First Adobe lost digital product designers a decade ago. First to Sketch, and then to Figma. Photoshop/Illustrator wasn't really made for designing digital prod

First Adobe lost digital product designers a decade ago. First to Sketch, and then to Figma. Photoshop/Illustrator wasn't really made for designing digital products. Photoshop's most features are built around photos, bitmaps and pixels, and the industry moved from pixels assets to vectors or rendered UI. Adobe didn't really have tool dedicated to digital products. They bought Fireworks in 2005 but then kind of killed it. They finally woke up in 2016 and introduced Adobe XD but it was too late and it product was meh. Also many designers also hate Adobe and their creative cloud to the Adobe brand didn't help either. Sketch came along with a tool for designing digital products, like websites, mobile apps etc. It was really good, but it was a native Mac application that dealt with local .sketch files. To share the design the person would need to send them the sketch file and they would generally the same major Sketch version installed on their Mac. They also were operating an "indie" team in the Netherlands and were kind of removed how Silicon Valley teams design and build products. When Figma came along, they were bit behind of Sketch in terms performance and design features, but they had the cloud/browser first architecture where there is no local files. There is no files on anyone computers, everyone in the company has access to all the files. There generally no versions, you edit the latest file. They also listened what product design teams actually needed. For example they came to the Airbnb design team to ask about what we would need for the design system and components, and then they basically built that (I assume they also talked to other teams). They also built simple prototyping tools which then killed Invision and the cottage industry of other prototyping tools. The web sharing and basic handoff tools kind of made Zeplin and Abstract obsolete. So in the end what Figma built was a design tool that product designers and the product teams needed. It had the cloud, collaboration and the features that work in a way that make sense how things are designed and built today. It's little bit like you can run your own git server and setup, but what Github build was the workflow and the tools for teams or groups of people to build things together. Adobe still operates in the world where they sell these specialized git clients for specific types of users for but there are no workflows or really a way to do anything together.