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Developers said they would leave GitHub when Microsoft acquired it. Did GitLab get a valuation boost? Maybe a minor one at most. Adobe aren't buying Figma to k

Developers said they would leave GitHub when Microsoft acquired it. Did GitLab get a valuation boost? Maybe a minor one at most. Adobe aren't buying Figma to kill it. It's their future.

swyx 4y ago
yeah lets not rehash this debate, this same back and forth already happened on the announcement thread. we all know adobe aren't the best stewards historically, but intentions are good, yada yada. time will tell.
gumby 4y ago
> Adobe aren't buying Figma to kill it. It's their future. That's for sure. And I can be sure that Adobe knows they are stuck having driven down a wrong road for some time. The big question is: can they revamp? Figma is designed from the ground up to be cloud<-> web, while Adobe's big money spinners have a long legacy of all-on-the-desktop. It's very very hard to retrofit the latter into the former. And they have a huge legacy customer base most of whom are unlikely to want to change. It will be interesting to see how they proceed. Use Figma as an excuse to "eat their own lunch" (instead of, say, porting Lightroom, build from scratch the competitor to Lightroom that someone else could have written?). Or try to retrofit Lightroom? My suspicion is that if they try the retrofit path they will not make it.
- _HMCB_ 4y ago
  Adobe has been slowly moving to the cloud. Almost imperceptibly. A version of Photoshop lives in the browser. Same for Express. I just think they realize Figma is light years ahead and they want to shorten the gap with an app that fills 80% of their collaborative needs. Then they sprinkle in their font and other technologies they’re good at. Me? I hate browser apps. But that’s just me.
  - pen2l 4y ago
    They are in a truly capricious position though. I'm a pretty advanced-level Photoshop user and I'm almost fine with Photopea except for the speed and general annoyance of it being a web-app -- if it were a desktop app I'd probably be fine with it. Which is to say, I'd be fine with a $10 product vs. a $1000 one. In the same way that some professional 3d designers I know switched from Maya/c4d to the free Blender and are fine with it (except for the renderer, we still don't have a really good industry-grade GPU-accelerated renderer). Point being that a compelling alternative can be made by a small, focused team in this day and age and offered at a pricepoint that big companies cannot compete with. I fully expect Penpot to take over Figma very soon, AfterEffects will be interesting because really what makes AE what it is is not necessarily AE itself but the killer RedGiant&VideoCopilot plugins so it is equally as vulnerable. There's really no telling where Adobe will be in another 5 years. I would not be surprised if it's 1/10th its current size; in fact I think it is the likely possibility..
  - dimmke 4y ago
    >I just think they realize Figma is light years ahead That's the problem - and what makes this a true silicon valley story. Big entrenched competitor buys innovative competition. Maybe they won't kill Figma, but they will definitely make it worse. The current CEO of Adobe has been CEO since 2007 and has led their awful Creative Cloud strategy. There's no regime change here. I see people comparing this to Microsoft acquiring Github. Microsoft is both orders of magnitude larger than Adobe and they paid way less for Github. They can afford to have Github as a form of "soft power" in the developer space, supporting their cloud work/developer stuff but indirect to their core revenue and business without needing to monetize it directly. Their CEO wasn't a moron and understood intrinsically there'd be a lack of trust and a hands off approach was needed. I'd be really surprised if Adobe shows the same grace in this situation. Figma was a direct competitor of their core business. I do think that comparing Adobe to Microsoft in general is reasonable though. They are both software companies that make terrible software and have little incentive to improve because of how entrenched they are in the market. I've always thought of Adobe as the Microsoft of creative software.
    - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
      > The current CEO of Adobe has been CEO since 2007 and has led their awful Creative Cloud strategy. I know it's fun to rip on Adobe, but it's worth putting this in context. In '07, Adobe's stock price was around ~$40. Today, even after the (undeserved, in my opinion) thrashing the stock has taken for the Figma acquisition, it's at $300. He 10x'd a multi-billion dollar company in about a decade and a half, while also simultaneously redoing its entire monetization strategy. It's nothing to sneeze at. A quick search turns up interesting numbers from this press release a year ago (literally the first result in my search, so not digging too deep here) [1]: - all-time record revenues in Q3 2021 - 20-30% YoY growth in every segment they play in - the DocuSign acquisition has turned into a cool ~2B/yr business - and creative revenues of 2.4B, i.e., almost 10B/yr As a handy rule of thumb, I like to assume that any long-term CEO of a profitable multi-billion dollar enterprise probably isn't a moron. Is Adobe a dinosaur? Absolutely. Stock buybacks are a great indicator of this, in my opinion. Could Adobe screw this up? Absolutely possible. As a good example, they do plenty of dark-pattern UX in their subscription and cancellation flows that I really don't like. With all that said, I think there's a decent chance that we in the peanut gallery might look back on this in a few years and see it as a brilliant acquisition in the vein of WhatsApp and Instagram. Figma is a world-class product, leaps and bounds ahead of anything else. Considering the price they paid, I bet Adobe understands this is an existential issue for them. [1]: https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2021/Adobe-Reports-Record-Revenue/default.aspx https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2021/Adobe-Reports-...
  - secabeen 4y ago
    > Me? I hate browser apps. But that’s just me. Same. I wonder how many people have truly switched from Lightroom "Classic" to Lightroom ("Cloud). I still base my work in Classic, but I wonder how widespread that is.
    - _HMCB_ 4y ago
      This week I tried the Figma desktop app which I imagine is an electron app. Opened up fine the first time; subsequent attempts just showed a blank screen, so I tried the web browser version. Ugh, felt so slow to open and unresponsive. Part of the mental brick wall I have is that I’ve always equated browsers with surfing/reading and other light stuff. Opening a desktop app puts me in work mode. And the UIs (seeing the browser chrome in context with the app itself) makes me feel like I’m running a less robust app. I imagine these are hurdles I’ll have to get over within the next couple of years as more apps move to the browser :(
- paulmd 4y ago
  Adobe moved Creative Collection to the cloud like 5+ years ago and at this point the desktop implementations are pretty much "legacy" and don't see new feature development/etc. I actually would prefer to just buy Lightroom but I can't.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    CC is just a DRM layer over the same old executables, though.
    - paulmd 4y ago
      What I'm saying is that the cloud version is not the same as the CC version (DRM or no). The offline version is moved to legacy status and isn't seeing feature updates anymore.
imron 4y ago
> Adobe aren't buying Figma to kill it. I'm sure it's not their purpose, however they may end up doing it unwittingly anyway.
bsder 4y ago
> Developers said they would leave GitHub when Microsoft acquired it. Did GitLab get a valuation boost? Maybe a minor one at most. "Developers" may not have moved in much percentage-wise. However, I have noticed quite a few projects moved to GitLab. Projects being on Gitlab forces developers to exist in both places which cracks the "default convenience" monopoly of Github.
- oefrha 4y ago
  I’m a pretty active open source developer, having a couple reasonably popular projects myself and been a team member of an extremely success one. I’d say maybe one in one hundred projects I’m interested in is on gitlab.com. Last year they stopped allowing anonymous search on hosted issue trackers, and it took me the better part of a year to even notice (I posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252501 when I did notice), and I only noticed it on a project that’s developed on GitHub but uses gitlab.com for issue tracking, a choice made back when GitHub’s issue tracker was a lot more primitive. That is to say, I had to search a gitlab.com issue tracker once in a whole year, while I search plenty of open source issue trackers all the time. That’s how irreverent gitlab.com for open source is at least to me. Disclosure: I host a GitLab instance at home.
bel_marinaio 4y ago
Github did not kill off the free tier

Developers said they would leave GitHub when Microsoft acquired it. Did GitLab get a valuation boost? Maybe a minor one at most. Adobe aren't buying Figma to kill it. It's their future.

swyx 4y ago

yeah lets not rehash this debate, this same back and forth already happened on the announcement thread. we all know adobe aren't the best stewards historically, but intentions are good, yada yada. time will tell.

gumby 4y ago

> Adobe aren't buying Figma to kill it. It's their future. That's for sure. And I can be sure that Adobe knows they are stuck having driven down a wrong road for some time. The big question is: can they revamp? Figma is designed from the ground up to be cloud<-> web, while Adobe's big money spinners have a long legacy of all-on-the-desktop. It's very very hard to retrofit the latter into the former. And they have a huge legacy customer base most of whom are unlikely to want to change. It will be interesting to see how they proceed. Use Figma as an excuse to "eat their own lunch" (instead of, say, porting Lightroom, build from scratch the competitor to Lightroom that someone else could have written?). Or try to retrofit Lightroom? My suspicion is that if they try the retrofit path they will not make it.

_HMCB_ 4y ago
Adobe has been slowly moving to the cloud. Almost imperceptibly. A version of Photoshop lives in the browser. Same for Express. I just think they realize Figma is light years ahead and they want to shorten the gap with an app that fills 80% of their collaborative needs. Then they sprinkle in their font and other technologies they’re good at. Me? I hate browser apps. But that’s just me.
- pen2l 4y ago
  They are in a truly capricious position though. I'm a pretty advanced-level Photoshop user and I'm almost fine with Photopea except for the speed and general annoyance of it being a web-app -- if it were a desktop app I'd probably be fine with it. Which is to say, I'd be fine with a $10 product vs. a $1000 one. In the same way that some professional 3d designers I know switched from Maya/c4d to the free Blender and are fine with it (except for the renderer, we still don't have a really good industry-grade GPU-accelerated renderer). Point being that a compelling alternative can be made by a small, focused team in this day and age and offered at a pricepoint that big companies cannot compete with. I fully expect Penpot to take over Figma very soon, AfterEffects will be interesting because really what makes AE what it is is not necessarily AE itself but the killer RedGiant&VideoCopilot plugins so it is equally as vulnerable. There's really no telling where Adobe will be in another 5 years. I would not be surprised if it's 1/10th its current size; in fact I think it is the likely possibility..
- dimmke 4y ago
  >I just think they realize Figma is light years ahead That's the problem - and what makes this a true silicon valley story. Big entrenched competitor buys innovative competition. Maybe they won't kill Figma, but they will definitely make it worse. The current CEO of Adobe has been CEO since 2007 and has led their awful Creative Cloud strategy. There's no regime change here. I see people comparing this to Microsoft acquiring Github. Microsoft is both orders of magnitude larger than Adobe and they paid way less for Github. They can afford to have Github as a form of "soft power" in the developer space, supporting their cloud work/developer stuff but indirect to their core revenue and business without needing to monetize it directly. Their CEO wasn't a moron and understood intrinsically there'd be a lack of trust and a hands off approach was needed. I'd be really surprised if Adobe shows the same grace in this situation. Figma was a direct competitor of their core business. I do think that comparing Adobe to Microsoft in general is reasonable though. They are both software companies that make terrible software and have little incentive to improve because of how entrenched they are in the market. I've always thought of Adobe as the Microsoft of creative software.
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
    > The current CEO of Adobe has been CEO since 2007 and has led their awful Creative Cloud strategy. I know it's fun to rip on Adobe, but it's worth putting this in context. In '07, Adobe's stock price was around ~$40. Today, even after the (undeserved, in my opinion) thrashing the stock has taken for the Figma acquisition, it's at $300. He 10x'd a multi-billion dollar company in about a decade and a half, while also simultaneously redoing its entire monetization strategy. It's nothing to sneeze at. A quick search turns up interesting numbers from this press release a year ago (literally the first result in my search, so not digging too deep here) [1]: - all-time record revenues in Q3 2021 - 20-30% YoY growth in every segment they play in - the DocuSign acquisition has turned into a cool ~2B/yr business - and creative revenues of 2.4B, i.e., almost 10B/yr As a handy rule of thumb, I like to assume that any long-term CEO of a profitable multi-billion dollar enterprise probably isn't a moron. Is Adobe a dinosaur? Absolutely. Stock buybacks are a great indicator of this, in my opinion. Could Adobe screw this up? Absolutely possible. As a good example, they do plenty of dark-pattern UX in their subscription and cancellation flows that I really don't like. With all that said, I think there's a decent chance that we in the peanut gallery might look back on this in a few years and see it as a brilliant acquisition in the vein of WhatsApp and Instagram. Figma is a world-class product, leaps and bounds ahead of anything else. Considering the price they paid, I bet Adobe understands this is an existential issue for them. [1]: https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2021/Adobe-Reports-Record-Revenue/default.aspx https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2021/Adobe-Reports-...
- secabeen 4y ago
  > Me? I hate browser apps. But that’s just me. Same. I wonder how many people have truly switched from Lightroom "Classic" to Lightroom ("Cloud). I still base my work in Classic, but I wonder how widespread that is.
  - _HMCB_ 4y ago
    This week I tried the Figma desktop app which I imagine is an electron app. Opened up fine the first time; subsequent attempts just showed a blank screen, so I tried the web browser version. Ugh, felt so slow to open and unresponsive. Part of the mental brick wall I have is that I’ve always equated browsers with surfing/reading and other light stuff. Opening a desktop app puts me in work mode. And the UIs (seeing the browser chrome in context with the app itself) makes me feel like I’m running a less robust app. I imagine these are hurdles I’ll have to get over within the next couple of years as more apps move to the browser :(
paulmd 4y ago
Adobe moved Creative Collection to the cloud like 5+ years ago and at this point the desktop implementations are pretty much "legacy" and don't see new feature development/etc. I actually would prefer to just buy Lightroom but I can't.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  CC is just a DRM layer over the same old executables, though.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    What I'm saying is that the cloud version is not the same as the CC version (DRM or no). The offline version is moved to legacy status and isn't seeing feature updates anymore.

imron 4y ago

> Adobe aren't buying Figma to kill it. I'm sure it's not their purpose, however they may end up doing it unwittingly anyway.

bsder 4y ago

> Developers said they would leave GitHub when Microsoft acquired it. Did GitLab get a valuation boost? Maybe a minor one at most. "Developers" may not have moved in much percentage-wise. However, I have noticed quite a few projects moved to GitLab. Projects being on Gitlab forces developers to exist in both places which cracks the "default convenience" monopoly of Github.

oefrha 4y ago
I’m a pretty active open source developer, having a couple reasonably popular projects myself and been a team member of an extremely success one. I’d say maybe one in one hundred projects I’m interested in is on gitlab.com. Last year they stopped allowing anonymous search on hosted issue trackers, and it took me the better part of a year to even notice (I posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252501 when I did notice), and I only noticed it on a project that’s developed on GitHub but uses gitlab.com for issue tracking, a choice made back when GitHub’s issue tracker was a lot more primitive. That is to say, I had to search a gitlab.com issue tracker once in a whole year, while I search plenty of open source issue trackers all the time. That’s how irreverent gitlab.com for open source is at least to me. Disclosure: I host a GitLab instance at home.

bel_marinaio 4y ago

Github did not kill off the free tier