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What a disaster for Adobe. They signal they can't build something to outcompete Figma. Their stock price falls They axe their existing competing product, and

What a disaster for Adobe. They signal they can't build something to outcompete Figma. Their stock price falls They axe their existing competing product, and is therefore now way behind. They face problems with the acquisition, which makes their stock price fall again because it signals that not only can they not build products they can't use their money to buy companies that do. Then it's confirmed they can't acquire Figma. Then they have to lose 1bn dollars. And that money is going to a competitor that they took seriously enough to try and acquire at a sky-high price. QQ

blagie 3y ago
I don't think that's a correct analysis. Adobe is very good at building software. It's not the problem. It's not that Adobe can't compete with Figma. It's that they don't want to. Adobe has a great engineering team and ships wonderful products. The problem with Adobe is that the business side is anticompetitive, exploitative, and sleazy. Buying Figma, they lose a competitor. Competitors have a nasty tendency to expand to adjacent markets, and that's the sort of thing Adobe likes to nip as early as possible. If not for their business practices, I would totally buy Adobe products, because they're great. As is, I don't know if Adobe won't triple prices tomorrow for me to continue to be able to edit my own documents (once they know I'm locked in), or find some other way to !@#$ me up the !@#$. The slight hit to product quality going to competing products and open-source is more than made up for with the stability of having a reliable business partner, or source code I can build myself, respectively.
- 542458 3y ago
  > Adobe is very good at building software. Is that actually true? XD attempted to directly compete with Sketch and Figma, and was not generally considered to be a success at that primarily because they couldn’t ship features fast enough to catch up.
  - jyunwai 3y ago
    At the same time, however, Adobe maintains products with no clear competitors due to their quality. This is especially true for After Effects (for motion graphics in videos).
    - martin_a 3y ago
      > This is especially true for After Effects Or Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Acrobat... I know, Affinity exists but as everybody in the graphic industry has learned on Adobe software, switching over is hard.
    - dclowd9901 3y ago
      > At the same time, however, Adobe maintains products with no clear competitors due to their quality. This is especially true for After Effects (for motion graphics in videos). Really not sure if this is true. Probably due more to "network effects". It's hard to compete with Photoshop or Illustrator if everyone is familiar with their UIs and has all their files as PSDs or Illustrator files. Also anyone who would be reasonably close to creating a good competitor would be bought.
  - prismatix 3y ago
    Take a look at their five other industry-leading products. UX design was never their forté, but they have the rest of the design world in the bag. As a former designer, I can tell you from experience that the designers I encountered would much rather have the newest tools at their hand for a subscription fee than be behind in software. There's so much the competitors cannot do (or can't do well), and if your prodcut doesn't work on a subscription model you're never going to be giving the latest features away in updates.
  - alephnan 3y ago
    Photoshop is one of the best pieces of software, period. Premier is, well, the premier photo editing app. Every designer knows illustrator. UX/UI is just a subset of design. Many web developers who were around before the HTML5 era will swear by Dreamweaver.
    - blagie 3y ago
      > Photoshop is one of the best pieces of software, period. FWIW, painting is one of the easiest pieces of software to get right. As much as I couldn't replicate the volume of stuff Adobe has done in 30+ years, I could build the bones of Photoshop in a few months, with modular extensibility frameworks to slot everything else in. Indeed, GIMP did much the same thing. They messed up a few things (like color models), which continue to haunt it (even the ones which were retroactively fit back in), but it's not any more work to do it right. If they had, it'd be very competitive with Photoshop today. The basic data model is a grid of pixels, organized with layers, and having masks, and an extensible set of tools to operate on them. You also need a little bit of "other" for things like editable text, before it is flattened into the above. Add modular tools and filters, and you're 90% of the way there. Most of the value-add of Photoshop is simply developer time to add a comprehensive set of tools. Adobe can hire a researcher to tweak some algorithm for years, and at this point they've got a lot. Basic video editing is similar. Linear streams, in layers, with modular filters and effects. I'm much more impressed with Adobe drawing tools, page layout, and animation. That's HARD because there aren't the same kinds of clean data models and abstractions. These are harder to use, and don't feel as polished, but that's not because they're less well-written, but because they solve a harder problem. I could NOT build the core of that myself in a reasonable amount of time.
      - alephnan 3y ago
        > Indeed, GIMP did much the same thing. They messed up a few things (like color models), which continue to haunt it (even the ones which were retroactively fit back in), but it's not any more work to do it right. If they had, it'd be very competitive with Photoshop today. Ask any designer and they’ll laugh at you for bringing up in Gimp compared to Photoshop. Photoshop is 10x better. It’s easy to say it’s easy to make Photoshop, but they didn’t. It’s like a poor person saying it’s easy to be a millionaire if they wanted to.
- shortsunblack 3y ago
  Premiere is a piece of trash that crashes on first breath. Adobe also operated Flash for quite a long time. Another amazingly engineered product, supposedly. I do not think your assesment of Adobe's engineers are accurate.
doctorpangloss 3y ago
They didn’t just pay $20b for something that’s probably worth $500m so I think they won this round.
strix_varius 3y ago
Figma had revenue about in line with Heroku, with a similar growth curve. However, Figma has an even more difficult expansion story than Heroku because it's already near 100% market penetration for its core market. Salesforce bought Heroku for $212 million. By avoiding spending $20 billion for a similar company, in my estimation Adobe has finally come to its senses. This really seems like an executive wanted to make an unrealistic long bet a couple of years ago, and since then Adobe has seen Figma's financials and cooler heads prevailed.
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blagie 3y ago

I don't think that's a correct analysis. Adobe is very good at building software. It's not the problem. It's not that Adobe can't compete with Figma. It's that they don't want to. Adobe has a great engineering team and ships wonderful products. The problem with Adobe is that the business side is anticompetitive, exploitative, and sleazy. Buying Figma, they lose a competitor. Competitors have a nasty tendency to expand to adjacent markets, and that's the sort of thing Adobe likes to nip as early as possible. If not for their business practices, I would totally buy Adobe products, because they're great. As is, I don't know if Adobe won't triple prices tomorrow for me to continue to be able to edit my own documents (once they know I'm locked in), or find some other way to !@#$ me up the !@#$. The slight hit to product quality going to competing products and open-source is more than made up for with the stability of having a reliable business partner, or source code I can build myself, respectively.

542458 3y ago
> Adobe is very good at building software. Is that actually true? XD attempted to directly compete with Sketch and Figma, and was not generally considered to be a success at that primarily because they couldn’t ship features fast enough to catch up.
- jyunwai 3y ago
  At the same time, however, Adobe maintains products with no clear competitors due to their quality. This is especially true for After Effects (for motion graphics in videos).
  - martin_a 3y ago
    > This is especially true for After Effects Or Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Acrobat... I know, Affinity exists but as everybody in the graphic industry has learned on Adobe software, switching over is hard.
  - dclowd9901 3y ago
    > At the same time, however, Adobe maintains products with no clear competitors due to their quality. This is especially true for After Effects (for motion graphics in videos). Really not sure if this is true. Probably due more to "network effects". It's hard to compete with Photoshop or Illustrator if everyone is familiar with their UIs and has all their files as PSDs or Illustrator files. Also anyone who would be reasonably close to creating a good competitor would be bought.
- prismatix 3y ago
  Take a look at their five other industry-leading products. UX design was never their forté, but they have the rest of the design world in the bag. As a former designer, I can tell you from experience that the designers I encountered would much rather have the newest tools at their hand for a subscription fee than be behind in software. There's so much the competitors cannot do (or can't do well), and if your prodcut doesn't work on a subscription model you're never going to be giving the latest features away in updates.
- alephnan 3y ago
  Photoshop is one of the best pieces of software, period. Premier is, well, the premier photo editing app. Every designer knows illustrator. UX/UI is just a subset of design. Many web developers who were around before the HTML5 era will swear by Dreamweaver.
  - blagie 3y ago
    > Photoshop is one of the best pieces of software, period. FWIW, painting is one of the easiest pieces of software to get right. As much as I couldn't replicate the volume of stuff Adobe has done in 30+ years, I could build the bones of Photoshop in a few months, with modular extensibility frameworks to slot everything else in. Indeed, GIMP did much the same thing. They messed up a few things (like color models), which continue to haunt it (even the ones which were retroactively fit back in), but it's not any more work to do it right. If they had, it'd be very competitive with Photoshop today. The basic data model is a grid of pixels, organized with layers, and having masks, and an extensible set of tools to operate on them. You also need a little bit of "other" for things like editable text, before it is flattened into the above. Add modular tools and filters, and you're 90% of the way there. Most of the value-add of Photoshop is simply developer time to add a comprehensive set of tools. Adobe can hire a researcher to tweak some algorithm for years, and at this point they've got a lot. Basic video editing is similar. Linear streams, in layers, with modular filters and effects. I'm much more impressed with Adobe drawing tools, page layout, and animation. That's HARD because there aren't the same kinds of clean data models and abstractions. These are harder to use, and don't feel as polished, but that's not because they're less well-written, but because they solve a harder problem. I could NOT build the core of that myself in a reasonable amount of time.
    - alephnan 3y ago
      > Indeed, GIMP did much the same thing. They messed up a few things (like color models), which continue to haunt it (even the ones which were retroactively fit back in), but it's not any more work to do it right. If they had, it'd be very competitive with Photoshop today. Ask any designer and they’ll laugh at you for bringing up in Gimp compared to Photoshop. Photoshop is 10x better. It’s easy to say it’s easy to make Photoshop, but they didn’t. It’s like a poor person saying it’s easy to be a millionaire if they wanted to.
shortsunblack 3y ago
Premiere is a piece of trash that crashes on first breath. Adobe also operated Flash for quite a long time. Another amazingly engineered product, supposedly. I do not think your assesment of Adobe's engineers are accurate.

doctorpangloss 3y ago

They didn’t just pay $20b for something that’s probably worth $500m so I think they won this round.

strix_varius 3y ago

Figma had revenue about in line with Heroku, with a similar growth curve. However, Figma has an even more difficult expansion story than Heroku because it's already near 100% market penetration for its core market. Salesforce bought Heroku for $212 million. By avoiding spending $20 billion for a similar company, in my estimation Adobe has finally come to its senses. This really seems like an executive wanted to make an unrealistic long bet a couple of years ago, and since then Adobe has seen Figma's financials and cooler heads prevailed.

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