.
They may have considered that by bundling Figma's functionality into their cloud subscription, with the number of new subscribers that would bring, that revenue attributable to that added functionality would be much more than 400 million annually.
It would need to be much, much more than 400 million to justify the purchase, and I'm not sure numbers of that size will ever materialize.
Another way to look at it is, what amount of investment would Adobe need to make to bring equivalent functionality in-house. Certainly less than 20 billion, by an order of magnitude at least. But then you have to wait, and manage with inspiration and dedication, and possibly fail. Not for the faint of heart.
My guess is there are a lot of Figma employees who would rather not be working for Adobe, regardless of whatever incentives they get in the deal. It's hard to overstate how little regard software designers have for Adobe.
It gives me whiplash to see Sean Parent's deeply technical public talks on Adobe's experiences with C++, and Adobe's disdain for customers (and presumably other programmers' disdain for Adobe).
Well they wont all be massive now that mostly VCs and sometimes founders soak up all the benefits from an acquisition before the regular employees get much.
Well, good for the founders and investors anyways, who knows how many employees had meaningful holdings that outweigh the hurt of being integrated into Adobe
Well if it's any consolation the market also feels sad about this [0]. ADBE is down 15% as of this writing.
My guess is because, given the current market, you don't really need to spent money acquiring potential competitors. As rate hikes continue (and likely will for the foreseeable future) I suspect many of the non-ipo's non-profitable startups will just die on the vine. No reason to spend $20 Billion to make sure they're not a threat, this isn't 2018.
Only open and free software can defeat the likes of Adobe.
Can't wait for the dominance of Photoshop to be ended by gimp and ffmpeg, I've found that they work fairly well for whatever editing I need. Maybe open source variety of Figma also exist?
The one thing I know about is Penpot see https://penpot.app/ which is by the team that designed Taiga.io - It's fully open-source and I think tries to solve some of the same problems but it's still in beta. I'm not much of a designer but yesterday started to teach myself Figma only to find this acquisition happening. I've resisted installing creative cloud for years and hearing various people's experiences with Adobe makes me feel like this was a wise decision.
Our university subscribes to Adobe Products Suit- when all of their functionality can be replicated with FOSS. They sent out a survey about this before they started the subscription and I answered negatively to that, to no avail. So that's where our tuition/grant/loan/savings money are going.
It’s not illegal to be a monopoly; it’s illegal to use your monopoly to profoundly disadvantage your competitors.
An example was Microsoft threatening to cancel HP’s Windows license if they bundled Netscape Navigator instead of Internet Explorer back in the browser war days.
This comment makes me sad because Adobe used to be an exceptional example of how good professional software could be, and now I can’t disagree with you at all. I don’t mean to disparage anyone at Adobe, but I think as a business it’s become a place good things get acquired to die.
Every single one of these corporate consolidations makes me sad. Competition and heterogeneity are critical for capitalism to function and everyone one of these mergers reduces it.
Figma was not generating profit and they also started doing some shady practices according to this guy. I was not Figma user so I don't know if that is true but this seems like an interesting video opinion on it https://youtu.be/xpCqZwMekCI
Never had an issue with this tbh, it's always very easy. Manage account > cancel plan.
Hell, if you subscribe but then cancel within the same day, they give you a full refund. I've abused this a few times if I just need to do something quick - sub, use it for a few hours, cancel, and it doesn't cost me anything.
I did a trial of Creative Suite on my mac. When it was time to uninstall, I couldn't do that using Creative Cloud Uninstaller. Because, apparently I have to uninstall photoshop and other softwares from Creative Cloud App before uninstalling CC. I couldn't uninstall photoshop etc. because my login to CC App didn't work. So, I contacted Adobe, there was some issue with getting 2FA to my email for some reason. I had to reset my mac just to get rid of Adobe spywares.
Adobe pioneered the "click cancel plan but we will offer you some stuff that you don't care about in order to stop you from cancelling your plan" dark pattern.
Then on the support call they will straight up pretend that none of their systems work in order to stop you from cancelling.
I have literally cancelled (and later re-obtained) subscriptions to CC at least 15 times. It hasn't been an issue, and I've never needed to call anyone.
They do offer you things, but those things tend to be free months. Not random stuff you won't care about.
If I'm trying to cancel I don't care about free months or free storage space or discount on their new product. those are random things I don't care about.
To cancel a yearly plan, you must a) talk to their support staff (not available as an option in the portal) and b) pay the remainder of the period anyway.
The only time you can freely modify your subscription is one month before your renewal date.
Adobe could eliminate this loophole by simply charging the difference (between what they actually paid and what they would have paid on a monthly play) when they opt out.
Presumably the current arrangement is some kind of creative accounting exercise though, and such a pro-customer policy might blow it up.
That doesn't sound right to me either though. You enter a contract for 12 months at a reduced price. The company knows it will get 12reduced price. Now the customer wants to drop out after 7 months and you pay 7delta.
What you just have done is eliminate the monthly price. There can never be an annual contract anymore. That seems beyond silly. Is it really Adobe's fault for you trying to either be sneaky or simply malicious?
I do this because I specifically assumed using Adobe there would be some maniacal dark pattern they wouldn’t really let me cancel sooner than a year despite what the main text stated. Seems like I was correct, reading this thread.
I'm paying via Paypal so I've just cancelled the adobe subscription through their subscription management panel. Is there any reason why this might be a bad idea?
PS I just remembered that I forgot to cancel the subscription and they want to charge me 40 quid for the rest of the year. I even had a reminder set, but I missed it. So annoying.
> Given the amount of information regarding adobe being a bunch of cntz over the last many years, you got anyone you actually want to blame?
I was asking for advice, so I’m a bit confused about your comment.
I’ve been using them since photoshop 5 and generally had a positive opinion for most of that time. I learned about the whole annual sub/weekly payments issue last year.
Come to think of it, I do blame them for dark UX and making the process unnecessarily difficult (which has worked in my case perfectly).
I have an adobe subscription, I never heard of Figma. I am sure their product is great, but it is a niche product. Figma is not worth 20B as a standalone company. Adobe will integrate Figma’s technology into Adobe’s suite of products and will make it available to the masses. I say it is a good thing that Adobe is acquiring Figma.
Change is hard; As a Figma consumer you are probably uncomfortable with the change, but Adobe acquiring is better than Figma going shutting down due to lack of mass adoption.
You’re definitely not aware of how Figma changed the game and how essential it is to web design today. Whether you’re a solo designer, a freelancer, a startup, a tech company, a UX team in a major company… Figma just works. And just makes sense. Their velocity is fantastic. They launch features every few months. The performance is incredible. The ease of use is phenomenal. The collaboration capabilities are perfectly integrated. Even developers use it and love it.
They have taken the market by storm. And it’s a huge market.
You don’t seem to be part of that target market, and that’s fine. But saying Figma joining Adobe is a plus just shows how little you know about Figma and the web design world in general.
The thing about Adobe is that their products are used by common people and professionals. I edit 10 of my personal photos a year, still I have an Adobe subscription which includes Photoshop and Lightroom.
Had Figma been part of the Adobe Suite I would have at-least downloaded it and tried it. As great as Figma is, reach of their product is limited, Adobe is giving Figma‘s technology the reach they would have never gotten as a standalone company.
I said Figma is not worth 20 billion as a standalone company. It might be worth 20 billion to Adobe. Adobe can do to Figma what Facebook did to Instagram, Facebook took a relatively small startup Instagram and made it into a global juggernaut worth hundreds of billions in value.
Similar story with ByteDance and Musically, how many of you have used Musically before Bytedance bought it and re-branded it as TikTok.
Heads up, then, it's the de-facto standard in UX / UI design these days. There are alternatives, but this is the go-to tool people are training on, using at work, etc. It's not some unknown tool that's being saved by Adobe out of obscurity.
> Change is hard; As a Figma consumer you are probably uncomfortable with the change, but Adobe acquiring is better than Figma going shutting down due to lack of mass adoption
Hilariously bad take. Figma has very strong adoption. Lacking the same scale as Adobe doesn't mean it has bad adoption.
Hilariously ignorant. I've seen steady adoption into businesses like large banks for UX and design work over the last two years, in domains previously dominated by Adobe. This acquisition looks like a defensive one. They are not saving Figma from death in obscurity, hence the price tag.
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.
I love Sketch but macOS is no longer the OS I spend the most times in, which is Linux and Windows. I'd love for Sketch to be cross-platform, I'd buy one license per year just to support them.
So my only option was Figma and now... Now what? Damn this sucks.
Check out Framer. It's actually a really nice UI/UX and prototyping tool, but is pretty opinionated in how you set up your file (IMO). I used it a lot when I was freelancing because it gave me a little more power than Sketch did, at the time, and was more mature than Figma. They are the one product I know of currently that has web, Windows and Mac clients.
This ^ is what's lead my small sample size of companies to move from Sketch to Figma. The focus on cross platform and ease of use that Figma had really helped drive adoption across a wide range of company sizes which is probably why this is such a logical acquisition for Adobe.
Common things are so obtusely buried in these applications. It's extraordinary the decisions they make.
Maybe there should be a telematics tool for gtk that tracks when a user is clicking around looking for something and treats it like a bug report after a program crash.
Some Non-Obtrusive (very important) dialog says something like "looking for something? Tell us what and where you're expecting it so we can add it".
There's no reason at all things can't be in 2 or 3 places instead of like View / Interface Options / General / Advanced / ... or wherever the hell someone decided to place it.
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.
I used Fireworks for years for web design stuff - it was simple to use, but fully featured, a real joy to use.
As soon as Adbobe bought Macromedia, I knew they would shitcan it because of Photoshop and Illustrator. And I knew other nice Macromedia tools, like Dreamweaver, would have a similar fate. Such a shame, and buying a competitor just to kill it feels so wrong :(
I'm not totally sure if Figma will suffer a similar fate, but I do think it's going to get progressively more expensive, harder to use, buggier, and generally be more user-hostile.
> I'm not totally sure if Figma will suffer a similar fate
I strongly suspect not. It's in a lot more use than Fireworks (which was cool -I used it- but was always a bit "niche").
If they play their cards right, they can use it to leverage their way back into many designers' good graces (who had been leaving the Adobesphere for the Figmasphere). They would probably add ways to leverage their cloud storage and other apps.
That said, it's pretty much a textbook "buy the competition" move, and the kind of thing that's getting a lot of scrutiny from regulators, these days.
But $20B is a lot of yachts. I don't blame the Figma people for selling out.
I still use Fireworks CS6 for one-off mockups. I don't specialize in design myself, but I think that's exactly why I like using it - its UI is intuitive and simple. I've tried newer/maintained vector editors like Inkscape and Krita, and still feel like there's a void left by Fireworks for casual users like myself.
I thought I was one of the last Fireworks users and I gave it up a few years ago in favor of Sketch!
Once I learn a tool well enough to suit my needs, I really hate giving it up so it was a difficult transition. Probably why I never bothered abandoning Sketch in favor of Figma.
I've used all of these tools as well. Recently I was clinging to the side of Sketch with white knuckles while bringing over stuff from photoshop and illustrator and exporting to zeplin. The process was cumbersome but created excellent results. But I finally forced myself to check out figma.
Within about two weeks I never looked back.
For me, figma was just SO much better. Some of the behaviors are so head-smackingly, "Oh my god, why doesn't Illustrator do that?!" it's nuts.
I still need PS and Illustrator on occasion, but for embracing Figma I was able to dump 2 programs (Sketch/Zeplin) and actually improve my company's overall design consistency and brand like never before. And I use the Adobe products - which I've used for over 30 years - so much less, it's stunning.
I must sound like an advertisement, but figma has been a total life/career-changer. The news of the acquisition this morning slapped me hard. I fear the unknown. I remember what happened to Macromedia, too.
Sketch is ideal Fireworks replacement. I clinged to Fireworks for years after it was abandoned, and when I found Sketch, I never looked back. Every little thing that ever bothered me in Fireworks, they made just right.
I'm in exactly the same boat. It's such a shame that AFAIK nothing can import .fw.png files and keep them editable; I'll need to manually export everything to .psd before I eventually have to upgrade my OS.
Same boat. Wondering what it takes to either VM Mojave or get a windows license and VM that. And this whole episode has made me definitely appreciate the merits of Windows backward compatibility as a feature...
They literally did the same thing with dreamweaver as well. And now dreamweaver is a fast growing business in the form of Webflow.
It’s the same story over and over again. Adobe acquires and then stifles innovation. 10 years later we realize what we were missing out on when a challenger eventually gets big enough—-until Adobe kills that company too.
I’d bet a nice chunk of money that Webflow is next.
I don't think so. Webflow is all marketing and PR IMO.
The issue with Webflow is that GUI-based web design that exports static HTML files doesn't fit with how most large websites are coded and deployed. It would be one thing if Webflow CMS and Ecommerce was gaining market share vs Squarespace and Wix, but I don't know if that's really happening.
When I go on Twitter, I mostly see PR-type posts about Webflow. Lots of "Webflow experts" but few real companies that are willing to build large sites with it.
Once static site generators + headless CMS's became all the rage among enterprise IT types, that opened the door to Webflow...since Webflow is basically a GUI-based static site generator + headless CMS.
If you ask the engineering team, they'll build the marketing site into a complicated monstrosity on Gatsby + Contentful, and then never allow you to touch it again. You'll need to go through them to make any changes--and they'll be busy with real product work.
If you build on Webflow, you're basically doing the same thing, but putting ownership of the marketing site squarely inside the marketing org (who likely has people who's time is less expensive able to do what you need in Webflow...and faster).
There's limitations for sure (eg. multi-lingual sites, nested directory URL structure, etc), but within a few years I'm guessing those will be solved and the adoption will be even more dramatic.
Although Webflow seems to be stupidly focusing on the whole "No code" Twitter circle-jerk with Logic/memberships, so they may get disrupted by Framer in the meantime however.
> If you build on Webflow, you're basically doing the same thing, but putting ownership of the marketing site squarely inside the marketing org (who likely has people who's time is less expensive able to do what you need in Webflow...and faster).
Fair enough. I still don't think Webflow CMS is going to make much of a dent in this market (even though I think their GUI is much better than Wix/Squarespace). The charts in the site builder report link, even being 2 years old, suggest they're well behind even obscure platforms like Google Sites.
Every webflow site means paying customer (and professional setting). It's pretty expected that free builders like Google Sites will have more websites. The question is how many of them are high quality.
If you look at the 2 year old data - Webflow already had more sites in top 1 milion websites than WIX.
I would expect change in market share to be faster for design tools than CMS systems / web builders, as the barrier to adoption is lower for design tools, however, change does happen when innovation addresses under-served market needs and delivers greater value against those needs. Framer, Webflow, Jotform and others seem to be on a path to doing just that. Here's a chart that shows Figma's rise against competitors: https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*gdeNbC57BJKydbYQjNdqOg.pn...
Maybe it depends on country but Webflow has massive adoption around here. Every agency is becoming webflow agency because they can teach their designers to create small to medium sized websites without coding. You can't create custom unique branded websites without coding with any other tool. It got to a point where clients themselves require webflow because it means easy, cheap, fast visual changes.
Wix had to rush to create their Editor X which is direct Webflow competition.
Yes it won't replace big sites that require complex CMSes and publishing flows. But it certainly has a niche.
TBH i think it will be super interesting if somebody made some kind of more open webflow style html/css editor that could be integrated to current CMSes and workflows. Like sections of pages that are handcrafted like this. Or your header/footer and blog are CMS but landing page is this super visual html/cms editor.
I remember how Fireworks *felt* to use. Just seeing that name written again gave me warm fuzzy feelings. Fireworks came about at a time when web design was almost entirely something you did in HTML. The workflow to go from bitmap to web was really bad, so most of us just did things natively.
Fireworks was the first tool that allowed you to draw, but maintain the constraints (and portability) of HTML and CSS as it came in to prominence.
The closest thing I have had to that feeling again was when a friend of mine did some design for me and shared it in Figma. What I thought were bitmaps were vectors!! I had so much fun bringing that in to my site (which I ended up doing in Webflow, because apparently I haven't kept up with the times enough to hand code reasonably quickly).
I've used the latest and greatest Adobe products, they definitively do not have this feeling. There is really no delight to be found. I know they are incredibly powerful and near and dear to many people, but for the young and restless they are boring.
I was part of the first wave of animators who found Flash and mucked around in it - I made a cartoon early on that went viral before that was a thing.
An exe file as an attachment to an email, that went round the world. Crazy days.
Ah, Fireworks brings back good memories. I used Fireworks way back in high school to design websites - you could throw together a basic multi-page website with a clickable/hoverable image navbar in literally minutes, no code required. And it looked good too, at least by the standards of the early 2000s.
Later, I did the vast majority of the visuals I used throughout my PhD in Fireworks CS6, long after it had been abandoned by Adobe. It was fast, faster than Photoshop or Illustrator is today. The shape libraries meant that doing diagrams and illustrations was a breeze - these days I do most of that in Keynote/Powerpoint, with much poorer bitmap editing support. Photoshop and Illustrator are simply too big and slow for quick-and-dirty editing tasks.
The thing that ultimately killed Fireworks for me was that it crashed more frequently every time I updated macOS, to the point where it simply would no longer launch. For a couple of years I maintained a set of binary patches to Fireworks CS6 to work around startup crashes and such, but that ultimately got to be too time-consuming to keep up with.
I don't think I've ever been as productive in any other image editing software. Photopea gets surprisingly close for me - despite being a Photoshop clone, it's both faster (just a web app!) and has a few of the nice features I miss from Fireworks.
In case people are too young to remember, Macromedia was well on its way to matching Adobe's application suite – except Macromedia apps had far better UX, better performance, and better integration with the web. There's a good case that Adobe would no longer exist today had Adobe not acquired Macromedia.
I still use Adobe Animate (formerly Macromedia Flash), for simple vector drawings. For example, you can just draw a circle, draw a line through it, delete part of the circle that is bisected on the line, then click and drag the line or the remaining curve to curve those two segments. It's so much easier than using the pen tool or having to deal with vectors in Illustrator.
Thank goodness interactive experiences now require a full developer team, myriad NPM packages, and an application deployment pipeline. All for a web page that won't even work in a few years' time when some script necessary for the page to work ends up getting removed from whatever template they're using.
>Thank goodness interactive experiences now require a full developer team
Interactive experiences the kind Flash was used for, can now be done trivially without plugins AND be compatible with the rest of the page (e.g. history, copy paste, etc.). For some basic stuff Flash was used you can even do them in one line of CSS. You can even play video, sound, and trigger MIDI natively now, with just a few lines.
More advanced stuff, you can it do with just canvas and at most a wrapper lib for higher level methods - no "NPM packages" or anything else required.
For casual games or animation, there are tons of FOSS and even proprietary libs, with game-building templates and GUIs to do what Flash did, and even things Flash barely did, like 3D - and they all export to native web code running on all platforms - even mobile. And with lower resources that Flash did.
All I can say is, good luck navigating the Minesweeper field that are the caniuse.com tables for browser feature cross-compatibility. At least Flash worked everywhere, even on Android.
I never curse on HN, but screw you, man. Nothing in my programming life has felt the way making animations and scripting them felt with Flash. You either missed out, or got suckered by steve jobs into thinking it's bad. It was overused, sure, but that's true of every new technology that's accessible and powerful.
Building something in Flash visually felt far more concrete and rewarding vs having to write lines of code for CSS keyframes or SVG animations.
Flash also just made it possible for non-programmers to build cool stuff. Today, that is pretty much impossible if you're not a programmer.
Programmers often aren't artists, so when they're playing around, they build something that may only be of interest to them. Taking HN as an example, I have seen tons of posts about people excitedly describing their favourite static site generator. Not much there for others to really dig into and enjoy.
And that's what we lose when the tools of creation are limited to those whose interests lie entirely elsewhere.
And aside from animations, it helped build the "landing page" nightmare - huge (for the download speeds of the time) pages, loading tons of assets, to do nothing.
Or the even worse "flash-only website" which just showed some text and images, and had nightmarish navigation, slow download times, didn't use regular html widgets, and you couldn't copy and paste or take a bookmark of your position in it...
The true neglect really started showing after Adobe bought the product. And your last paragraph could also apply to a lot of HTML5 apps, especially during the "AJAX" era. People didn't care about those things (and a lot of them still don't !) regardless of the technology used.
Indeed—however much it "sucked", there's literally no replacement. We've simply lost a certain kind of very-accessible creation tool for rich, animation-heavy, potentially-interactive content.
I wouldn't have a career without it, that's for sure. I made a cartoon called The Pygmy Shrew which went round the world and led to me going to Monaco to record Roger Moore!
It's a work of art because it was created by someone with a great sense of art - Johnathan Gay, who developed Dark Castle using tools that would end up becoming Flash/Director. [0]
It's pretty established now that for what we had at the time/the environment/and where the web was evolving, Flash was actually pretty damn good as far as UX for creators and the web has never regained that level of expression/ease yet. (despite all the technical problems and anti-open-web caveats)
I too really loved Fireworks (and Dreamweaver) back in the Macromedia days. As a kid then, it was really very intuitive to do all sorts of odd creative projects easily.
Riding on nostalgia fumes, I went searching for screenshots and in the process amusingly found: https://askubuntu.com/a/244128 - a Linux user still running Fireworks 8 in WINE. I'm almost tempted to try the same...
I just did, since I have WINE installed to run music software. It runs _perfectly_, although with early 2000s era UX conventions (i.e., very small fonts, some pixelated). Edits seem very fast, although it is hard to say on my hardware (Ryzen 7). As a curio, it's a fun experiment, but being a bit less nostalgic and more realistic now, I'd quicker reach for GIMP or Krita on Linux (on the Mac, I use Pixelmator Pro and Affinity Designer for the semi-advanced editing I need)... Although I do love this thing.
FYI, the download of version 8 was available to use as a 30-day trial, which seems legal enough today, if only for experimentation, and I actually have a license of MX someplace from my G4 Mac days.
I wouldn't be so sure anything will be similar to Adobe->Macromedia. That was 17 years ago and Adobe is a very different company today operating in a different competitive environment with a different business model. Also, Adobe's competitor to Figma isn't PS or AI, it's a newer tool called Adobe xD. Adobe has sunk a lot of effort into getting xD "right" but so far failed to make it competitive. This massive acquisition is Adobe admitting that the xD effort failed and giving up.
In recent years, Adobe's approach to mega-sized acquisitions has been to put the newly acquired company's management in charge of the relevant business unit, not the other way around. The users who should be worried by the news are those who love Adobe xD vs Figma (I assume there must be some). If the post-acquisition integration goes well, I'd estimate the chances at better than 50% that in a couple years former Figma management end up running Adobe's creative professional segment entirely (ie PS, AI, etc).
(note: none of this means you personally will prefer whatever the impact of that may be in any particular product.)
Adobe’s direct competitor is Adobe XD, which launched with practically no features and was slowly developed only to dwindle to death as a rarely used cloud service, while everyone does the important work in Figma.
The parent comment is spot-on. Antitrust legislation needs to be invoked to prevent this acquisition from happening.
It amazes me that people posting on a YC controlled board whose entire purpose for existing is to fund startups long enough to get an exit - statistically most likely through an acquisition by a bigger company - wants to stop acquisitions.
The funding environment for startups would be a lot worse if investors thought that the only way they could recoup their investments is through exits. Look how few of YC companies actually go public.
Even companies that do go public are often just surviving long enough to hopefully get acquired.
The founders at Figma chose to be acquired. It’s their product and their company.
Who said that? The point is that anticompetitive acquisitions, like Adobe acquiring a direct competitor, hurt everyone but the acquirer, and should be tightly controlled.
Nobody would care if Figma were getting acquired by GitLab or Salesforce or Atlassian or whatever. The fact that it's a direct competitor known for destroying acquisitions is the problem.
Why would Gitlab want Figma? Could it afford it? I am sure the owners of Figma thought this was the best available option. It’s their company - not yours or the governments. If they want to sell their property it’s theirs to sell.
Would Gitlab make it a better product if it was sold to them?
It's just an example of a non-monopolistic acquisition. There are other examples of larger companies that may be able to support it better, like Microsoft or Dropbox or Zoom or something.
DropBox isn’t doing to well itself if you haven’t checked. How well are their previous acquisitions doing? Would you rather have a company acquire Figma with no expertise in the area (MS)?
I think everyone would prefer Figma to continue to be an independent business that challenges and competes with Adobe, forcing both products to be better.
“Everyone” but the people who own the company, created the product, found investors, took the risk of starting their own company, the employees who all could have probably made more money during the intervening years by working for BigTech.
Their priorities and wants are a lot more important than yours.
If you had an idea that attracted investor interest, convinced engineers to forego BigTech compensation and created a product that people wanted, I am sure your opinion would matter a lot more.
No. But I hate the idea that people who did absolutely nothing to create the company think they by proxy of the government should have the right to tell others to do with their property. If you want a company that meets your ideals - create a company yourself.
Customers do to some degree have a sense of ownership over the product. Marketers literally try to cultivate that "sense of ownership" factor. Especially where there's network effects, or a marketplace ecosystem forming. It very literally becomes a community and a standard.
More and more I think we'll see companies have to signal their intentions and be lightly bound to their community, or see those ecosystems form somewhere else instead.
The best for the acquirers and acquired isn't necessarily, and is in fact rarely, the best for the consumers at large. Unless you want to end up in an abusive relationship in all of your transactions, governments should intervene to keep things level, competitive and innovative.
"history". Yes, that concise and short read that just tells you government bad. Do you have anything in particular in mind?
I really struggle to find an excuse for not wanting to involve government regulations in obvious cases like monopolies almost monopolies. Even some libertarians, who are far from being a logical bunch of people, agree with this (alongside safety regulations and sometimes even infrastructure). The free market cannot function properly when it concerns externalities, infrastructure with high upfront costs, monopolies/oligopolies.
Fuck yes. The government is there for everyone. I want to not be abused as a consumer by for instance having a single ISP, phone manufacturer, etc. etc. price gouging me and everyone else, and i practice what i preach.
In a similar vein, i don't want trash on the ground, so i inconvenience myself by collecting my trash and throwing it at the appropriate places. You know, normal "sacrifices" one does as the cost of participating in a society.
I understand why people like Figma. But just because you don’t like that Figma is selling their company doesn’t mean that the government should be involved.
When a group of people thought they wanted a better operating system and databases that can’t be acquired - they created an open source offering. They didn’t depend on government intervention.
Many of us think the VC approach to business has perverse incentives and is fundamentally broken, with large exits basically demanding megacorp purchases, who then hand large dividends back to the investors behind the scheme. No matter who loses, the house always wins. I post here in spite of YC and pg, who I both dislike equally very much.
Even though you don’t like how VCs operate, you are taking advantage of a product (HN) that is funded by them. But yet, the founders of Figma shouldn’t be able to maximize their returns?
Sure you could, if you have the courage of your convictions you could have a pursued a career in public service and worked for a non profit. Did you do that?
You don't know my convictions and are projecting them on to me.
This kind of abuse of power dynamic is directly conflicting Hayek's view on competition and on antitrust from 1946.
There's this modern ideology of reactionary fealty to every abuse of power like some masochist vigorously shaking pom poms at every market exploit and cheering "thank you, give me more!"
You know how utterly indefensible that position is and so instead of even attempting to do that you try to pry into my personal life and imagine you've found inconsistencies from which you mount a personal attack on my character.
Give me a break. A company buying up its competition to dismantle it is garbage and plenty of even Austrian economists agree.
Living a life a charity isn't required to see when an emperor wears no clothes.
Actually it is, you’re not willing to give up your comfortable lifestyle and trade your labor for the most compensation that you can yet you clutch your pearls wondering why those evil capitalist pigs aren’t willing to make the same sacrifices.
Anyone who makes a living by working for a private company and then saying the same private companies are evil, don’t have the courage of their convictions and are false clutching their pearls
My lifestyle is afforded to me because I trade my labor for money at a for profit company (BigTech). I am not clutching my pearls bemoaning the evils of capitalism while feeding from the very same troughs.
I’m not sure why you think that 100% market freedom ought to be this audience’s primary index of importance. Many of us own or work for companies that will likely be negatively impacted by this. Antitrust has been systematically marginalized over the last 40 years, and despite prevailing narratives, this is not necessarily a net good for entrepreneurs.
There purpose for existing and our reasons for coming don't need to be the same. Very few readers/posters have a ycombinator startup. Stronger feelings towards YC ideals would be found on the private ycominator channel.
The goal of facebook is some meta universe. Most users go on to write a friend..
How many readers and posters on HN do you think work for a startup where they are hoping their equity in a private VC backed company will be worth something? How many posters work for one of those “evil monopolist” where a great percentage of their livelihood is based on their RSUs doing well? Even if you do work for a private profitable “lifestyle business” that is profitable and was bootstrapped, I bet your company’s owners would sell their company in a heartbeat if the right “monopolist” pulled up with a truck load of money.
It's not the acquisition itself. It's what company acquires it. Adobe is the IBM of creative tools. (If not Oracle.)
OTOH being acquired by a behemoth company always feels uneasy for the product. Imagine an acquisition by Google, or Facebook, or Microsoft, or even Apple. I bet people would start imaging how Firma were to deteriorate under their corporate governance.
Ideally an acquired company is just left as is, and used as a cash cow, resulting just in the products becoming a bit more expensive for large customers.
I still run a 22 year old copy Fireworks 4 because of Adobe's shenanigans. Just this morning I had to crop and resize a 1 MB image for display on a website and was able to do that in Fireworks in about 2 minutes resulting in 15k PNG and was on to my next task.
A basic image viewer included in your OS can probably do that - and a lot quicker than two minutes! How does Fireworks make it so slow to open, resize, and close?
Most of the two minutes was setting up Windows to select Fireworks as the editor.
I have Windows 10. There is a program called Paint 3D. I opened it now and do not see guides or the option to turn on guides. I do not have an export option where I can preview different formats with different color palettes. If I had more time I could probably list other features Fireworks has that I have become accustomed to.
Oh and Fireworks is consistent. I can trust when I have a task I can open it and it will have expected behavior and features. The way modern software removes and add features and add and hides options on every update makes using the software a task in of itself, before doing the business at hand. I'd rather make my images and be on about my day.
Well, you can do that with almost any very lightweight app, including apps costing like $10 and having hardware acceleration and everything, like Acorn and Pixelmator (examples on the Mac side) and also "be on to your next task".
You can even fully automate it (well, at least the resize, you'll still need to pick where to crop) with both.
I don't think there's anything a 22 year old copy of Fireworks can do that can't be done in other newer apps, but I feel like that's kinda irrelevant. Some people would rather spend their time learning how to do something new rather than learning how to do the same old thing in new ways.
I used Fireworks back in school and from what I remember it was a lot easier to use than Adobes products.
How does this analogy make sense though? Fireworks was, to Adobe, some third-rate app that Adobe had to acquire because they had acquired Flash, the thing they really cared about. Adobe certainly maintained Flash - anyone remember ActionScript 3?
In this Figma acquisition, Figma is the main prize. They're not just going to leave Figma to languish, no more than they left Flash to languish. Eventually Flash did die, yes, but that was more Apple crushing it than a direct decision of Adobe.
Adobe ran Flash into the ground. Flash was developing at such a rapid pace until it was acquired, and then quickly stagnated. Adobe too way too long to get Adobe Air performant and the tooling was abysmal.
If Flash was in capable hands, it would have become a major player in the game development space, which is where most of its strengths were.
> If Flash was in capable hands, it would have become a major player in the game development space, which is where most of its strengths were.
I don't understand what you mean here. Flash WAS a major player in the game development space. Flash games were dominant on the web for something like a decade, and a large part of that was post-Adobe acquisition.
Yes, they missed the boat on mobile, but that was more a function of Jobs putting his foot down on anything vaguely Flash-related.
And yet I still get jobs working in Flash, there's still no comparable program for frame-by-frame vector animation. A package that you can draw into but also rig puppets in. I'm rooting for Grease Pencil to catch up but really it's nowhere near in terms of fast usability.
That's not so say they didn't run it into the ground - I still remember the nightmare of CS5.
Indeed. I still build my game assets in Animate CC, export them with the Export Texture Atlas feature, and then have a custom built runtime play the animations in my game. It’s quite simple to build such a runtime for immediate mode rendering engines such HTML canvas, Monogame, Kha.
There's a recent comment of mine someplace about how much I miss the _genius_ of Fireworks as a combined pixel/vector art tool that saved everything to standard PNG files - which anyone could read since the additional data was inserted using PNG tags.
That and it being very fast and effective for Web design (miles ahead of Photoshop at the time).
This is an online collaboration / network effect acquisition. Not a tech acquisition.
(This is like Microsoft acquiring Github due to GitHub network effect)
While I too loved Fireworks and Dreamweaver, neither one had the network effect that Figma does (granted, SaaS software in the late 90s / early 00s was rare).
Even if Fireworks were to have flourished while at Adobe, it's not entirely clear they would have successful made both the pivot to web AND also gained the network effect that Figma has created.
> This is an online collaboration / network effect acquisition. Not a tech acquisition.
One could also make the argument that it's an acqui-hire.
If one wanted to build a real Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere, etc. for the web, you'd want the Figma team. Nobody else understands how to build desktop-like experiences using the latest web technologies (Wasm, etc.) better.
I have nothing but praise for Photopea. Having used it in the past, it's great for things that I might otherwise use macOS Preview (or similar utilities) for.
However, Photopea is at least a couple of orders of magnitude simpler than the Adobe apps I mentioned. It'd be interesting to compare to Photoshop 1.0 (1987), though!
The only hope is that since Figma is subscription revenue, they will immediately feel the pain of neglecting the product. I’d imagine it’s a mature enough, well known enough product that you could say it’s already stolen as much share as it would from adobe’s cash cows. Potentially it’s the place users get started nowadays and adobe could leverage it by making it easier for those users to explore adobe’s other products.
>The only hope is that since Figma is subscription revenue, they will immediately feel the pain of neglecting the product.
I honestly haven't observed this to be the case with subscription software. They will continue making cash because people want to continue to use it. Meanwhile, if it were individual sales, they would actually have to maintain and improve it to get people to buy new versions.
I was heavy user of Fireworks back in the day. Looking back — it had enormous influence over where I’m now today. I still can’t get over what Adobe did to it. It’s like Microsoft or some other behemoth buying JetBrains and then slowly killing it in favor of its own IDEs.
Microsoft bought GitHub years ago and announced the "sunsetting" of the Atom editor (a GitHub-company project) and its official ecosystem a few months ago. The archiving of Atom and all related projects will occur on Dec. 15th, 2022: https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/.
Yeah, there's still nothing as good as fireworks at what it did. Figma is better in some ways with autolayout, etc. But fireworks also had excellent bitmap editing support.
I miss those days too. Built so many sites in Dreamweaver + Fireworks. But it's probably not the internet that has changed, but you. It's not magical anymore because we're no longer kids and because it has become normal to be online. After having to deal with 56k modems for years, every moment of being continuously online felt special.
I used to always check out new releases of Illustrator to see if they had caught up to CorelDraw circa 1999… behind those cheesy vector and free-font CDs was a vastly superior vector editor. (to be fair, they seem to have mostly caught up around 2010-ish?)
Was looking for this comment. I loved Freehand. It was so much better than Illustrator. Don't get me wrong, Illustrator today has come a long way. But I can only imagine what Freehand in 2022 would be like.
I still keep a copy of CS6 installed just for Fireworks. It was the first design tool that made sense to me as a programmer that wanted to think of everything in terms of pixels and object groups. I should probably move on at this point but it still does what I need it to do.
We still use Fireworks! I open it every day, and it remains a decent vector and simple image editor. Back in the day we used to create our web designs in Fireworks and then (before we knew better) "slice" them to HTML and export using Fireworks. Even after we transitioned to building by hand, we still used Fireworks for things like creating mouseover menus.
We used HTML tables for several years before fully transitioning to DIV based layouts. With CSS you could/can make tables flexible and that's all we needed for most responsive layouts.
>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.
Well, that product was also theirs at that point, so it wouldn't be threatening anything (profits of its sales would go to them anyway).
If you people people would stop buying Photoshop and Illustrator, then no, Fireworks was meant for other use case entirely (web mostly), and it had 1/10 the capabilities of Photoshop and Illustrator pertaining to their own domains (yes, many use just 10% of a program, but many must-have features included in that 10% differ from person to person, so Fireworks having that 10% wouldn't be enough).
But when these big corps buy and potentially kill products shrinking competition, where the hell is antitrust to be found? Like are the guys there sleeping well? Would they like a massage?
I remember Fireworks very well and completely agree it was exceptionally well optimised for UI. As well as the ability to easily edit both bitmaps and vectors, the combination of frames and layer sets nested within the frames allowed for super rapid iterations on layouts. The export features were super optimal too at the time. Rather irrational of me, but I took the slow death of it rather personally and never forgave Adobe.
I have such great memories of Fireworks prior to the acquisition by Adobe. It was my go to tool for 90% of all web graphics: simple to use, no need to fuss with layers for selections, vector + bitmap in one app, easy exports, and everything editable within a PNG file. Such a wonderful tool! I truly hope Figma doesn't suffer the same fate. Hopefully the $20B price tag, justifies resources.
These tools aren't interchangeable. Photoshop is for editing images. Illustrator is for editing vector graphics.
Figma is a multiplayer layout tool, which can be used for web, print, or anything else. The main use cases for enterprise are a) it's web-accessible, and b) the realtime collaboration/revision/commenting tools.
The smart thing would be to just sunset Adobe XD and replace it with Adobe Figma.
Nothing in the rules say anything about malice or incompetence. The most charitable interpretation I could find for your assertion is this line:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Of course, the subject of this is a user's comments, not a corporation. I suggest you read the rules a little more thoroughly before accusing others of breaking them.
Making 9 sliced graphics for the web is obsolete though.
That said Flash also supported a bunch of innovation for its time, and it too was obsoleted.
Maybe 9 slice graphic were already dead at Fireworks’ peak.
Figma is officially way more overrated than this stuff ever was.
Does anyone know a person who’s like, bonafide smart, using Figma? I feel like everyone I know who does “Figma” day to day is doing negative ROI shit. It’s like anti-R&D. It’s the ultimate bullshit job for non engineers.
One of the top users of Figma by time-spent-in-app in its early days was the founder of a little tool called Notion.
So apparently spending your days in Figma can result in negative ROI shit like designing a billion dollar product.
But hey, I used to have the same gut feeling…that anyone who does something different to what I do all day is worthless. Then I got older and learned my model of the world, with me at the center of it, was naive and incorrect.
Well if your definition of bonafide smart is that they’re an engineer, then there are pretty few. If you think design and visual communication has any value whatsoever, then yeah, lots of people are using it, some of whom are very smart. That’s why they’re worth $20B after all.
I like the community here overall but there are far too many discussions tainted by the implicit assumption that if (royal) you see yourself as valuable then others value is synonymous with their similarity to you.
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.
This doesn't deserve to be downvoted. Competition is crucial for healthy markets, and the only effect of buyouts and mergers is to consolidate business and decrease competition. If Adobe wants Figma's product, then they can do business with Figma and license it from them. Stop normalizing monopolistic behavior.
> the only effect of buyouts and mergers is to consolidate business and decrease competition
Acquisitions also preserve value in businesses that would otherwise shut down (now or are on a path to). They can create a combined business that's better than the sum of its parts. For example, Apple acquiring Next.
Pro-competition / anti-monopoly doesn't require throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Did they use the Consumer Welfare Standard to block Visa's acquisition of Plaid? Seems like the main reasoning they used was because it was a strategic buy rather than a financially sound one. (and the finances of this deal pretty much mirror Plaids)
That's what they have used in the past, and are not bound to it. If you read any of Lina Khan's work, it's clear that they'll take a more holistic view of the impact of lack of competition.
That's a good point, it's important to note the current FTC chair is working to change the standards that are used. I'm excited to see how that pans out. I think the lack of antitrust enforcement in recent decades is a really underrated problem in American governance.
Consumer welfare standard is not a law enacted by Congress its just something a lawyer named Robert Bork that was rejected from the Supreme Court popularized in the 70s. It was pre-internet and couldn’t comprehend platform firms like Amazon that price below cost for years to win a market and kill competition
There may be "plenty" of other competitors, but I think it's pretty undeniable that Figma is the "up-and-coming" (or maybe it already got there) market leader among "design tools for web design". I also think it's pretty apparent that Adobe knows this and that's why they want to buy them.
This is the exact same pattern as Facebook buying Instagram, and heck the same as some of Adobe's previous acquisitions, where large corporations buy out competitors that could potentially overtake them.
If antitrust means anything it should block these types of acquisitions.
Not really, no. Miro is a giant whiteboard/brainstorming tool. Canva is a presentation tool, like Powerpoint. To say they can be used for design is saying that MS Paint or Photoshop can be used to design mockups... sure, but that's not really what they're made for, and it would be a painful experience (even Adobe learned that, eventually, and tried to copy Figma by making the separate Adobe XD tool)
You can try to coerce those other apps to make wireframes & mockups, but Figma is much better for both designers (the layout tools are phenomenal and CSS-like) and devs (the exports are good, there's CSS code to copy, a bunch of plugins, etc.).
I've had various product people try to make mockups in Miro because they didn't want to learn Figma, and it usually ends up being a bunch of screenshots clobbered together. That's a lot harder to work with than being able to click on a particular component in Figma and see its exact color, border radiuses, flexbox layouts, etc., and then to have entire widgets, dashboards, screens, and apps composed out of these components and built into a functional interactive prototype that stakeholders can review and comment on and devs can inspect for technical details. Figma is really really good at that.
If someone tried to send me one in Canva, well, I think I'd just quit right then and there lol. (Don't get me wrong, Canva is a great tool for presentations, but not for sharing designs)
Are there any significant historical cases? The Nvidia and Arm one seems like a big deal (if it succeeds), but the others just seem like random low-hanging fruit. I feel like the ones that matter (ISPs, cell phone carriers gobbling each other up, the Microsoft/Facebook/Adobes of the world, AMD buying ATI...) never really get stopped.
I think you’re undervaluing the significance of the FTC’s everyday work, but I’ll agree with your the Federal government has not been aggressive enough in exercising its anti-trust authority.
Isn't AT&T/T-Mo a DoJ effort, not the FTC? I don't see the FTC's involvement in your links... were they cooperating behind the scenes somehow?
The Sprint one was also DoJ, according to the wiki.
I get that the FTC on paper is supposed to enforce things like that, but their track record doesn't seem great. It just feels like a zombie agency that used to have teeth a long time ago...
Ya the last big case was Microsoft. Antitrust is being revived after being mostly dormant for 40 years but Congress has never changed the laws executives and the judiciary have just chosen not to enforce them
Considering the instant response on HN was to upvote the open source competition and the fact many people are probably going to leave to go to a competitor because they hate Adobe. It probably doesn't lessen competition but increases it since a lot of competitors are getting sign ups right now.
The argument "but there are competitors" – that the very existence of other players in a market should preclude the blocking of acquisitions – is flawed and misleading.
For competition to strengthen a space, it needs to be meaningful competition. The goal for regulators should not be "more than one player in every category." It should be diverse product expression, improved customer utility, and most of all ZERO winner-take-all effects.
That last item (winner-take-all) is crucial to understand, and I'm sad that it is no longer a major part of economic discourse (as it once was when systems-thinking was more common). Winner-take-all effects often occur without an explicit monopoly, yet devastate the category and its adjacent categories.
> For competition to strengthen a space, it needs to be meaningful competition.
There are meaningful competitors to Adobe's design tools. There are quite a few applications like Figma with a decent amount of traction. The fact they will be receiving an uptick in users will increase their meaningfulness which means Adobe acquiring Figma is not lessening the competition.
Why do you think that other companies will see an uptick in users from this? Most companies are not going to renegotiate contracts, update all their processes and tools, and retrain all their users just because this got bought by Adobe (which they are probably already paying for other tools). This absolutely reduces competition.
> Why do you think that other companies will see an uptick in users from this?
Because the number of people who are saying "Adobe is going to ruin Figma".
While companies aren't going to renegotitate, freelancers and designers doing personal work will just switch to another freemium tool. And tools end up in the work toolchain by the employees using them and suggesting.
For sure not triple digit legitimate competitors. To be legitimate competitor means some very mature software / service. I can think of Sketch and Adobe XD, maybe Balsamiq but not quite the same. What are these 100 extra well formed alternatives?
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.
Post C6, I was 100% out and only FOSS as well. Dedicating time to those tools have proven more than acceptable and on occasion I got to file a bug too. Of them, darktable and Hugin have been my favorites.
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".
Same here. This is going to do tangible damage to my daily life as someone who opens Figma daily. I also spend time hunting rogue Adobe spyware processes in activity monitor daily. Adobe destroys everything they touch and Figma was finally innovating despite them. I hope we get real anti trust laws someday.
but are you willing to walk away from your current job where your employer won't share your sentiments? Are they going to switch to a Figma alternative because of ideology and emotions tied to the change in ownership? Isn't it more likely that the product will work as is and businesses won't face any direct interruption because owner changed?
I think Adobe made a smart decision, businesses are locked in and unlikely to switch once something is deeply integrated to their application design workflows.
"Corner the market, and raise the price." In this case, outsource the former and in-house the latter.
I’m a freelancer so I have the luxury of choice here, but I agree there is likely not much that will change until Adobe cripples Figma enough for an alternative to surpass it significantly.
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.
As a cto/admin/manager/hiring person: Sketch is worthless for me because I don't have a Mac. But because of that, my company does not use it: despite designers working on macOS, if I can't run it to look at their work and actively comment/collaborate with them, it's not a useful workflow. Therefore instead we hire people familiar with Figma (sadly, because I wanted to avoid giving Adobe money. Well, fuck, eh?)
Because statistics. If you make one option less appealing (which is the presumption) all competitors will indirectly benefit, statistically, for various reasons, none of which might resonate with your specific personal needs.
Anyone here can lodge this simple form and I'd encourage you to do so. Especially if you think this merger will substantially lesson competition and stifle innovation lodge a complaint: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation
At a minimum, they will investigate this and make inquiries (typically within months) if they see a high volume of complaints.
2. It should include something similar the following (maybe a lawyer here, could help):
a. Adobe acquiring Figma may violate anti-trust laws.
b. These are the 2 dominate players in web design apps. There is very little competition elsewhere.
c. I am a user and once they merge there is no viable competitor.
Sent, thank you. I also made sure to mention the "consumer harm" (keyword) of forcing consumers to engage with Adobe's predatory pricing model ("annual subscription billed monthly" bs)
The antitrust agencies in the United States (FTC and DOJ) do not proactively give approval for companies to merge. After official merger filings have been made (which they have not in this case), the FTC or DOJ have a process in which they gather evidence and determine whether they have grounds to challenge the proposed merger. [1]
Nah, they just have different rules for different huge tech companies.
FTC is blocking Meta’s acquisition of Within, the maker of a VR fitness app - an extremely niche product. Meanwhile Microsoft and Adobe seem confident that they can close on deals to buy Activision and Figma.
I'm betting they will leave it alone, at least for a while. I'm sure the C suite at adobe is not blind to their reputation and they know that if they start tacking on "Adobe" features to Figma, user growth will stall out.
Everyone is referencing the Macromedia purchase but I would argue that it was a very different kind of purchase. With that Adobe spent $3.4B acquiring them, in Figma's case they paid $20B. I could see how Adobe is willing to throw away $3.4B to kill their competition but I'm not sure they would be willing to do that to a $20B purchase.
If anything they keep is exactly the same, kill Adobe XD, and rename Figma to Adobe XD.
Big company executives do not see the world the way you do.
Creative Cloud alone has at least 5x the users of Figma. I have no idea how to even calculate all the users of all Adobe products. I guarantee that a lot of people at Adobe see Figma as just adorable, but not really, you know, a product. Some people at Adobe get it and are hoping to revolutionize their company with new blood, but… they probably won’t succeed.
At big companies that have captured a large portion of the market, they are usually not interested in “disrupting” themselves. Steve Jobs was a rarity. There are far more attainable revenue and careers to be made optimizing the existing revenue streams.
If killing Figma entirely made Creative Cloud revenue go up by a few percentage points that would be worth it for them. Even if the acquisition has negative value the people who pioneered it have more influence in their company, and an achievement that advances their career narrative.
They may tell themselves they’re going to integrate Figma, and some people are going to definitely try, but if that doesn’t work out that’s probably fine.
I'm an Adobe employee, and I think that this is most likely what will happen. I think maybe the transition to web-first wasn't going as planned. I think that Adobe's going to move their features into Figma (integration with creative cloud assets, easy importing/exporting to other programs, collaboration workflows) and close out XD.
