I’m not expecting Adobe to kill Figma or raise the price overnight. I’m not angry about any of that, I’m angry that I’ve now built team workflows around a product that means I have to pay money to a company that doesn’t spend it on making products better and relies on vendor lock-in to propagate.
Could have asked if they think selling to Adobe has limited the potential of what Figma could accomplish. Could have asked about how users who supported them as a solution against Adobe might feel betrayed.
I believe Matt Stoller, who studies and writes about monopolies is collecting feedback about the effects of this merger on professionals in the industry [0].
From the sound of it you could be a valuable voice in there. The merger will probably have to go through approval in DC. Perhaps if sufficient evidence is collected it could be blocked in accordance with anti-trust law. He wrote about how there is a heap of evidence about Adobe’s history of mergers and acquisitions which only lead to reduction of consumer choice.
I've repeatedly heard the sentiment from interviewers that it's not worth the time asking questions you know you won't get an answer to. As a sibling noted, both of your questions can reasonably fall into that category.
Not disagreeing, just lamenting the sad state of journalism nowadays, at least as I perceive it.
I’d have to ask why even do the interview at all then. Like I can save everyone involved a lot of time and just imagine the interview if you’re not gonna ask a difficult question.
A good interviewer would then ask follow up questions to either get a straight answer or highlight the absence thereof. Unfortunately, much of the mainstream tech "journalism" is just repackaged press releases written by people hoping to get hired by the very same companies that they "report" on. Thence the softball questions and toothless interviews all in an effort to not upset any potential future employers.
> Could have asked if they think selling to Adobe has limited the potential of what Figma could accomplish. Could have asked about how users who supported them as a solution against Adobe might feel betrayed.
Well, it's a business, not a non-profit.
In business everything is for sale at any moment in time, if the price is high enough. Especially, when there are multiple shareholders with different goals.
As an entrepreneur he simply did his job: he built an extremely valuable company and took the best deal he could probably get for it.
Maybe a few years later he won't even be with Adobe anymore. Just like the founders of Instagram and Whatsapp are no longer with Meta.
Building tools to dethrone Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects IS a good business though. You’ve essentially swapped just over 1 year of Adobe revenue for a quick exit instead of building the system that delivers $15B+ yearly by dethroning them.
Claiming this is a good move is the same as claiming selling the iPhone or Android to Nokia for short term profit would have been a good business move.
Lots of people shared the same sentiment you just did about Instagram selling to FB. Look at them now, if IG had continued alone the idea to sell to FB would be a joke at this point.
> As an entrepreneur he simply did his job: he built an extremely valuable company and took the best deal he could probably get for it.
Sorry, but: no.
There are many ways to work in the world, and certainly one way is to be an amoral mercenary in search of profit.
But if you think "the job" of the entrepreneur is simply to have a good exit, well the world would be gravely impoverished if entrepreneurs in general shared your view.
The fact that many of the acquiring companies in these stores are still largely controlled by their founders is telling.
How often have seen that speech of “we are going to stay autonomous!” , probably way too many times. As soon as hard time hits, or the current leadership changes, that goes right out the window.
I understand the lure of a big pile of money, surely. It probably creates a lot of opportunities for Figma in the short run, but long term I feel it will be Macromedia all over again.
"We'll have lots of autonomy", "they want to learn for us as much as we learn from them", etc. A year down the line and our founders have left and we've been gutted of anything that made us a special place to work and it's all going to hell in a handcart. My perfect job at the best place I've ever worked has turned incredibly sour post-aquisition. We had so much potential and it's been utterly screwed.
I'd love to know if there has ever been an acquisition like this that has turned out how they claim it will.
I’m so sorry to hear. I went through something similar, as a founder. All the promises were forgotten, even the ones we wrote into contracts. Especially the ones about supporting development of our complementary product. It was absolutely crushing.
Ouch, that sucks! It’s hard to find a good company/fit. Only about 1/4 of companies is a pleasant environment in my experience. It takes a while to find a new good one. Hope you do find it, could you contact the old founders perhaps and see what they are up to?
There doesn’t seem to be much new in here, but it’s good to hear Dylan’s perspective. I really hope Figma find a way of transforming Adobe from the inside.
I’m still pained by the Adobe/Macromedia acquisition. Fireworks was the best UI, and arguably “screen” focused, graphic design tool of the time. So much better in every way than Photoshop (because thats not what it was trying to be!), but Adobe couldn’t see that, thought they were competing products, and killed it.
If Adobe had kept Fireworks, invested in it, and eventually added the UI focus and collaboration feature of newer products they would continue to own this market.
Fireworks is the true predecessor to products like Figma and Sketch.
I fear Adobe are not particularly good at seeing how a new product tailored to a new design pragmam doesn’t compete with the older products. Reinvention is good! Maybe this is the start of them approaching that differently.
I hate to be the pessimist but I suspect it has never happened and why would it? To allow Figma to bring their culture into Adobe will mean massive changes to a lot of people who have been doing a terrible job for years, it will mean power shifting, it will mean older people accepting that the world has changed and they aren't worth their inflated salaries any more.
Even if they wanted to, I doubt they could change, these things just don't scale. 26K employees, most will just carry on doing what they do.
I think the best way to run any of these things is to keep Figma at arms length. Own it, yes, but let them carry on doing what they are already doing well. Don't force them to make their product more enterprise friendly otherwise they will start doing loads of one-offs, complicating it, basically turning it into Creative Suite.
For those that don’t know Fireworks was essentially Sketch 10 years earlier. Adobe had a tool with vector based bitmap graphics creation and non destructive styling. That could how multiple pages, states and a basic form of component all in 1 file with one click export to flats.
Adobe didn’t understand their own software or users so killed it to try and force us to use a painting/photography tool for UI layouts.
Makes this all a cruel joke for those of us who used it daily then moved to Sketch then moved to Figma.
If any Figma are interested in an alternative, try the free & open source alternative Penpot (https://penpot.app/). I like it and the team behind it (Kaleidos) always does great work (I love their JIRA alternative Taiga to bits).
More content… so we can extract more money from existing customers… yay
Meanwhile the race is still on to merge real actual code components back into the design tools, and out again as workable screens. The first one to properly crack that nut is going to snatch so much market share. I thought it would be figma since they did auto layout but they don’t seem that interested in the code side
Readit News
I’m not expecting Adobe to kill Figma or raise the price overnight. I’m not angry about any of that, I’m angry that I’ve now built team workflows around a product that means I have to pay money to a company that doesn’t spend it on making products better and relies on vendor lock-in to propagate.
Could have asked if they think selling to Adobe has limited the potential of what Figma could accomplish. Could have asked about how users who supported them as a solution against Adobe might feel betrayed.
But you didn’t. Great journalism guys.
From the sound of it you could be a valuable voice in there. The merger will probably have to go through approval in DC. Perhaps if sufficient evidence is collected it could be blocked in accordance with anti-trust law. He wrote about how there is a heap of evidence about Adobe’s history of mergers and acquisitions which only lead to reduction of consumer choice.
[0] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/should-the-government-blo...
Not disagreeing, just lamenting the sad state of journalism nowadays, at least as I perceive it.
Well, it's a business, not a non-profit.
In business everything is for sale at any moment in time, if the price is high enough. Especially, when there are multiple shareholders with different goals.
As an entrepreneur he simply did his job: he built an extremely valuable company and took the best deal he could probably get for it.
Maybe a few years later he won't even be with Adobe anymore. Just like the founders of Instagram and Whatsapp are no longer with Meta.
Claiming this is a good move is the same as claiming selling the iPhone or Android to Nokia for short term profit would have been a good business move.
Lots of people shared the same sentiment you just did about Instagram selling to FB. Look at them now, if IG had continued alone the idea to sell to FB would be a joke at this point.
Sorry, but: no.
There are many ways to work in the world, and certainly one way is to be an amoral mercenary in search of profit.
But if you think "the job" of the entrepreneur is simply to have a good exit, well the world would be gravely impoverished if entrepreneurs in general shared your view.
The fact that many of the acquiring companies in these stores are still largely controlled by their founders is telling.
I understand the lure of a big pile of money, surely. It probably creates a lot of opportunities for Figma in the short run, but long term I feel it will be Macromedia all over again.
"We'll have lots of autonomy", "they want to learn for us as much as we learn from them", etc. A year down the line and our founders have left and we've been gutted of anything that made us a special place to work and it's all going to hell in a handcart. My perfect job at the best place I've ever worked has turned incredibly sour post-aquisition. We had so much potential and it's been utterly screwed.
I'd love to know if there has ever been an acquisition like this that has turned out how they claim it will.
I’m still pained by the Adobe/Macromedia acquisition. Fireworks was the best UI, and arguably “screen” focused, graphic design tool of the time. So much better in every way than Photoshop (because thats not what it was trying to be!), but Adobe couldn’t see that, thought they were competing products, and killed it.
If Adobe had kept Fireworks, invested in it, and eventually added the UI focus and collaboration feature of newer products they would continue to own this market.
Fireworks is the true predecessor to products like Figma and Sketch.
I fear Adobe are not particularly good at seeing how a new product tailored to a new design pragmam doesn’t compete with the older products. Reinvention is good! Maybe this is the start of them approaching that differently.
Even if they wanted to, I doubt they could change, these things just don't scale. 26K employees, most will just carry on doing what they do.
I think the best way to run any of these things is to keep Figma at arms length. Own it, yes, but let them carry on doing what they are already doing well. Don't force them to make their product more enterprise friendly otherwise they will start doing loads of one-offs, complicating it, basically turning it into Creative Suite.
Kind of a sideline - but very worried to see this combination of ageism and the "we're hiring" in your profile.
Adobe didn’t understand their own software or users so killed it to try and force us to use a painting/photography tool for UI layouts.
Makes this all a cruel joke for those of us who used it daily then moved to Sketch then moved to Figma.
Meanwhile the race is still on to merge real actual code components back into the design tools, and out again as workable screens. The first one to properly crack that nut is going to snatch so much market share. I thought it would be figma since they did auto layout but they don’t seem that interested in the code side
https://pinegrow.com/ is also interesting in that regard.
If so that's a very very difficult task to do.
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