As a designer, it was amazing to how badly invision was unable to move beyond their original simple prototyping platform. They were way ahead of the curve when they began and simply never did anything useful beyond that.
What was even more wild was watching them clearly dump money into gimmicks and sales over their product. I worked at a large agency during invisions heyday and they were constantly pitching all levels of employees on whatever their new thing was, typically with sales people flying out for in person visits, buying whole office lunches, etc. I prob sat through a dozen pitches in a year where literally nothing about their product fundamentally improved or changed. People who had no idea what a design system was would pitch a half baked "design system manager" or similar, but were unable to really talk to any depth about design systems or answer questions about gaps in their product. It was very clear they would not succeed.
Invision actually tried building its own Sketch clone! It's hard to find much about it today, but Invision Studio was an attempt to move up the value chain and build the design app that feeds the Invision prototyping experience. It was extremely ambitious, and it fell absolutely flat.
Invision Studio came on the scene just as Figma was starting to eat Sketch's lunch, and lacking both Sketch's feature set and Figma's speed, it simply got caught in the crossfire. It must have been incredibly expensive to build, and its failure probably played a big part in locking Invision into its current path to eventually shutting down.
Invision Studio was competing against Sketch, Adobe XD, Gravit Designer and Lunacy all at the same time. Invision Studio didn't really differentiate itself and it was super crash prone to boot. Then Figma came and ate everyone's lunch.
Invision clearly didn't have the ambition or understanding of user needs as they simply kept copying others instead of innovating in the space. Invision had a big headstart on others but still fell flat.
A while ago (around 2014-2017), I used InVision plus Sketch daily and tried the InVision Studio beta.
Their prototyping product was limited and full of bugs, and in many senses, it was a regression compared to older prototyping tools. Based on that experience, I was highly skeptical about the ability to deliver for InVision Studio. The Studio beta was extremely slow and unstable. It was dead even before the rise of Figma.
The thing is Macaw was pretty amazing when it came out, but relaunching the same app (3?) years later, with a worse UI, and bad / forced integrations into the rest of the Invision stack – not good.
Framer was also in a similar situation, but they successfully pivoted into being a website builder, competing with Webflow now but in a much nicer interface, as well as inputting and outputting React code.
What was even more wild was watching them clearly dump money into gimmicks and sales over their product. I worked at a large agency during invisions heyday and they were constantly pitching all levels of employees on whatever their new thing was, typically with sales people flying out for in person visits, buying whole office lunches, etc. I prob sat through a dozen pitches in a year where literally nothing about their product fundamentally improved or changed. People who had no idea what a design system was would pitch a half baked "design system manager" or similar, but were unable to really talk to any depth about design systems or answer questions about gaps in their product. It was very clear they would not succeed.