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Adobe's buy of Figma is 'likely' bad for developers, rules UK regulator
- seanhunter 3y agoCompetition and Markets Authority press release is here https://www.gov.uk/government/news/adobe-figma-deal-could-harm-uk-digital-design-sector https://www.gov.uk/government/news/adobe-figma-deal-could-ha...
- happymellon 3y agoThere was no upside to this. Much like Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Oktas acquiring Auth0, it is just market consolidation.
- max_ 3y agoThe investors & founders of Figma clearly got the upside. I really don't know why every business transaction has to be some kind of mission that will take us to Nirvana. What is wrong with people taking money? If Figma is bad for Developers let them build an alternative since they are developers or they can just use several of the many Figma alternatives.
- satao 3y agoBecause monopolies hinge the growth of human development and should be avoided by any true capitalistic economy.
- gertrunde 3y agohinge -> hinder ?
- max_ 3y agoAdobe isn't a monopoly it is simply domainant. Consumers have a choice to use other alternatives. How does this "hinder the growth of human development"
- tremon 3y agoEvery dominant piece of software is its own monopoly as long as the documents have a proprietary format and there exist no independent readers/writers.
- superchroma 3y agoBecause they commonly swap to profit extraction models when they fail to integrate the acquisitions, and after that they typically shutter otherwise viable businesses. Most recently seen with Unity and Weta Technologies
- tmikaeld 3y agoWhy would Adobe pay 20$ Billion if "consumers have a choice to use other alternatives".. c'mon man.
- ben_w 3y ago> What is wrong with people taking money? Is the wrong question to ask. Money is a means to facilitate self-organisation in the economy — it's not a good in itself, only as a means to an end. For the most part, people are happy to not look too closely and just assume it's all good, but the entire point of regulators such as the Competition Markets Authority is to find the cases where a trade isn't good for the wider economy.
- indigo0086 3y agoThen thr wider economy can decide if it's good or not, and choose alternatives. The only thing that would really stifle consumer choice is ip laws that could just claim the entire solution of Figma is off limits
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoIf UK or Europe government think that merger of two US tech companies they don't control is bad for competition, they need to invest in creating a competition. And I am not talking about a million or two they give here and there, they need big investments. It baffles me that Europe programmers has similar or better education and skills than US, but they get paid 1/3rd of US's salary for the same cost of living for senior positions.
- tmikaeld 3y ago> ..let them build an alternative.. Sure, let's just throw something together and it will work as good as something worth 20$ billion dollars..
- chrisandchris 3y agoThe fun fact around this is that, whatever number you believe, each paying user is worth something north of 50-100k to Adobe. Figma has 4 million active users, maybe 5% signed up for a paid plan, will make 100k for each user at the acquisition price.
- max_ 3y agoYou honestly think someone needs $20bn to build a Figma alternative or clone?
- ben_w 3y agoAdobe clearly thought that or they wouldn't have paid that much, and so did their shareholders or they would have sued for wasting money.
- boeingUH60 3y agoThey're paying for the network effects, not the app. They can build a Figma clone with less than $10 million, but good luck getting people to use it.
- kevindamm 3y agoSupposing that one company's cash-value offer is equivalent to what it would cost to build, there would be no point in building a startup. That value estimate is what the built thing plus company staff plus brand recognition plus timing is worth. Hardly the same thing as what it would cost to build again. Especially now knowing an effective UI/UX for the task.
- andsoitis 3y ago> Adobe clearly thought that or they wouldn't have paid that much, and so did their shareholders or they would have sued for wasting money. Value is not the same as cost. The cost of acquiring something is not the same as the cost of building something.
- codr7 3y agoI feel the issue here is that Figma has become the standard tool for UI design, it's what everyone uses and everyone knows. Which means there's a potentially huge collective cost if it goes downhill.
- MajimasEyepatch 3y agoEndless consolidation isn't the only way to make money. There's plenty of money for Figma to make if they remain an independent company, _and_ their customers would be better off.
- wdb 3y agoDon’t think Microsoft the dominant creator of games compared to Adobe which is the dominant creator of graphics tools.
- aeurielesn 3y agoMicrosoft is trying to buy more than just Activision/Blizzard I the games industry.
- kemotep 3y agoTheir goal (in my opinion) is to have enough studios to be cranking out one or more games each month for game pass. With many games taking over 3 years now to make and about 10 of those Activision studios working on just Call of Duty, they have several more studios to go.
- that_guy_iain 3y agoIn my opinion, they're just playing catch up with Sony. Sony started buying up studios years ago and has some quality studios pumping out top notch games which are Playstation Exclusive. To deal with that Microsoft is buying up some too, they just went straight to the top and decided to go for an already estabished studios instead of going for smaller ones and investing until they deliver in 5-10 years.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y agoWhat people hated about Microsoft’s acquisition was that it will deprive its competitors IPs they used to have access to - eventually. Sony’s acquisitions are less “egregious” as the companies they acquire usually generated few to no (valuable) IPs for their competitors - there are exceptions of course. That’s why most all of their acquisitions fly under the radar.
- that_guy_iain 3y agoYea, but the problem was originally caused by Sony. Many say it's anti-competive but really it's basically done to compete. I would say making games console exclusive should be banned if you want to remove things like this.
- throwaway2990 3y agoMicrosoft’s aquisirion of activision likely saved blizzard. MS only has 15% of the console market.
- Lacerda69 3y agoIMO the problem was the acquisition of Blizzard by Activision. I agree that MS will be a better steward than Activision who managed to completely ruins Blizzards reputation since the acquisition.
- vsnf 3y agoWhile saying nothing about the quality of their games or the decline thereof, Blizzard did a perfectly good job torching their reputation themselves when the report of their insane and inappropriate office antics was made public.
- fnordsensei 3y agoThey also host more or less the entire PC gaming market.
- throwaway2990 3y ago[flagged]
- kypro 3y agoIf I was to try to steel man an argument for why acquisitions like this are good it would be that a lot of startups like Figma only exist because acquisitions are common and therefore offers early investors an exit on their investment that isn't 1-2 decades in the future. If we got rid of M&A in tech there would significantly less investment and much less innovation, which I think you could argue is bad for the ecosystem as a whole and the end consumer of these products – even if individual acquisitions are often not great when viewed independently. Or to look at it another way, big tech basically outsources their R&D to startups and the successful projects (companies) are then acquired. And this goes both ways given the goal of a lot startups is to be acquired.
- crote 3y agoThe problem isn't that they are acquired, the problem is that they are acquired by their primary competitor, leading to a quasi-monopoly. If Figma was being acquired by literally any other company the regulators wouldn't have any problems with it.
- jliptzin 3y agoInvestors don’t have to structure their deals such that selling the company or an IPO is the only way to get their money out though. They could say give me 10% of profit until I get 10x my investment, etc. At least that way investors are aligned with creating a company with sustainable profits, rather than the VC pump and dump that we’re all familiar with.
- capybara_2020 3y ago
- tpurves 3y agoAt least with Activiaion Blizzard under new management, there's a hope of reviving the Starcraft franchise? But otherwise yes, Okats & Auth0, Figma + Adobe 100% travesty. As would have been nvdia + arm.
- HlessClaudesman 3y agoWith the sale price passed directly on to consumers in the inevitable form of higher subscription fees. Designers believing themselves to be forever locked into the Adobe clown cloud are literally turkeys paying for Christmas.
- pfannkuchen 3y agoIf you aren’t allowed to sell something, you don’t really own it. Whoever decides the valid sale conditions also owns part of it, it’s just off the books (so to speak). Do we really want governments implicitly part-owning companies that aren’t related to violence? At least a monopoly can be out innovated.
- hakube 3y agoSo is Figma gonna be the next Adobe XD?
- drcongo 3y agoAdobe is a horrible company, and Figma is terrible software. They deserve each other.
- k4rli 3y agoWhat's an alternative with same functionalities for both devs + designers?
- mathis 3y agoSketch used to be the first choice for app developers. However, it has always been macOS only and their collaboration tools were lacking for a long time. Don’t know about current differences though.
- drcongo 3y agoOur designers are wedded to Figma so I have to use it from time to time. I despise it. The other day I had some work to do on an old project designed in Sketch and it was an absolute joy. For a lot of things our developers end up taking stuff out of Figma and into Sketch just to be able to work in a pleasant app.
- GenerWork 3y ago>I despise it I'll bite, what do you despise about it?
- drcongo 3y agoSorry, keep leaving out details. I hate the non-native UI, I hate that copying from Figma creates something in the pasteboard that most apps won't allow to paste, I hate that to open a file I have to click a link and open it in a browser and then spend ages trying to get it to open in the "desktop" "app" because in a browser it runs like a turd. I mean, the list is long. I'm sure if I was a designer, working in it regularly, I'd probably like it a bit more, but as someone who only has to dip in and out occasionally it seems to make everything I ever need to do with it considerably more difficult than it should be. As mentioned above, people on our dev team copy and paste stuff out of it, into Affinity Designer, and then copy and paste from there into Sketch, just so that they can get decent assets out of it. Try it - select a group of objects in Figma, hit Cmd+C and then try pasting that into Sketch - most of the time you'll get nothing at all, sometimes you get some text and none of the vectors. Basically it's just not a good OS citizen - working properly with the system pasteboard is surely one of the first things you'd get working.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dom96 3y agoCan the UK regulator ban its sale?
- orra 3y agoIt's only one possible remedy, but yes. Facebook was forced to sell Giphy. I presume the CMA doesn't have worldwide jurisdiction (I mean, even hypothetically, under UK law). However, if a merger went ahead against its wishes, I presume it could easily block the Figma portion of Adobe operating in the UK.
- martinald 3y agoI think it would go further. The CMA can impose fines of 10% of worldwide revenue if they ignore the breach, and also disqualify at least the UK business unit company directors from holding another UK company directorship for up to 15 years (in any company). I think the only way to do it would be to entirely pull Adobe out of the UK market. This would be extremely difficult for many reasons, not only that Adobe has many multi year enterprise license agreements with many UK companies which would incur enormous penalties for severing them, plus the UK is probably still a quite large market for Adobe. I'm not even sure if that's possible though, as they could still get a judgement in the UK and then take that to other jurisdictions to get payment for fines and other breaches.
- seymon 3y agoWhat do you think about penpot as an alternative to figma? https://penpot.app/ https://penpot.app/
- mortallywounded 3y agoI tried for a while back in 2022 when Adobe announced acquiring Figma. I spent a week with Penpot. It's pretty good, but there were a number of issues that forced me going back to Figma... mainly random freezes and issues causing me to lose saved work.
- swalsh 3y agoI was looking for a figma like app that had AI integration, I'm mostly happy with uizard. Think the AI could be a bit better, but its not bad.
- LesZedCB 3y agoit's clojure/clojurescript, which is pretty cool!
- karaterobot 3y agoThe last time I used it, it was like a slower, buggier version of a subset of Figma's feature set from 3 years ago. But Figma has come a long way in 3 years, so it's not a serious competitor now, if it ever was. If you just occasionally need to put some text on top of something, or make a couple wireframes, it would be fine. If you work on complex production designs as part of a team, it's far from ready for you to switch over. I believe Penpot has even acknowledged that some architectural choices they've made mean that it's unlikely that a Penpot document can ever scale to the size or complexity of a Figma document, which to me means it'll always be a toy, or, more generously, a tool for simpler use cases.
- tremon 3y agoThe EU Commission has taken a similar position: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23961096/adobe-figma-acquisition-antitrust-eu-statement-of-objections https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23961096/adobe-figma-acq... the European Commission reached the preliminary conclusion on Friday that if the deal goes ahead, it may “significantly reduce competition in the global markets” for the supply of interactive product design tools, vector editing tools, and raster editing tools.
- codetrotter 3y agoMore people should adopt the open source Penpot app instead of using Figma. Then the problem will be solved. https://penpot.app/ https://penpot.app/
- jai_ 3y agoI don't think switching to the open source alternative is a viable option for many, mainly because a lot of them just don't work as well. This article lists a large amount of pitfalls when trying to do just that: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/just-paying-figma-15-dollars https://fasterthanli.me/articles/just-paying-figma-15-dollar... And this isn't some esoteric use case used as an excuse. The core need the author has is "export my diagram to SVG and have it render the same in all browsers".
- danielvaughn 3y agoThat's probably by historical incident. I'm a big advocate of open source design tooling, and I think the reason they haven't taken off as much is because design tools are generally ignored by developers. We spend loads of free time building open source developer tools, but there doesn't seem to be as much excitement as building solutions for the design side.
- atomicfiredoll 3y agoThere's an element of that, but I think design tools tend to be ignored by designers as well. It took well over a year to get my last design team to even consider looking at Figma seriously. I've worked with several that have big gaps in understanding their day to day software. To some degree the issue can be lock in, but people also just seem to want get in and bang something out, even if the process is sub-optimal (and that can be valid.) I've used several tools over the years and am not afraid to jump into a new UI or workflow, but have come to believe that's an exception and probably driven by the dev part of my brain.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shanghaikid 3y agoadobe killed fireworks, buy an alternative ~~~
- walteweiss 3y agoThey killed pretty much everything they ever did, considering how shitty their software is. I work with it from time to time and I am amazed how it doesn’t change (meaning all the bugs and idiotic UI decisions) over decades. Ducking decades. There is Affinity. There is Pixelmator Pro, Figma, Blender. I wish everyone and their dogs cancelling their CS subscriptions.
- campuscodi 3y agoIt was an easy decision. You can't allow one single company to own all the major web dev tools. I'm surprised they actually decided this, since the EU has a history of turning a blind eye to some of these deals.
- stevage 3y agoWell, duh? How could a merger like this possibly be good for consumers? You take two companies actively competing against each other and ...stop one of them.
- NeoTar 3y agoIf there were thirty companies competing in the space then it could be good for consumers - e.g. by allowing economies of scale for the company and so reduced prices for consumers. With two or three companies - yeah, not so much.
- toyg 3y agoIt should be noted that "economies of scale" works in manufacturing and distribution, but doesn't really work in software or other creative endeavours - in fact, creative teams are often more impactful and cost-effective (and hence cheaper) the smaller the company is. Antitrust law should really get amended with that framework in mind.
- da_chicken 3y agoPer se economies of scale don't work in all areas of business, but there is increased efficiency in centralizing nearly anything. That's exactly why standards get created in software as well as anything, and why hierarchies and specialization of labor happen. The problem with monopolies -- and monarchies for that matter -- isn't that they're inefficient. They're incredibly efficient. It's merely that the gains are almost universally used to enrich the owners of the means at everyone else's expense.
- lesuorac 3y agoWell it depends on your definition of efficiency. In a perfectly competitive (and perfect information) marketplace there will be more goods sold than in a monopolistic one. So in terms of resource allocations its inefficient. There's a graph on this page title "Perfect Competition, Monopoly, and Efficiency" [1] that shows how since the monopoly can price set they choose a higher price than where demand meets supply since it results in higher profits. This isn't achievable in a competitive marketplace as then somebody else would just undercut them. Interestingly you can correct this inefficiency by subsidizing a monopoly so that it offers the correct amount of supply. [1]: https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_principles-of-microeconomics-v2.0/s13-03-assessing-monopoly.html https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_principles-of-microecono...
- jpalomaki 3y agoIn the long run the positive thing is that this deal shows there's money to be made in this space. This will likely attract more companies to come up with new ideas and solutions.
- willsmith72 3y agoit's no surprise that there's money in the space, every tech company uses design tools extensively, and more and more as the prototyping capabilities get better
- lebean 3y agoI fail to see how this would harm developers. If Adobe enshittifies it, use something else. Or don't use it; we were fine before Figma existed.
- qkeast 3y agoI'm confused: why is this article/headline focused on developers, when the report and its outcomes are explicitly focused on designers, who are Figma and Adobe's primary audience?
- jrajav 3y agoI think 'software developers' in this sense refers to companies developing software (and thus employing designers).
- karaterobot 3y agoThat confused me too. I think they just don't have as nuanced a vocabulary when it comes to the different roles in software development. To them, a software developer is the company that makes the software product, and/or everyone involved in making it, including designers and SWEs. Figma does have features specifically made for developers rather than designers, but my guess is that's not what they're talking about, they just mean "software people".
- ydnaclementine 3y agoI wouldn't want to catch any of Adobe's figma
- wrigglingworm 3y agowhat's figma?
- jejeyyy77 3y agothey should reverse this deal and force adobe to sell
- lowbloodsugar 3y agoWell someone didn’t get their bribe! Or maybe UK just not very important any more. Boo hoo!
- edgyquant 3y agoNo I’m fairly certain this acquisition was already blocked by the US DOJ as well. Or at least they are preparing a suit to do so
- nojvek 3y agoUS govt and court rooms are very very lax on large corps. Lina Khan is really struggling on anti-trust. The lawyers aint buyin it. I do think our current big tech is a toooo big. The big 5 (AAPL, MSFT, GOOG, AMZN, NVDA) with > 1$ trillion market cap need to be broken.
- ajkjk 3y agoWould make my fucking year if there could be a new law that makes it easier for those lawsuits to work. After all there is no reason to think that the present antitrust laws are the ones we ought to have.
- jiveturkey 3y agobut the deal is not blocked.
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoCan anyone explain in layman's terms how a regulatory body in the UK has such decisive authority over the merger of two US companies?
- rreichman 3y agoThese companies operate in the UK. It's the same authority that the EU or China has. The deal is that you can adhere to their laws or leave the market.