Now Figma can become the de-facto choice for its software category and a merger was proved to be ultimately unnecessary for its survival and was a clear attempt at Adobe trying to buyout their competition because they can't seem to compete.
I think overall this is a good thing. Adobe owning Figma isn't a great promise that it would be make Figma better, improve Figma in any way, nor keep Figma on the path of making healthy improvements.
I can't blame anyone for seeing $20 Billion dollars upfront and taking the offer, but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? I don't know that I'll ever know the actual answer to this question, but this is a sign to me that no, it didn't, it is building a healthy business as a standalone product.
Now Figma can take the $1 billion USD breakup fee and do some amazing work on solidifying their position.
I do, as a sense of morbid curiosity, wonder if Adobe has had discussions in their boardroom about buying PenPot
>but did Figma even need to sell in the first place?
I've worked a company that was profitable, operated well, growing ... but were sold and the CEO said (I'll get the words not quite right):
"I fought for keeping independent and not selling, that's how I've kept that company and I wanted it to stay that way. But the offer was increased into the range where I didn't feel like I could survive a legal challenge (if it came to that) as far as my requirement to do what is best for the shareholders."
In the case of that CEO, I believed him (i'm not usually inclined to do so). I could be wrong, of course he made a lot of money, but this guy really did seem like he really did like building companies so to speak and that was more a motivation than anything else. But in his case I think he was right, he couldn't seriously argue that he could likely provide a return to investors even for a decade or more than they could get taking the offer right then and there.
It is a problem I always worry about, good businesses are there to return value to the stockholders, it makes sense. But in the face of gobs of cash they must fold.... and so often poorly managed after that and some things are lost. It's a black hole in the free market.
It is anecdotes like this that make me think that the public shareholder model is fundamentally flawed and a large part of why many American companies are struggling to truly build long term value, and many once great companies have been destroyed by beancounters to bleating calls of shareholder value.
Don't worry - the conversation in the anecdote does not reflect the true position in the major common law countries at least. The public shareholder model is not doomed or flawed on this account.
If an acquirer wants to acquire shares in a public company (or any company actually) it makes the offer to the shareholders and they are the ones who decide to accept or not. The proposed transaction is between the acquirer (who wants to buy the shares) and the current owner of those shares (the shareholder). The Board manages the company but is not itself an entity (it's a group of people) and cannot therefore own shares (tho individual directors can and usually do).
The Board can make a recommendation to its shareholders about whether it thinks the offer is fair or not (based on their usually greater knowledge of the company and its worth), but it is the shareholder who decides whether to accept.
The underlying suggestion that a Board or CEO is essentially forced to do something bad for the company because of some underlying obligation to make shareholders money etc etc is false. Directors owe fiduciary duties, but they are proscriptive, not prescriptive in this way. One of the most commonly repeated falsehoods is that the Board is under some duty to maximise profits etc - that is proved wrong not least by the existence of non-profits...
The closest analogy is someone owns and investment property being managed by a real estate agent. A buyer approaches and says "I will pay you $x for the land". The agent can say "Hey I rent this out all the time, it can earn $z over t years, so I think it's worth $x + y, or $x - y" but it's up to the owner to say yes or no.
The above ignores eg competition law issues (laws that prevent an acquirer buying companies where there is likely to be a substantial lessening of competition), potential conflicts for share-owning directors, and the myriad statutory considerations etc but is the basic underlying position.
I don't know how much of this is actually a problem with the shareholder model (though I hate it). From what I understand, the whole "legal obligation to shareholders" thing isn't actually a real thing.
What's more likely, I think, is that the CEO meant was that if he declined the offer, the board may fire him and replace him with someone who won't decline it. So if it's an eventuality either way, he may as well be the one to lead it.
Corporate boards do have quite a few legal obligations to their shareholders. The often-mistaken popular view is that companies are required to seek ever-increasing profit above all else.
While that isn't true, if a corporate board takes actions that are contrary to shareholder interest, they open themselves to liability. In the case the GP is talking about, where a buyout offer exceeded any amount of return that the company could possibly provide while remaining independent, shareholders would absolutely have a case if that acquisition offer had actually been turned down.
No it's not. I've been in discussions about it here and nobody could cite a law.
If one can't cite a specific US code, it's not a legal obligation. It could be in a charter or contract, but it's not US law. Feel free to correct me if you can cite one. I believe this is a good starting point: https://www.congress.gov/advanced-search/legislation
Fiduciary duty doesn't apply to most non-finance related companies. It's mostly something that investment firms are required to do. And you'll know if you become their client. If Google is doing that they definitely need broken up. It means they have a duty to use your money to make more for you, and not lose any if possible.
The US has a Common Law system so case law is as important as code (or even more so). The question isn't whether there's "a law", the question is whether there have been cases fought over it and what the outcome was. That seems harder to google.
Likewise I have yet to hear a coherent legal justification for the idea of the "state monopoly on violence" that doesn't boil down to a just-so story invoking the fiction of the social contract (even the US only grants a limited exemption to this via the second amendment and even that still uses the context of "militias"). But even in Civil Law systems that doesn't mean the state won't act as if it is a thing and base legislation on that assumption.
> public shareholder model is fundamentally flawed and a large part of why many American companies are struggling to truly build long term value
This doesn’t stand up to scrutiny (there are many publicly traded companies that build immense long term value, and there are multiple reasons why companies fail to produce long-term value).
It is easy to be a critic (and fine), but do you have an alternative to publicly traded companies that you think would , on balance, be better?
The long term value thing rings true. The CEO in question had been a part of building a large company and he always said his ambition was to create a company that was seen as an asset to have that country located in the US that would last for a long time. That sounds weirdly generic but I think he was honest in that. Could he? I duno, but he had helped grow it to thousands of employees and so on and they made some great products that were highly profitable.
But instead it was sold to a company who specialized in breaking up companies and selling them off for parts while squeezing out the last $ they could / maximizing income and discarding the resulting nothing.
I agree but I think the mistake is to think this only affects public companies. Private investors also want ROI and this means they'll be more likely to push for a profitable "exit" than let the company just be sustainable and reasonably profitable forever.
It’s really hard not to in many fields these days. Network effects/marketshare are the whole ball of wax. You can’t scale them down beyond a certain point without making them utteerly irrelevant.
You can have a viable speciality car manufacturer that employees a handful of people to build a couple of cars a year. There are tons of such shops building hot rods, doing EV conversions, building movie cars, and things like that.
You can’t build a viable commercial social media site that serves 50 users.
This is the outgrowth of a VC startup accelerator. "Startup" in these parts usually implies being VC funded, seeking VC funding or acting as if you were VC funded (i.e. growth focus rather than sustainability).
we don't need shareholder growth capitalism as it stands... we need sustainable capitalism that is in it for the long term. no clue how to achieve that as it stands though and ceos have short term goals/bonuses tied to short term profits.
Exactly. It used to be a perfectly respectable thing to have a factory that made decent widgets, provided a good life for the owners and employees, and made enough profit to gradually upgrade/squirrel away for a rainy day.
You could quite simply legislate permissible compensation structures to make sure that long-term sustainability (however you want to define that) is incentivized. I.e. mandate that above a certain threshold, c-suite and board compensation is tied to long-term performance of the company.
Another (perhaps more drastic) approach would be to force shareholders to hold their shares for a minimum period of time, or institute a mechanism that distributes losses across the shareholders of the last X years. That would incentivize long-term investment strategies over short-term rent-seeking.
Or you use taxes. In Germany (where I live) we have a speculation tax on property, for example: If you (as a private individual) sell a property less than 10 years after you have acquired it, any profit from that sale is taxed as income. After the 10-year cut-off you don't have to tax it at all.
> Another (perhaps more drastic) approach would be to force shareholders to hold their shares for a minimum period of time
The US tax code already does this by differentiating tax treatment between short- and long-term capital gains, although you might argue that the time required to qualify as long-term (1 year) is too short.
We should have capitalism but where humans and human interests come first and companies work to support a society where everyone is housed, fed, educated, and healthy. Also we shouldn't have a thousand companies all competing to do the same thing - people should work collaboratively instead of the same work getting done a thousand times over. Given the community focused nature of this system, maybe the name of it can reflect that.
It makes sense as things are right now. It's anchored by a bunch of court decisions that arguably subvert the public interest. Do I think Shareholder value should be all that drives corporations? No.
But I don't think corporations should be considered people, either.
In the US there’s another option: become a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). That’s what we (Answer.AI) did. It provides a great solution to exactly this problem: you don’t have to sell your company just because the financial offer is high; if it’s not going to help you achieve your stated public benefit then you can reject the offer.
There’s really no significant downside to becoming a PBC, AFAICT, and a lot of potential upside.
The fact your investors won't be able to exit as easily (or ever) is a significant downside if you're having any difficulty at all raising money. It's easier to found a charity than find philanthropists!
Who should decide that? The shareholder's could also fire directors who did not accept the best offer?
I am not familiar with the US decisions you refer to, BUT the same thing would happen in the UK, for example, where I would expect the other directors and the shareholders to ensure a really good offer was accepted.
Before the Friedman Doctrine[0] (that is, that a corporation's only responsibility was to its shareholders) was put forward in 1970, and generally accepted sometime around the '80s, it had been held for centuries[1] that shareholder-owned corporations also had responsibilities to society and the general public, as well as to their industry and their employees.
Yes, they had responsibilities to their shareholders, but those did not automatically override literally any other consideration.
[1] The Amsterdam Stock Exchange was founded for the trading of shares in the first real publicly-traded joint-stock company, the Dutch East India Company, in 1602. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euronext_Amsterdam
> it had been held for centuries[1] that shareholder-owned corporations also had responsibilities to society and the general public, as well as to their industry and their employees.
For centuries[0], governments were very limited, and other organized institutions of human life, like churches and businesses, held duties to the public at large.
Government spending as a percentage of GDP in the US, for example, remained in the single digits for most of its history[1] (outside of wartime), with a big bump post-WW2, then another big bump in the 70s with the Great Society programs, leading up to the current figure of a little over a third of the economy[2].
For an even longer view, government spending in the UK from the late 1600s and onward hovered around 10% with the same wartime jumps[3] for centuries, until the two world wars and the permanent expansion of the welfare state, hanging on around 45% now.
So, it's a very reasonable view to say that governments around the world started to take a much more sizable role in such "responsibilities" to society, and crowded out private efforts in those arenas. In effect, redistributive taxes are supposed to take place of those previously responsible.
[0]: Millennia, really; for most of civilized human existence.
Those aren't totally unreasonable points, but I feel like they're somewhat undercut by:
a) the people who advocate most strongly for the Friedman Doctrine (maximising shareholder value at all costs) also seem to be the people who most want to abolish (or prevent) government-provided safety nets, like state pensions, or universal healthcare, or public education, or UBI. It doesn't seem like it's a "Well, so long as we have these valuable strong public institutions, we might as well see how taking the reigns off private investment turns out" type situation, as much as it is a "I got mine, fuck you" libertarian class-warfare fantasy.
b) the idea that the public programs we have are expansive and comprehensive enough to have "crowded out private efforts in those areas" feels like a stretch to me.
Why not let them be what they are? The most base level definition, a corporation is simply A group of people authorized to act as a single entity and recognized as such in law.
Even if you take a slightly more expansive take on that, there is nothing that inherently means a corporation should exist to maximize profit. Its minimally viable definition is pretty well understood: A legal organization of people to act as a singular entity and are recognized as such under the law, typically formed as commercial entities to transact commerce on their behalf.
I don't think that misses anything.
Anything piled on top of that seems like something that should be specific from business to business. Thats my general issue with the US courts siding with maximize shareholder value to the point its now seen as a decree.
Especially when such rulings tend to trounce majority shareholders by minority ones.
The market should decide that. And somehow, “shareholders” (what a giant tent) are currently destroying corporations and thus markets in the chase of ever higher returns.
A good metaphor for a this as a whole is the Ultimate Ears Roll 2. For its time it was a really good Bluetooth speaker, punching far above its weight compared to competing Bluetooth speakers, but also within Ultimate Ears’ product line. There was almost no reason to go one or two product tiers higher.
In a healthy market, the other competitors would have stepped up, and Ultimate Ears would have improved their other products to create sufficient differentiation.
Instead, Ultimate Ears just discontinued the Roll 2 and replaced it with a relatively inferior product. In a rational market without shareholders this doesn’t make sense, but once you consider that the company isn’t optimizing for sales (good and/or cheap products) but for shareholder value, the picture fits.
The simple and unsatisfying answer is that the board is responsible for these decisions, and the board should be constituted in accordance with each company's articles.
My point is that there is nothing inevitable about the board representing the interests of shareholders alone. A typical company where the shareholders appoint most or all of the directors is not the only way to set up a board, and I'd argue that there are legitimate reasons to set up a company where other stakeholders (e.g. employees [1][2] or customers [3]) appoint directors.
Also, consider this: There is a risk/return continuum between bondholders and shareholders (through holders of various other convertible and preferred securities). It is always an arbitrary decision as to where to draw the line separating investors who get a say and those who don't.
So my view in all this is that as long as Figma’s board was appointed in accordance with its constitution, and the board members weren’t acting corruptly (e.g. bribery, conflicts of interest) or exceeding their authority under the company's constitution, shareholders should NOT get to challenge that board’s decisions. (IANAL; this is my view, not necessarily what the law says.)
p.s. A stock exchange may require that boards be primarily represent shareholders as a condition for listing; but this should not affect privately held companies.
I know many people who joined Figma specifically because of the promise and goal of a large buyout. Even if it isn't explicitly stated, in most circumstances people want to go public at the right price.
Those are the kinds of people you never want working for you. And, frankly, the kinds of people I hate working with. I get that for many people a job is just a job, but these sorts of people tend to be opportunists who are just there for the hope of a big payday, and will likely be a drag on you and your team while they're there.
Why else would I work for a for profit company other than because they have money and I have a skill that allows me to trade my labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter?
Also, all other things being equal, why wouldn’t I trade my labor for the most money possible?
That is as long as it doesn’t require working for Amazon (been there done that) or Facebook (I don’t hate myself that much).
Its depressing how basically every tech company (except like... craigslist) is a Delaware C Corp with investors and a cap table... all these naive 20 year old technical founders getting screwed over right at the beginning when they cash that investor check.
Work for FAANG for a few years, stack $500k, and bootstrap to profitability. That's the only good path
My current employer and my last were both 25+ year-old quietly successful private tech companies. In both cases there was a strong commitment to product quality in order to maintain our reputation and long-term customer relationships whereas the public companies I worked at were focused on chasing the next quarter to satisfy "the shareholders".
Every once in a while I'm tempted to work for a public company again since I might be able to earn slightly more, but after working for adults for so long it'd be hard to go back to a place where my responsibilities to users and shareholders are misaligned.
Out of all the major tech companies - Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Tesla, Nvidia, etc. can you honestly say any of them are short term focused.
Well it would be a stretch to say that Google has any focus.
Yes. Many of those companies have made choices that trade reputation and/or relationships built up over years to increase a quarterly profit margin.
Whether that is sacrificing product quality, sunsetting well-loved products/services only to spin up similar efforts in the future, treating long-term employees poorly, burning through developer goodwill through high fees or API churn, etc.
When I think about the value of long timeframes I don't just mean having a good R&D dept or throwing money at moonshots, I mean building up and maintaining goodwill with employees, customers, users, partners, developers, and regulators.
Of course many private companies are run by profit-maximizing jerks and some public companies have patient shareholders who trust the company's management. But in general I have had better experiences working for an engaged owner who I can meet face-to-face over working for a crowd of shareholders and venture capitalists for whom the company is just another financial instrument in their portfolio.
- Apple is over 45 years old and is still creating new market defining products
- Microsoft has been around for 45+ years and didn’t stay one of the most valuable companies for 25 years by not thinking long term
- Amazon Retail is a nothing burger as far as profitability . The future is AWS. (Former AWS employee. I have no love for the company). They have also invested in the long term and still people overwhelmingly shop at Amazon.
- Google has always been a rudderless shit show led by executives with the attention span of a crack addled flea
- Tesla - I hate to admit it. But they built one of the few hardware based tech startups and you don’t become Tesla with a short term focus.
Consumers love Apple and Amazon and Microsoft’s true customers - OEMs - have had a good relationship with MS post the DOJ lawsuit it seems.
Shareholders seem to trust the management of those companies as they have pivoted
I agree that public companies can be successful, have long-term plans, or satisfy stakeholders so evidence of success or longevity or happy customers is not a counterargument.
But think of recent decisions that Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, or Tesla have made recently. Are they generally made with the best interests of employees, customers, users, partners, developers, and regulators in mind? Or do they only satisfy those other constituencies insofar as doing so increases profits for shareholders?
Ultimately the trust and goodwill they build up is just another asset to leverage to make more money for shareholders. If tomorrow they run the numbers and conclude that the most profitable course of action is to spend down some of that goodwill and screw over employees, customers, users, partners, developers, and/or regulators in exchange for slightly higher profits then they will do that.
Yeah but it takes quite a success story in IT to have a breakthrough product and not yield under all the millions thrown at you, especially when you know that 'competitors' might try to break your legs all the way if you decide to stay in the race.
It gets tough as the numbers start to get unreal fast. Patagonia and any physical product oriented business has a curve to ride, they grow in percentage not N fold. Someone registers a company and develops new technology, if he has the edge the company worth will skyrocket over night.
Is this a baked-in legal distinction between public and private businesses, or is it that the company is supposed to do what the shareholders want and the shareholders of a private business are more likely than those of a public business to want something beyond ROI?
I think very often with private companies it is not just looking beyond ROI (they may do) but they also look longer term.
A shareholder whose children will inherit the business one day will have a very different outlook to one who is looking at their annual performance numbers, which is the sort thing institutional shareholders are looking at.
Sadly, nowadays the shareholder will sell the shares and buy properties to pass on to children. Land owner is fast becoming the only profession with inter generational prospects. That's why a property crash is the only hope for a return to a normal economy (where people run businesses, develop skills, do actual work)
> That's why a property crash is the only hope for a return to a normal economy (where people run businesses, develop skills, do actual work)
Well, let's not actively hope for a crash. Lots of normal people who run businesses, develop skills, and do actual work suffered greatly during the last property bubble of the GFC[0].
For what it's worth, outside of the major metropolises where a combination of supply restrictions (principally via zoning) and overwhelming demand (stoked by natural and economic advantages as well as policy that induces home purchases), people running businesses, developing skills, and doing actual work are able to afford to buy land and homes. My barber, for example, with no college degree and no inheritance, lives on 10 acres. The catch? It's in an area not fancied by urbane types, and his house on that land is a mobile home, though he is saving up to build a "real" one[1].
[0]: And with this, it's interesting to study the effect that government policy had on pushing loans to people who had no hope of repaying them.
[1]: In many areas, building codes and zoning place a floor on the minimum price of a house, and it can be argued that this floor is too high.
Not that I disagree, but in my experience the enshittification, or at least a lot of prominent examples are often services that never made money and now have to and ... yeah they can't so it goes bad.
The whole cycle of "free brings in users (and we users LOVE that) --> users bring in investors --> later you have to make money --> change the service to make money and now nobody is happy" is a whole other issue.
1. The current economic situation is causing a lot of investors to tighten screws and demand profitability where they had previously been fine with just seeking growth because it becomes clearer that fewer investors are willing to participate in the next round of hot potato in the hopes of catching a unicorn.
2. Investors generally seek growth and at some point you've hit the physical limits by having caught nearly every customer you can and the only way to drive up those numbers is by upselling to the same people which often means kneecapping user experience to help upselling on the cure (e.g. Amazon Prime Video "channels" as extra subscriptions on top of the Prime Video ad-free subscription on top of the buy/rent for individual movies and shows on top of the Amazon Prime subscription that also includes access to Prime Video itself).
With streaming services specifically there's also the effect where Netflix itself ended up figuring out its niche's business model only to have every IP owning distribution studio try to copy it and become its competition, removing their IP from it (and any additional IP they can get exclusive licenses for) and locking it behind their own subscription model to cut out the middleman even if for the customer this means having to sign up to at least five different platforms if you want to watch every episode of the Pokemon animated series (for some reason). This is obviously enshittification for the customer and would still be so even if the individual streaming services all used the same exact pricing and business model as Netflix did a few years ago (before the price hikes, ads and measures against account sharing) - although it could be described as a monopoly being replaced by a market (which we're normally told should be a good thing).
That fiduciary duty needs to die/ be reimagined. It's turned corporations into one dimensional money makers. Profit at any cost. You should make money in order to achieve your goals, not just to set the high score for making money.
It's way too easy for hostile shareholders to force companies to do things that the workers, even CEO level workers, don't want to do.
If it were "illegal", the State would be actively prosecuting any executive not making money. That's obviously absurd.
Not maximizing shareholder value (which in itself doesn't necessarily mean profit, btw) is, at best, a breach of contract, a civil matter between private parties. Losing a civil trial doesn't mean having done something illegal.
You know how people say things like "I wish the fundamentals of coding/math/financial accounting/music/whatever were actually taught in school, everyone should know them"? I wish people also got a basic understanding of legal terms.
For-profits must act in the shareholders' best interests. Shareholders want profit, but they also care about other things. Matt Levine has been banging this drum of late in his column. To paraphrase:
Shareholders are people who breathe air. A car company could oppose particulate emissions regulations to maximize profits for shareholders. But if they supported regulations instead, this is equally justifiable to any court in the land, even though it reduces profits. Cleaner air to breathe is very obviously in their shareholders' best interests.
If there's a single shareholder that wants profit instead of clean air from their share, they have grounds to sue (and win). LLCs aren't dictatorships of the majority, and definitely not of the CEO.
Minority shareholders who want clean air instead of more profit can also sue and win. Courts don't interpret fiduciary duty as literally profit; this is a common misconception. Management has to show they are acting in their their shareholders' reasonable best interests. In my made up example, clean air and profit are both in shareholders' best interests, and no reasonable court will rule against the company for going with either option.
Profit is an easy, objective metric. Optimizing it enriches the management personally because they're paid in stock. Most people, thanks to generations of propaganda, have come to believe they're legally required to optimize solely for profit. Consequently there is little risk in doing that instead of something else.
However, the stockholders could make a civil case that, as majority owners,they wanted to go that way, and with high enough offer and social perception that CEO must work to do so, they could make it a very bad time in courts - or possibly just replace the CEO with someone willing to burn the ckmpany for their profits.
> I can't blame anyone for seeing $20 Billion dollars upfront and taking the offer, but did Figma even need to sell in the first place?
It's a great question from a P&L standpoint, but like you said: the board of the company represents the shareholders, and it's likely that $20 billion was a number _far_ above what they viewed the company's value - therefore accepting that type of deal would've made 100% sense to maximize return for those investors.
Note that many employees are also shareholders, and therefore would've banked quite a bit of $ if this went through.
I think the better questions are: did Adobe _need_ Figma? (We'll see...) and why did Adobe overpay by so much?
EDIT: after some quick searching, estimates place the value of Figma at $8-9 billion...making the offer of $20B virtually impossible to reject.
> I think the better questions are: did Adobe _need_ Figma? (We'll see...) and why did Adobe overpay by so much?
Because Figma would have undoubtedly rejected at or near market rates. And regulators were already iffy. Being overly generous, if it still will pay off for you in the end, is a good way to grease a lot of wheels.
The best analogy is the person who offers to pay 25k over asking (in a market where that is abnormal) on a house they definitely want to bypass the whole secondary negotiation process.
IPO is another way to return to shareholders though, as is making a profit and paying a percentage of those profits via dividends to shareholders, which any private company can do, or using those profits to do share buybacks.
There's any number of ways to benefit the shareholders.
Its not anything you said per se, I'm simply annoyed at the legal maxim that we must maximize shareholder value whenever presented to do so, as long as its not an illegal activity.
If you give me the option to more than double my money now versus get dividends over the next few years, I'm taking the money now. The goal of most businesses is to make money. Building with a focus on longevity is just one of many ways to achieve that goal.
That sounds a little like the delayed-gratification experiments where they tell children they can have a single candy bar now, but if they wait a half hour, they can have two.
In general I would take the dividend, if the expected value over that time was greater than the immediate lump sum, plus what I might get for investing that lump sum in something over those few years.
And in reality it's usually not over just a few years; the dividend is long-term. I'd much rather build something valuable and get steady income from it than build something to flip.
Now if the risk of no dividend payout is high enough, I'll take that lump sum. But I feel like those sorts of deals -- huge money now, or very risky, uncertain money over a number of years -- just aren't really a thing that often.
> but did Figma even need to sell in the first place?
It’s pretty clear Figma in 5-10 years could make photo and video editing products that outperform Adobe and Adobe can’t even make one web product as good as Fireworks was that they killed so yeah no Figma has no need for Adobe.
Figma has an outstanding engineering team you can tell just by using the app, Adobes dev team it’s questionable how much of Photoshop and AE they even understand how it works as they so rarely try and fix any of it and when they do they tend to break something.
Kinda feel the Photoshop and AE codebases are probably like an ancient untranslated artifact to their current dev team.
I still use Photoshop because I know how to do a lot of things with it but I'd really like to have a similar app which is designed entirely around linear light. (It's not like the 1990s when I was always editing indexed color images) They are still keeping it relevant because of the generative AI features which I often use to touch up photos (remove a spot of grout from a brick wall, then add a row of bricks to center the pictures)
(where I touched up the bricks) and have 99% control of printing photographic and non-photographic images (more than I can say for Lightroom) although I recently improved my workflow and now I have 100% control (specifically of margins) of printing the back side of my cards
using a Python script and Epson's printing software.
I used to think the neural noise reduction in Lightroom was pretty hot but when I was having trouble w/ shooting indoors Volleyball other photogs told me to try DxO and it was like getting a whole new camera.
I like Premier and hypothetically I might want to make and edit a video but it never happens, so I suspect one of these days I am going to give up on Creative Cloud.
This is a practical answer to the problems of 8-bit technology where you would have terrible posterization in some values and also wasted bits in other values if you used linear light. sRGB is reflective of how the human eye works but not the physics of light. If you want to, say, average or subtract two images or rescale an image you should do it in linear light.
The right thing to do is to do transformations with linear light with at least 16 bit depth but output whatever color space the display expects. Most people (like the creators of Photoshop) do calculations that would be correct in linear light in sRGB and are oblivious to the results being wrong. It drives me nuts because my photog friends think I am nuts to write my own (correct) Python code with Pillow meantime they process everything with tools like
> but did Figma even need to sell in the first place?
My two cents would be no considering they already surpassed and put both Sketch and InVision out of business. They were predictably emboldened to think if they were able to beat out two other competitors, and more and more enterprise companies are moving to their product, taking on Adobe or even sharing the lions share of the market with them wouldn't be that bad.
The fact the only remaining real competitor went all in and attempted to buy them was a clear signal Adobe saw them as a threat and were willing to clear out their bank vault to acquire them. Figma rightly played their hand perfectly and not only shut down the offer, but now have a clear path to being the sole software provider in a rapidly dwindling market.
My anecdotal evidence would be if you go on LinkedIn or any other job board and start looking at the job descriptions for UI/UX designers, none of them list Sketch, InVision or Adobe XD. Its 100% Figma now. At my current company, everything has been moved to Figma and we've even had several enterprise tools that we're using that integrate with Figma.
Of course it was. ImageReady was lean, fast and web-focused. When they killed it you had to buy a PS license and deal with the monolith PS was becoming.
If you're making web pages, you don't need CMYK workflows.
> ImageReady was lean, fast and web-focused. When they killed it you had to buy a PS license and deal with the monolith PS was becoming.
To my knowledge, ImageReady 1.0 was the only version sold standalone - and that was back in 1998; the very next version (in 1999) was sold in-box with Photoshop 5.5 - but the separate ImageReady.exe program was around until 2005 - whereas the way your post is worded implies Adobe were being more customer-hostile than they usually are (hah).
I see your point about not needing the weight of Photoshop's print-and-photo tools when web-design folks back then were just wanting a flexible raster image editor - but my recollection of the web-design scene back then was that most web-designers tended to already have a background in print design work (e.g. think about all the print-shops who expanded into website-design in the late-1990s) - so it makes a lot of sense for Adobe to extend their tooling to support the web and "new media" as we called it - rather than create a new tool which would operate on a completely different, "web-first", domain-model (of course, that's exactly what Macromedia did, and they rightfully have their fans for that).
For a company like Figma, the shareholders often include many/all of the employees. Choosing not to take a deal that could net staff retirement money (or realistically in SF: "homeownership money") can also be a bad choice for morale.
Consider that many of the employees will have joined the risky startup instead of taking a larger cash compensation at a company like Adobe; helping them get liquid is part of the bargain.
This all assumes the company won't go public, the traditional path for companies to generate liquidity and raise capital while remaining independent. For whatever reason, companies like Figma are waiting much longer than historically to go public. HubSpot serves a similar market and went public in 2014 with a valuation near $1B, in a normal IPO with top-tier bankers. It's not a prerequisite for companies to wait until they are $10B-$100B to go public.
Adobe could have thrown $40B at it and never made a product to rival Figma because it would have been riddled with Adobe Updater, Adobe Service Manager, Adobe SwitchBoard, AdobeARMservice and all the other crap they force on their users, and nobody would bother. They get away with this kind of user hostility for software they're entrenched in, they'd never get away with it if they were trying to challenge something that's better and doesn't hate its users as much.
Yeah I hear what you are saying about services bloat, but the timing of today's XD discontinuance leaves me scratching my head. If this providing a web design / prototyping service was so valuable to Adobe subscribers that Adobe were willing to pay 20 billion for it, surely it must still be worth something to Adobe to prevent subscriber churn today. I don't get why Adobe would abandon a foothold in this corner of design, offering a good enough service is still compelling when bundled when all their other products.
Three explanations I can come up with are: 1. Maybe XD was a huge cash hole / or massively underperformed in some other metrics, 2. If Adobe cant dominate a market they take their ball and go home, or 3. Maybe more charitably, Adobe bigwigs still like Figma and have some sort of personal incentives to walk off the pitch and offer their competitor a massive open goal.
You just have cause and effect the wrong way around, IMHO. Adobe might have tried to buy Figma precisely because they already knew XD was a dead duck. Announcing it before acquisition talks, however, would have strengthened Figma's hand; so they waited and pulled the plug only after that situation was resolved.
Timing wise, maybe they had long since decided they have no path to winning with XD, but were holding off on pulling the trigger until they had Figma in their stable.
I can’t guess what their reasons were but I have worked in and near teams that have given up on being competitive with their rivals (but “it’s part of a winning bundle”). It was extremely rough on morale for those teams and everything those teams touched.
Was this the plan all along? 1B for all that due diligence information seems cheap, i imagine there are a couple of teams rushing to implement at Adobe right now.
This article is about Adobe getting out of this business. I'd think if they were "rushing to implement" they'd keep the existing product around and either integrate things into it or wait to kill it until they have a replacement. Also, while it's not perfect, there tends to be a fair amount of firewalling around that sort of due diligence to keep an acquirer from just ripping everything off with inside information gained in the process.
> This article is about Adobe getting out of this business.
That's an enormous leap from, "We have no plans to further invest in it". It's more likely that they're going to create a new, Sensei-based solution in this category instead of creating yet another Figma-/Sketch-type solution.
Yeah that's actually how I read it too, like they found out XD couldn't be savaged after peeking on Figma's internals, and is cheaper/better roi forthem to can that shit and just start from scratch for a collaborative real time environment like figma is build.
expecting figma's adobe clone in anything like 6-24 months out
Well it is obviously a bad thing, and goes to the heart of antitrust. US regulators understood this clearly all the way up until Reagan, and his DOJ instituted a paradigm shift that let companies get away with obliterating their competition through acquisitions - instead of assessing whether companies could compete in a healthy market, the focus became solely the impact on consumers. That’s why, under this new-ish paradigm, Amazon is fine, because prices are kept low through monopolistic and monopsonistic effects. The EU has a better enforcement paradigm that says a healthy economy can only exist where new market entrants can also earn a living, even if it means consumer prices aren’t the lowest they could possibly be.
It would have been a bad thing for consumers, which is why it's good that it was blocked by regulators. I don't believe it's always the case that an acquisition of a competitor by a large company is a bad thing, but it would have been in this one for sure.
The only problem is that it ruined my optimism about Figma's leadership and direction without actually changing the status quo at all.
A lot of founders see it as a good thing -- not everyone wants to stay in the game. Some want a big liquidity event after 10 years of grind and a sale to a large competing company typically yields the biggest windfall.
It might just be me but I don't think we should structure the economy around how easily founders can sell their business to escape to the next one. All that has done is make mega corps bigger and killed competition.
It's a bad thing if their intention is to buy out the competition, learn nothing from them, shut it down, and continue being something people use for lack of options, not because it's good.
Killing Adobe XD because they couldn't buy Figma for $20 billion means to me that they would never have been a good owner for Figma. XD may have not had as many features as Figma, but it was still a decent program and could have been a very good competitor to Figma for far less than the cost of buying out that company. The buy-in of Adobe's subscription model was a compelling reason for my employers to provide only XD to me for my work.
This isn't the first time Adobe has taken a decent app w/ potential and run it into the ground:
Dreamweaver did many things, not all of them well, but it was never actively terrible. Over time, its functionality got split out into more apps that didn't actually require people to write web code - a disappointment that shouldn't surprise as Adobe's heart was still w/ print production and never really committed to the development side of things.
I would have expected that after Flash went EOL that more resources would go to the editor, but they just mined it out before going subscription, a dealbreaker that made me seek out Panic's Coda and (later) BBEdit.
I know it still exists in Creative Cloud, but unless you are deep in the Adobe ecosystem, there are better options available.
I want to believe in Dreamweaver but when I try it "just doesn't work" or it does work with a 5 second delay for the screen to update when I type. Webstorm doesn't promise as much but at least I can get stuff done with it.
> Adobe just didn't manage the pivot to web design very well.
I'd argue they didn't manage it at all. Almost all of the web focused apps that people think of were acquired as opposed to being developed in-house. Adobe (correctly) recognized that the web was becoming more important and they could play in that space, but the mindset for what these apps were designed to address missed the mark.
A web-focused IDE as opposed to a designer's tool that writes things for you are vastly different in terms of what these apps do and how they work.
Oh so true. Adobe also had a product that is the same concept as Webflow, called InFlow (if I am not mistaken), and killed it, before Webflow existed. Some of its employe went to work for Webflow.
Staff likely fled teams working on XD as soon as the news surfaced around the acquisition. They probably have no one left who can move quickly with the product or the code base to catch up now.
Even if they didn't make business changes in anticipation of this...
Imagine you're one of the top employees working on a product, and that your company announces it's going to acquire a competitive product to yours for $20B and replace your product with that product, and this is looming for 15 months.
Are you still employed there in that group? Are you still an effective employee? How's morale?
YouTube was bought mainly because Google Video was failing as a platform. About the only thing it ever offered over YouTube were longform lectures and presentations. Combining the two platforms (e.g. allowing longer videos but using YouTube's social interface) just made YouTube better.
I was a bit bummed when Google Video was shuttered. In some ways its simple to-the-point UX was nice compared to that of YouTube, which had become cluttered pretty early on. It was also sometimes a backup for when videos on YouTube got taken down.
Yes, modern YouTube's infrastructure inherits more from Google Video than classic YouTube, but the frontend descends from YouTube's (albeit, completely Ship of Theseus'd at this point).
"The buy-in of Adobe's subscription model was a compelling reason for my employers to provide only XD to me for my work."
Yep, Adobe XD was at least something I could use when in a giant 'enterprise' company that already partnered with Adobe on subscriptions and didn't like using any other companies for creative products.
I'm really disappointed for two reasons. First the existence of XD as a competitor kept Figma innovating and the price in check. Now, ironically Figma is the monopoly here!
Second I have a creative cloud subscription and XD was good enough for me. Now I have to purchase Figma separately and also pay for Adobe CC because I still need the other software. So much for preserving consumer choice.
I wish Adobe InDesign had more competition for desktop/print publishing as well. Affinity Designer/Publisher seems a popular alternative for Windows and Mac for a one-off cost.
Scribus is open source and runs on Linux but I found it hard to use and slow on a modest document. Does anyone know of other good options on Linux? I've seen some posts about Affinity running unofficially in Wine but it seems a risky choice. There's LaTeX but that's not for everyone.
Figma isn't open source but at least you can use the web client on Linux. I'm curious if Figma will even get into print design also, as it doesn't seem like they'd need to add that much to support the basics (like CMYK color model and exports for different printer color profiles).
Unfortunately, Figma, Adobe and everyone else have the broken incentives to make money by locking teams into expensive subscriptions via closed file formats and a family of products that don't play nice with products from other companies. I recall that Sketch had a documented file format, which Figma used so you could import your Sketch files into Figma to escape Sketch but you can't go the other way.
I'm not going be surprised when Figma gets less generous with their free plan in the future now that they have such a strong network effect.
The problem with InDesign is that publishing industry is too small. Most people don't know InDesign but its used to produce practically every single print, book, label, poster ever. Yet it is too small for any company to care about to create competition (except Affinity).
Funny thing is InDesign by itself already had most of what you need for digital design tool like Figma (and more). At some point (when InDesign still used to get some new features) responsive ebooks/pdfs were all the rage and InDesign even has "responsive" modes (something Figma doesnt). They wouldn't be able to make it multiplayer but with quite minor tweaks and better positioning InDesign could have been the tool for UI design.
Who knows maybe it means Affinity is well positioned to make UI design tool. I know that many designers are starting too see local only software as advantage because their work can't be stolen by upcoming Figma AI designer.
> Yet it is too small for any company to care about to create competition (except Affinity).
I'm curious about their business model for this. When the Affinity suite is ~$170 one-off cost, I wonder how many they have to sell each year to keep going and how big the market is. If someone is using this software every day as their main way to make money, that's incredibly cheap as well but could they charge more? People hate subscriptions, but paying $100s upfront when it's actually worth it given how much it earns you is unpalatable as well.
I'm curious if there's any other approaching to charging. Not suggesting this would work here but for example game engines take a % of the sales generated so you only get charged when you start making money, which avoids upfront costs and subscriptions while you're getting started.
The way to do this is clear? If you release new version for 170usd every 18 months it's about 10usd/m subscription - so you are 6times cheaper?.
The funny thing is that i think the pro market doesn't trust them because of the low price. It's possible Affinity found so much friction with pro market which doesn't want to change their processes that they figured out they have to go after the prosumer/hobby market.
But as tools Affinity is not some kind of budget tool. The software is in many ways a lot better and doesn't have baggage ancient Adobe stuff has. The only thing they are missing for pro market is scripting/plugins. I think if they did that this would allow third parties to fill in lots of the functionality they don't have (same what InDesign and After Effects does). That could really really start to bite. The way i see it Affinity is one major update away from starting to eat away masses of Adobe customers. Everybody has been pissed at Adobe for years and once few bigger names start to do it because of costs it will fuel the confidence of everyone.
> If you release new version for 170usd every 18 months it's about 10usd/m subscription - so you are 6times cheaper?.
This would put them under immense pressure to come up with new features (useful or not) to get people to upgrade. At some point for certain users, the current version is going to cover 90% of what they need and they won't see the point in upgrading.
I didn't look into it much, but Sketch moved from a one-off payment for the current version plus 1 year of updates, to subscription-based charging. I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason was most didn't need the latest features.
Aside from this, has any software ever done something like "$170 upfront, or $20/month for 12 months only, then you own this major version"? I'm aware of Adobe's approach where if you cancel the monthly plan they'll surprisingly charge you the rest of the payments to make up 12 months, but you don't own anything after.
Sketch still has 120usd desktop version. Their solution was to add server/collaboration element that is subscription based.
> This would put them under immense pressure to come up with new features (useful or not) to get people to upgrade. At some point for certain users, the current version is going to cover 90% of what they need and they won't see the point in upgrading.
Isn't this backwards? If you don't have anything to add to the software why should you charge for it? The thing with Adobe there is no shortage of enhancements/features people wanted. It's not lack of imagination. Adobe just realized they don't need to do much so why would you pay programmers if you have no competition and very little churn? Especially since what everyone wanted was stability, bugfixes, performance and hard stuff like versioning systems. How are you going to market that your software crashes 20% less?
Also if anything software/hardware compatibility is always going to be reason for upgrading.
> If you don't have anything to add to the software why should you charge for it?
That's fair, but then ~$150 is too cheap for a lifetime license for a major version of software if you're using that professionally for 5 years to generate $10,000s. Asking someone to pay a higher amount upfront is difficult though.
> Also if anything software/hardware compatibility is always going to be reason for upgrading.
This is also one of the reasons that developers don't want to offer lifetime licenses as you need to keep software updated for security and compatibility as APIs, OSs, drivers, browsers etc. evolve over the years and to provide ongoing support to existing users.
By the way, I'm not saying I like subscriptions or paying a lot upfront, but the alternatives have downsides to the software makers as well. I really don't know what a good compromise is.
I agree that 150usd might be too cheap for pro market but like i mentioned maybe they found out they need to first go for amateurs. Who knows maybe they will make it more expensive in future or offer some kind of pro option.
I also have to mention maybe your expectations are a bit skewed? Software dev got cheaper and not everything has to be breakneck hype venture capital squeeze. There is type design software Glyphs (https://glyphsapp.com/) used by basically every typedesigner now. It costs 300usd and it is very complex. But they seem to be doing OK. Its so niche compared to Affinity that there is maybe 5% of potential customers?
Both Affinity and Glyphs are small private companies from europe where devs cost less. Maybe they are fine with smaller teams, slower pace and just OK profits.
Thanks, interesting data point! For what it's worth, I'm interested in selling products myself where "smaller teams, slower pace and just OK profits" sounds great to me, so I'm very curious how to price products for niche markets. It's also frustrating how Adobe lock-in and similar can block you from creating and selling certain design products.
It is hard to believe that a company with the expertise of Adobe in graphics programming (Photoshop, Premier, After Effects, Illustrator) cannot build a vector design program.
Adobe XD was almost there, and they made some great decisions in nooks and crannies usually forgotten - like bringing in Chrome rendering engineers to build a subset of HTML and CSS for the plugin ecosystem.
While there are hundreds of little decisions to be made - from the runtime, text rendering, gpu vs cpu rendering, to how shadows are rendered and line heights are determined - none of these are engineering problems beyond the ken of a good team of systems and graphics engineers and designers, the likes of which Adobe has in spades.
The attempt to acquire Figma for such an enormous sum itself felt like a serious decision making mistake, and the final nail in the coffin is the complete abandonment of vector design tools.
I would pay good money to read the insider account of the corporate politics inside Adobe that led to all this.
It is hard to believe that a company with the expertise of Adobe in graphics programming (Photoshop, Premier, After Effects, Illustrator) cannot build a vector design program.
Not for the workers using those tools. Adobe has been coasting for a decade if not more. Probably difficult to see from the outside if you're not directly using it daily.
Moving to a subscription model is largely a symptom of that coasting. They couldn’t consistently come up with compelling reasons to upgrade to new versions of Creative Suite, with users being perfectly happy to run what they had for as many years as possible.
They were always going to hit a ceiling on interesting features to implement, but they could’ve sold new CS versions on improvements in stability, performance, responsiveness, and efficiency (things that users care quite a lot about), but that kind of engineering work doesn’t work well with the cheaper model of continuously adding to the ball of mud.
There is another element at play: modern software product management. I think revenues at the main driver, but behind that is the modern PM philosophy of hypothesis-driven development. In my experience, the average outcome is incrementalism in the extreme.
PMs break every feature down as an experiment to try and measure the value. It often misses consideration of the whole product. Everyone is scared of taking a big bet because it's harder to measure and too risky because all of these small bets are seemingly safer.
What I'd argue for is better product leadership that recognizes these new modes of development are just a tool. However, many product teams have become cults of experimentation and I expect this is the case at Adobe. It pays off as long as people are renewing, but the product suffers.
With the software professional industries really care about (like InDesign) instead of messing with it they instead took approach of never changing it to not upset anyone. And instead of paying 1200usd one time people accepted paying 60usd month rent. I know places that still use CS6 and InDesign CS6 vs the current one is almost indistinguishable software. There are maybe 5 minor new features that anybody cares about in the current one. It's insane that in those 10 years somebody payed adobe over 7k. Users should revolt.
I still don't understand (as a DAW author) how there are so many more people doing various graphics tasks on computers, and relatively speaking so few significant apps to do them with, whereas there so many fewer people doing stuff with audio and more than a dozen serious contenders for the toolbox.
I think the lock in with audio is significantly lower than with graphical applications.
You can even tell this by the fact that there is a universe of plug-ins that work across many DAWs due to having somewhat standard interfaces.
The culture of audio creation before computers was already that you connected many devices from different manufacturers together for different specialised tasks. I mean even the term “plug-in” comes from the audio world as far as I can tell.
Reasonably true, except that in reality people move between DAWs rather rarely. The real world lock-in is quite high, even if the theoretical lock-in is lower.
I think some of the lock in is because MIDI (1.0, at least) just isn't good enough. I have an Ableton Push (Obviously locked to Ableton ... (mostly, there is 3rd party BitWig support)), Osmose (weird MPE+ standard), and a lot of pedals and effects which have their own, sort crappy apps for controlling them. (TC Plethora x3, Blackstar Dual Distortion, TD-3, etc.). Sys-ex is so strange to use that nobody want's to deal with it either.
The other half is because pretty much every DAW has some non-standard plugin/scripting system: Ableton with Max, Reaper with rJS, Bitwig with The Grid, etc. If I moved away from Ableton, I'd lose my M4L plugins/patches.
Standards for opening projcets cross Daws will help, I think, but the biggest 2 things that will motivate change is MIDI 1.0's slow death so that more is possible without strange, custom systems and CLAP, again for more-or-less the same reasons.
Push is not locked to Live at all. I wrote the support for it for Ardour.
Osmose uses MPE, just like other MPE devices, and it's not weird, its actually quite elegant.
Sysex was always meant to support device specific control, so of course it's "strange". And almost every bit of MIDI software "deals with" sysex in some way.
"Pretty much every DAW has some non-standard plugin/scripting system" - there is no "standard" scripting system, and in fact most DAWs have no scripting facilities at all.
CLAP offers nothing that existing plugin APIs do not, except for modulation ala Bitwig, and since no other DAW so far can do modulation like Bitwig, the value proposition here is low (not zero, but low).
The graphic/video industry has this idea of pipeline where multiple software are used to produce something. So if tomorrow I create say a Photoshop competitor, well, professionals using Photoshop as part of their pipeline will not even bother checking my product if it doesn't integrate with say illustrator, after effects, premiere, in design... in the sense that they should be able import the dot AI in my software for a project, and if the dot AI file changes, it should also change inside my software automatically.
Adobe and their software basically dominate the graphic design pipeline, and you bet that the format they use aren't all documented.
DAW work differently. First every software is expected to have a level of support for plugins off various formats (vst, au, clap...), MIDI, and of course audio is audio. There is also an effort to create an DAW interexchange format. So this is somehow a much much more collaborative community. So there is less vendor lock-in...
Finally, each DAW is different enough that there are not really in competition with one another. Been using Logic since 1998, nothing beats it at what it does well, but I'm willing to check alternatives ;)
Audio ultimately leads to a 1D data track. Ways to play that track is comparatively well understood, and well abstracted from the workload itself. We've been using 3.5mm jack at scale since the original Walkman, for example. That's 1979.
Graphics on the other hand constantly changes. Apple II around the same timeframe had 280×192 resolution -not even 4:3 aspect ratio- and 16 color that only existed because of a hack in the NTSC spec. Now we have dozen different common aspect ratios, 2 common sizes that we have to support (mobile and monitor), dozens of different resolutions, running on thousands of different hardware, that are near impossible to test the combination of their configurations, let alone the variety of behavior that comes from their software - the list is just endless.
Audio is played by speakers, there isn't much variance. Graphics on the other hand changes constantly, and most of those changes result in throwing out a lot of software. The situation is so incredibly bad that most cross platform products threw the towel and resorted to using perhaps the second most complicated software humanity ever devised - the browser - instead of trying to get a window and a button to work on 2 different operating systems.
Do people here really not know anything about surround sound, and multichannel sound in general? Apple's new surround support? Gaming use of Ambisonics? Film scoring? Do they really not understand how you need to mix differently for phone playback, car playback and "stereo system" playback (or at least pick one because that's the best you can do) ?
I thought it would be easy to understand the difference between x channels that play 1D data (that remained unchanged for half a century almost) and going from 50 thousand pixels to 15 million, with dozens of different sizes and aspect ratios would be readily apparent. Alas, I was mistaken.
I don't pretend to know much, if anything, about the intricacies of video and graphics programming. It would be nice if people who think that audio is "x channels that play 1D data (that remained unchanged for half a century almost)" could return the same courtesy towards audio.
5.1 surround was invented in 1987. Sound mixing as we know it did not change in the same way graphics did. One should not expect courtesy if they can't offer it in the first place.
This is actually quite surprising considering how many DAWs there are and most of them are also graphically intensive. I don't think audio industry is somehow bigger.
My wild guess would be that audio attracts a lot more programmer types and there is more demand for engineering. With graphics the engineers and programmer types are in 3D. Nobody really cares about writing type rendering engines and pdf parsers.
Graphics is harder. More users means more use cases, needs to work on more platforms, layout and output to work on various resolutions/dpi, GPU/driver dependence and issues. Print, web, UI design, prototyping, photo editing, all wildly different areas, whereas audio is way narrower scope with less or more mature standards background (eg MIDI spec is 1983).
My comment doesn't say anything about graphics programming, so it's pretty neutral on that particular point.
This dismissal of the complexities of audio programming is fairly common in general (and particularly bad on HN). Remarks about "less data", "less formats", "less demanding" are typical. But throwing in the specific mention of visual resolution as if somehow sample rate and depth are not more or less precise analogs seems like a fairly major red flag.
Maybe big players are not as interested in the smaller market, and none of the industry players were able to get huge like Adobe did. At least big enough to create their own gravity.
Also, images and video have either no timing requirements or very relaxed ones (human perceptual response to missing video frames is minimal; human perceptual response to missing audio deadlines is universal and significant).
Related: Human sensitivity to "unwanted" noise is impressive. There's a lot of professionally released music out there where the noise floor is high enough to be annoying. Similarly our reaction to lossy codecs not quite preserving quality is usually visceral if we know the track well.
I had a time when I listened to CDs that were ripped and then compressed to 128kbps MP3. One day I had the CD and just listened to it straight on the computer through headphones and was blown away by how much I was missing on the MP3. My take is 192kbps MP3 is a lot better and 320kbps is basically transparent.
I got a really great set of Yamaha speakers at our reuse center and, similarly, found a whole new world in some recordings (everything by the Super Furry Animals except their first album) but then found others (anything by Foreigner) sounded just the same as they always did on FM radio.
Doing a bit of research, it looks like a majority - ~60% across studies - prefer the better quality in double blind tests at 128. At 256/320 it drops off dramatically, yes.
I know I personally have sought out better copies of some songs because the high end sounds awful, witch each hi-hat splash being a crinkly-codec failure.
I still remember when Microsoft alongside Adobe, proudly presented Adobe XD at BUILD as one example of UWP applications, and Microsoft Store integration.
Implausible to me. Keeping that team going would put pressure on Figma. My read between the lines is that Adobe negotiated a partnership before ending talks.
Adobe XD was meant to take on Sketch, and failed at that, which meant it was fully two generations behind Figma. They couldn't compete, and as a company they have no capacity for making innovative web design products. They do seem to have a capacity for ruining the ones they buy, so I'm glad this attempt failed.
In that time between XD's inception and Figma's buyout attempt, hasn't Sketch caught up to Figma and become a decent competitor to it? I haven't used it in a while because my employer doesn't support it and my freelance work has effectively ended.
I used Sketch recently and it was a good and effective communication tool between dev, design, client, and pm from my perspective (dev). I assume design too, since it was their choice.
I'm not sure what it was missing before, but it seemed to have everything we needed. There were some things missing from the web app that the native app had, but it seemed like that was just the hook to upgrade from the free-tier.
I don't know, as I stopped using Sketch the day I discovered Figma. Maybe so? I'd be happy about it, because it's nice to have real competition, but it'd be quite an achievement for them to have caught up at this point.
Indeed, Sketch is a decent alternative to Figma including for collaboration. Sketch even has the advantage of still being a offline first app while Figma is quite useless without an always on internet connection.
I believe this is a minority opinion, but I love XD.
It (1) does everything I need, (2) doesn't do things I don't need, (3) is fast and (4) is easy to teach other people.
Considering none of this is true of other Adobe products, it's not surprising that the XD product felt "out of place" to their executives. I imagine several SVP's are quietly relieved to see XD hit the bin.
I also like XD. I do a little bit of UX design work, and XD feels more intuitive to me than Figma. I still have XD installed as part of Adobe Creative Cloud, and would prefer not to lose it.
XD may be good to use from a UX engineer perspective, but from a web developer perspective, it's not so great.
I occasionally get XD files from designers that I then have to cut up / develop for in HTML/CSS/JS, and XD does not do this well. Figma on the other hand, seems like it is designed really well with considerations for both designers (creating the designs) and developers (turning the designs into a product / project) alike.
For most people if you use Mac, I would use Freeform, which is included in the OS as your design till you really need all the power Figma like apps provides. You can do 80% of the stuff without the crap Web UI you are forced to eat
I'm ultimately glad Adobe is not going through with the deal, but I can still kinda appreciate the irony in this.
Regulators made the deal hard to keep more offerings on the market. In the end... the consumers still lost the choice. They saved patient for it to get hit by a bus.
Still, Adobe, why? Why not figure out sooner that you need to kill of your app - maybe before trying to get your purchase of the competitive product through an anti-competitive review?
I always saw this as Figma looking for a life raft during an uncertain time and Adobe being a whale. Shrewd on both parties part. I'm not surprised it fell through, though I am surprised that they have no plans for this space anymore.
I have never heard about Lunacy, looks promising from their website! How does it compare to XD and can you import XD designs? I will have to try it now XD is abandoned, thanks!
Well, crap. I just learned XD, since it was included in the Adobe suite that my job provides. I don't need the functionality frequently enough to pay yet another monthly subscription. Man I miss pay-once software.
Am I crazy? is it really that hard? I built a web design product that rivals figma in a web browser in like a month, and bootstrapped the whole thing lmao
> In a companywide note posted to Figma’s Slack work collaboration software channel, reviewed by Forbes, Field also announced a one-time ‘Detach’ program by which any employee could voluntarily depart the company in exchange for three months’ pay.
Does this detach program accelerate equity vesting?
Doesn't mean they've given up on a web platform completely, rather they've realised the one they were building on was built on the wrong foundations. Perhaps they even got some insight into how Figma architected theirs during the negotiations and will run with that
I think overall this is a good thing. Adobe owning Figma isn't a great promise that it would be make Figma better, improve Figma in any way, nor keep Figma on the path of making healthy improvements.
I can't blame anyone for seeing $20 Billion dollars upfront and taking the offer, but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? I don't know that I'll ever know the actual answer to this question, but this is a sign to me that no, it didn't, it is building a healthy business as a standalone product.
Now Figma can take the $1 billion USD breakup fee and do some amazing work on solidifying their position.
I do, as a sense of morbid curiosity, wonder if Adobe has had discussions in their boardroom about buying PenPot