14 ms·

Adobe gives up on web-design product to rival Figma after deal collapse

228 points by robin_reala 3y ago

no_wizard 3y ago
Now Figma can become the de-facto choice for its software category and a merger was proved to be ultimately unnecessary for its survival and was a clear attempt at Adobe trying to buyout their competition because they can't seem to compete. I think overall this is a good thing. Adobe owning Figma isn't a great promise that it would be make Figma better, improve Figma in any way, nor keep Figma on the path of making healthy improvements. I can't blame anyone for seeing $20 Billion dollars upfront and taking the offer, but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? I don't know that I'll ever know the actual answer to this question, but this is a sign to me that no, it didn't, it is building a healthy business as a standalone product. Now Figma can take the $1 billion USD breakup fee and do some amazing work on solidifying their position. I do, as a sense of morbid curiosity, wonder if Adobe has had discussions in their boardroom about buying PenPot
- s3r3nity 3y ago
  > I can't blame anyone for seeing $20 Billion dollars upfront and taking the offer, but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? It's a great question from a P&L standpoint, but like you said: the board of the company represents the shareholders, and it's likely that $20 billion was a number _far_ above what they viewed the company's value - therefore accepting that type of deal would've made 100% sense to maximize return for those investors. Note that many employees are also shareholders, and therefore would've banked quite a bit of $ if this went through. I think the better questions are: did Adobe _need_ Figma? (We'll see...) and why did Adobe overpay by so much? EDIT: after some quick searching, estimates place the value of Figma at $8-9 billion...making the offer of $20B virtually impossible to reject.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    > I think the better questions are: did Adobe _need_ Figma? (We'll see...) and why did Adobe overpay by so much? Because Figma would have undoubtedly rejected at or near market rates. And regulators were already iffy. Being overly generous, if it still will pay off for you in the end, is a good way to grease a lot of wheels. The best analogy is the person who offers to pay 25k over asking (in a market where that is abnormal) on a house they definitely want to bypass the whole secondary negotiation process.
    - radley 3y ago
      Figma actually did reject many offers at market rates. $20B was too good to pass up, particularly with the $1B cancellation fee.
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    IPO is another way to return to shareholders though, as is making a profit and paying a percentage of those profits via dividends to shareholders, which any private company can do, or using those profits to do share buybacks. There's any number of ways to benefit the shareholders. Its not anything you said per se, I'm simply annoyed at the legal maxim that we must maximize shareholder value whenever presented to do so, as long as its not an illegal activity.
    - clintonb 3y ago
      If you give me the option to more than double my money now versus get dividends over the next few years, I'm taking the money now. The goal of most businesses is to make money. Building with a focus on longevity is just one of many ways to achieve that goal.
      - kelnos 3y ago
        That sounds a little like the delayed-gratification experiments where they tell children they can have a single candy bar now, but if they wait a half hour, they can have two. In general I would take the dividend, if the expected value over that time was greater than the immediate lump sum, plus what I might get for investing that lump sum in something over those few years. And in reality it's usually not over just a few years; the dividend is long-term. I'd much rather build something valuable and get steady income from it than build something to flip. Now if the risk of no dividend payout is high enough, I'll take that lump sum. But I feel like those sorts of deals -- huge money now, or very risky, uncertain money over a number of years -- just aren't really a thing that often.
- woleium 3y ago
  Was this the plan all along? 1B for all that due diligence information seems cheap, i imagine there are a couple of teams rushing to implement at Adobe right now.
  - sfilmeyer 3y ago
    This article is about Adobe getting out of this business. I'd think if they were "rushing to implement" they'd keep the existing product around and either integrate things into it or wait to kill it until they have a replacement. Also, while it's not perfect, there tends to be a fair amount of firewalling around that sort of due diligence to keep an acquirer from just ripping everything off with inside information gained in the process.
    - CharlesW 3y ago
      > This article is about Adobe getting out of this business. That's an enormous leap from, "We have no plans to further invest in it". It's more likely that they're going to create a new, Sensei-based solution in this category instead of creating yet another Figma-/Sketch-type solution.
      - tough 3y ago
        Yeah that's actually how I read it too, like they found out XD couldn't be savaged after peeking on Figma's internals, and is cheaper/better roi forthem to can that shit and just start from scratch for a collaborative real time environment like figma is build. expecting figma's adobe clone in anything like 6-24 months out
- hipadev23 3y ago
  > a clear attempt at Adobe trying to buyout their competition because they can't seem to compete. You paint this like it's a bad thing, that's why many acquisitions occur.
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    It would have been a bad thing for consumers, which is why it's good that it was blocked by regulators. I don't believe it's always the case that an acquisition of a competitor by a large company is a bad thing, but it would have been in this one for sure. The only problem is that it ruined my optimism about Figma's leadership and direction without actually changing the status quo at all.
  - phmqk76 3y ago
    Well it is obviously a bad thing, and goes to the heart of antitrust. US regulators understood this clearly all the way up until Reagan, and his DOJ instituted a paradigm shift that let companies get away with obliterating their competition through acquisitions - instead of assessing whether companies could compete in a healthy market, the focus became solely the impact on consumers. That’s why, under this new-ish paradigm, Amazon is fine, because prices are kept low through monopolistic and monopsonistic effects. The EU has a better enforcement paradigm that says a healthy economy can only exist where new market entrants can also earn a living, even if it means consumer prices aren’t the lowest they could possibly be.
  - wisemang 3y ago
    Just because it’s relatively common doesn’t mean it’s good..
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    > You paint this like it's a bad thing, that's why many acquisitions occur. You paint that like it's a good thing.
    - foooorsyth 3y ago
      A lot of founders see it as a good thing -- not everyone wants to stay in the game. Some want a big liquidity event after 10 years of grind and a sale to a large competing company typically yields the biggest windfall.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  > but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? It’s pretty clear Figma in 5-10 years could make photo and video editing products that outperform Adobe and Adobe can’t even make one web product as good as Fireworks was that they killed so yeah no Figma has no need for Adobe. Figma has an outstanding engineering team you can tell just by using the app, Adobes dev team it’s questionable how much of Photoshop and AE they even understand how it works as they so rarely try and fix any of it and when they do they tend to break something. Kinda feel the Photoshop and AE codebases are probably like an ancient untranslated artifact to their current dev team.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    I still use Photoshop because I know how to do a lot of things with it but I'd really like to have a similar app which is designed entirely around linear light. (It's not like the 1990s when I was always editing indexed color images) They are still keeping it relevant because of the generative AI features which I often use to touch up photos (remove a spot of grout from a brick wall, then add a row of bricks to center the pictures) I still use Photoshop to print things like https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110607460518784045 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110607460518784045 (where I touched up the bricks) and have 99% control of printing photographic and non-photographic images (more than I can say for Lightroom) although I recently improved my workflow and now I have 100% control (specifically of margins) of printing the back side of my cards https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110662093661611559 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110662093661611559 using a Python script and Epson's printing software. I used to think the neural noise reduction in Lightroom was pretty hot but when I was having trouble w/ shooting indoors Volleyball other photogs told me to try DxO and it was like getting a whole new camera. I like Premier and hypothetically I might want to make and edit a video but it never happens, so I suspect one of these days I am going to give up on Creative Cloud.
    - jcheng 3y ago
      > designed entirely around linear light Can you say more about that? What is “linear light”?
- ivanmontillam 3y ago
  I can also say Figma avoided Adobe going into "destroy mode" with a similar product. We recognize Adobe XD as incapable, but with Adobe's resources, they'd have thrown enough money until they achieved it. Of course there are exceptions: same cannot be said of Google Video and YouTube.
  - drcongo 3y ago
    Adobe could have thrown $40B at it and never made a product to rival Figma because it would have been riddled with Adobe Updater, Adobe Service Manager, Adobe SwitchBoard, AdobeARMservice and all the other crap they force on their users, and nobody would bother. They get away with this kind of user hostility for software they're entrenched in, they'd never get away with it if they were trying to challenge something that's better and doesn't hate its users as much.
    - HlessClaudesman 3y ago
      Yeah I hear what you are saying about services bloat, but the timing of today's XD discontinuance leaves me scratching my head. If this providing a web design / prototyping service was so valuable to Adobe subscribers that Adobe were willing to pay 20 billion for it, surely it must still be worth something to Adobe to prevent subscriber churn today. I don't get why Adobe would abandon a foothold in this corner of design, offering a good enough service is still compelling when bundled when all their other products. Three explanations I can come up with are: 1. Maybe XD was a huge cash hole / or massively underperformed in some other metrics, 2. If Adobe cant dominate a market they take their ball and go home, or 3. Maybe more charitably, Adobe bigwigs still like Figma and have some sort of personal incentives to walk off the pitch and offer their competitor a massive open goal. Is this how corporations are supposed to act?
      - toyg 3y ago
        You just have cause and effect the wrong way around, IMHO. Adobe might have tried to buy Figma precisely because they already knew XD was a dead duck. Announcing it before acquisition talks, however, would have strengthened Figma's hand; so they waited and pulled the plug only after that situation was resolved.
- lrivers 3y ago
  Adobe has a record of acquiring products and then killing them. Fireworks & Freehand for example.
  - smilespray 3y ago
    They also kill good internal products because of infighting. ImageReady was nixed by the Photoshop guys.
    - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
      ImageReady’s tooling (slicing, 2-Up/4-Up Save-for-Web, GIF frame editing, etc) was incorporated directly into Photoshop. It wasn’t “nixed”.
      - smilespray 3y ago
        Of course it was. ImageReady was lean, fast and web-focused. When they killed it you had to buy a PS license and deal with the monolith PS was becoming. If you're making web pages, you don't need CMYK workflows.
        DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
        > ImageReady was lean, fast and web-focused. When they killed it you had to buy a PS license and deal with the monolith PS was becoming. To my knowledge, ImageReady 1.0 was the only version sold standalone - and that was back in 1998; the very next version (in 1999) was sold in-box with Photoshop 5.5 - but the separate ImageReady.exe program was around until 2005 - whereas the way your post is worded implies Adobe were being more customer-hostile than they usually are (hah). I see your point about not needing the weight of Photoshop's print-and-photo tools when web-design folks back then were just wanting a flexible raster image editor - but my recollection of the web-design scene back then was that most web-designers tended to already have a background in print design work (e.g. think about all the print-shops who expanded into website-design in the late-1990s) - so it makes a lot of sense for Adobe to extend their tooling to support the web and "new media" as we called it - rather than create a new tool which would operate on a completely different, "web-first", domain-model (of course, that's exactly what Macromedia did, and they rightfully have their fans for that).
- duxup 3y ago
  >but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? I've worked a company that was profitable, operated well, growing ... but were sold and the CEO said (I'll get the words not quite right): "I fought for keeping independent and not selling, that's how I've kept that company and I wanted it to stay that way. But the offer was increased into the range where I didn't feel like I could survive a legal challenge (if it came to that) as far as my requirement to do what is best for the shareholders." In the case of that CEO, I believed him (i'm not usually inclined to do so). I could be wrong, of course he made a lot of money, but this guy really did seem like he really did like building companies so to speak and that was more a motivation than anything else. But in his case I think he was right, he couldn't seriously argue that he could likely provide a return to investors even for a decade or more than they could get taking the offer right then and there. It is a problem I always worry about, good businesses are there to return value to the stockholders, it makes sense. But in the face of gobs of cash they must fold.... and so often poorly managed after that and some things are lost. It's a black hole in the free market.
  - Mistletoe 3y ago
    *good public businesses Private businesses don’t have to do anything and is where you get some of the best companies that exist and care about their customers like Patagonia. https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/gear-news/patagonia-axios-harris-poll-2023/ https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/gear-news/patagon... Maybe it’s the only way out of the enshittification death spiral because there are no shareholders to destroy the company to “create value” for.
    - dyno12345 3y ago
      There is still a fiduciary duty even for private companies
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Private companies often have so few shareholders that you can simply talk to all of them, together.
- runako 3y ago
  For a company like Figma, the shareholders often include many/all of the employees. Choosing not to take a deal that could net staff retirement money (or realistically in SF: "homeownership money") can also be a bad choice for morale. Consider that many of the employees will have joined the risky startup instead of taking a larger cash compensation at a company like Adobe; helping them get liquid is part of the bargain. This all assumes the company won't go public, the traditional path for companies to generate liquidity and raise capital while remaining independent. For whatever reason, companies like Figma are waiting much longer than historically to go public. HubSpot serves a similar market and went public in 2014 with a valuation near $1B, in a normal IPO with top-tier bankers. It's not a prerequisite for companies to wait until they are $10B-$100B to go public.
- burningChrome 3y ago
  > but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? My two cents would be no considering they already surpassed and put both Sketch and InVision out of business. They were predictably emboldened to think if they were able to beat out two other competitors, and more and more enterprise companies are moving to their product, taking on Adobe or even sharing the lions share of the market with them wouldn't be that bad. The fact the only remaining real competitor went all in and attempted to buy them was a clear signal Adobe saw them as a threat and were willing to clear out their bank vault to acquire them. Figma rightly played their hand perfectly and not only shut down the offer, but now have a clear path to being the sole software provider in a rapidly dwindling market. My anecdotal evidence would be if you go on LinkedIn or any other job board and start looking at the job descriptions for UI/UX designers, none of them list Sketch, InVision or Adobe XD. Its 100% Figma now. At my current company, everything has been moved to Figma and we've even had several enterprise tools that we're using that integrate with Figma.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  > did Figma even need to sell in the first place? In order to not bankrupt? No. In order to maximize discounted cash flow? Maybe. Define your objective, get your answer.
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    You’re saying the same thing in a different way. Any reason for selling would be a reason. I suspect there is no strongly compelling reason for it other than it was a big offer they couldn’t refuse
- lofaszvanitt 3y ago
  5 years and Figma is oob.
brycewray 3y ago
https://archive.is/E31yb https://archive.is/E31yb
pjmlp 3y ago
I still remember when Microsoft alongside Adobe, proudly presented Adobe XD at BUILD as one example of UWP applications, and Microsoft Store integration.
DHPersonal 3y ago
Killing Adobe XD because they couldn't buy Figma for $20 billion means to me that they would never have been a good owner for Figma. XD may have not had as many features as Figma, but it was still a decent program and could have been a very good competitor to Figma for far less than the cost of buying out that company. The buy-in of Adobe's subscription model was a compelling reason for my employers to provide only XD to me for my work.
- asah 3y ago
  Google Video was killed after the YouTube acquisition and YT flourished under Google.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    YouTube was bought mainly because Google Video was failing as a platform. About the only thing it ever offered over YouTube were longform lectures and presentations. Combining the two platforms (e.g. allowing longer videos but using YouTube's social interface) just made YouTube better.
    - silvestrov 3y ago
      Isn't there something about that seeking in movies was only possible in Google Video and not on (original) YouTube? So they ended up with the YouTube frontend and mostly Google Video backend?
      - deaddodo 3y ago
        Yes, modern YouTube's infrastructure inherits more from Google Video than classic YouTube, but the frontend descends from YouTube's (albeit, completely Ship of Theseus'd at this point).
    - jwells89 3y ago
      I was a bit bummed when Google Video was shuttered. In some ways its simple to-the-point UX was nice compared to that of YouTube, which had become cluttered pretty early on. It was also sometimes a backup for when videos on YouTube got taken down.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Related/flipside from last week: Figma Offers Employees Shares and Buyouts After Collapsed Adobe Deal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39133000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39133000
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- htrp 3y ago
  > In a companywide note posted to Figma’s Slack work collaboration software channel, reviewed by Forbes, Field also announced a one-time ‘Detach’ program by which any employee could voluntarily depart the company in exchange for three months’ pay. Does this detach program accelerate equity vesting?
htrp 3y ago
Reading between the lines, Adobe fired all of the people who were working on XD when they did the Figma deal.
- aabhay 3y ago
  Implausible to me. Keeping that team going would put pressure on Figma. My read between the lines is that Adobe negotiated a partnership before ending talks.
- Eric_WVGG 3y ago
  There's no "between the lines" here, it was discontinued all the way back in June. Dunno why that's headlines today. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/22/23769586/adobe-xd-discontinued-shutting-down-figma-design-app https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/22/23769586/adobe-xd-discont...
jack_riminton 3y ago
Doesn't mean they've given up on a web platform completely, rather they've realised the one they were building on was built on the wrong foundations. Perhaps they even got some insight into how Figma architected theirs during the negotiations and will run with that
qingcharles 3y ago
Adobe not continuing XD seems like them throwing their toys out of the pram. They competed fairly with Canva and built their own, Express, which I think does a very admirable job. No reason why they couldn't have competed fair and square with Figma, and competition is usually good for the end user.
karaterobot 3y ago
Adobe XD was meant to take on Sketch, and failed at that, which meant it was fully two generations behind Figma. They couldn't compete, and as a company they have no capacity for making innovative web design products. They do seem to have a capacity for ruining the ones they buy, so I'm glad this attempt failed.
- DHPersonal 3y ago
  In that time between XD's inception and Figma's buyout attempt, hasn't Sketch caught up to Figma and become a decent competitor to it? I haven't used it in a while because my employer doesn't support it and my freelance work has effectively ended.
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    I don't know, as I stopped using Sketch the day I discovered Figma. Maybe so? I'd be happy about it, because it's nice to have real competition, but it'd be quite an achievement for them to have caught up at this point.
  - jmull 3y ago
    I used Sketch recently and it was a good and effective communication tool between dev, design, client, and pm from my perspective (dev). I assume design too, since it was their choice. I'm not sure what it was missing before, but it seemed to have everything we needed. There were some things missing from the web app that the native app had, but it seemed like that was just the hook to upgrade from the free-tier.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    I don’t know how Sketch compares on the collaboration front, but I still use it a lot personally for three reasons: - It still has a one-time/annual purchase option available - It’s still offline-first, with a fully first-party-documented file format[0] (no lock-in) - It’s suited well for screen-destined vector graphics creation, whereas Figma has a strong prototyping bent to it [0]: https://developer.sketch.com/file-format/ https://developer.sketch.com/file-format/
stronglikedan 3y ago
Well, crap. I just learned XD, since it was included in the Adobe suite that my job provides. I don't need the functionality frequently enough to pay yet another monthly subscription. Man I miss pay-once software.
rhspeer 3y ago
Meh, Mockflow & Lucid Chart consistently deliver better outcomes. Figma is optimized for invoicing & silos. I know these are fightin words for some, but I've personally never seen Figma be a good thing for product goals or the whole team.
sumanthvepa 3y ago
I'm really disappointed for two reasons. First the existence of XD as a competitor kept Figma innovating and the price in check. Now, ironically Figma is the monopoly here! Second I have a creative cloud subscription and XD was good enough for me. Now I have to purchase Figma separately and also pay for Adobe CC because I still need the other software. So much for preserving consumer choice.
- mcmoor 3y ago
  That's exactly what I thought. Do we end up with monopoly after all this time?
zeroq 3y ago
Adobe gave up on web design products right after they bought Macromedia.
jasim 3y ago
It is hard to believe that a company with the expertise of Adobe in graphics programming (Photoshop, Premier, After Effects, Illustrator) cannot build a vector design program. Adobe XD was almost there, and they made some great decisions in nooks and crannies usually forgotten - like bringing in Chrome rendering engineers to build a subset of HTML and CSS for the plugin ecosystem. While there are hundreds of little decisions to be made - from the runtime, text rendering, gpu vs cpu rendering, to how shadows are rendered and line heights are determined - none of these are engineering problems beyond the ken of a good team of systems and graphics engineers and designers, the likes of which Adobe has in spades. The attempt to acquire Figma for such an enormous sum itself felt like a serious decision making mistake, and the final nail in the coffin is the complete abandonment of vector design tools. I would pay good money to read the insider account of the corporate politics inside Adobe that led to all this.
- staplers 3y ago
  It is hard to believe that a company with the expertise of Adobe in graphics programming (Photoshop, Premier, After Effects, Illustrator) cannot build a vector design program. Not for the workers using those tools. Adobe has been coasting for a decade if not more. Probably difficult to see from the outside if you're not directly using it daily.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Moving to a subscription model is largely a symptom of that coasting. They couldn’t consistently come up with compelling reasons to upgrade to new versions of Creative Suite, with users being perfectly happy to run what they had for as many years as possible. They were always going to hit a ceiling on interesting features to implement, but they could’ve sold new CS versions on improvements in stability, performance, responsiveness, and efficiency (things that users care quite a lot about), but that kind of engineering work doesn’t work well with the cheaper model of continuously adding to the ball of mud.
    - omnimus 3y ago
      With the software professional industries really care about (like InDesign) instead of messing with it they instead took approach of never changing it to not upset anyone. And instead of paying 1200usd one time people accepted paying 60usd month rent. I know places that still use CS6 and InDesign CS6 vs the current one is almost indistinguishable software. There are maybe 5 minor new features that anybody cares about in the current one. It's insane that in those 10 years somebody payed adobe over 7k. Users should revolt.
seanwilson 3y ago
I wish Adobe InDesign had more competition for desktop/print publishing as well. Affinity Designer/Publisher seems a popular alternative for Windows and Mac for a one-off cost. Scribus is open source and runs on Linux but I found it hard to use and slow on a modest document. Does anyone know of other good options on Linux? I've seen some posts about Affinity running unofficially in Wine but it seems a risky choice. There's LaTeX but that's not for everyone. Figma isn't open source but at least you can use the web client on Linux. I'm curious if Figma will even get into print design also, as it doesn't seem like they'd need to add that much to support the basics (like CMYK color model and exports for different printer color profiles). Unfortunately, Figma, Adobe and everyone else have the broken incentives to make money by locking teams into expensive subscriptions via closed file formats and a family of products that don't play nice with products from other companies. I recall that Sketch had a documented file format, which Figma used so you could import your Sketch files into Figma to escape Sketch but you can't go the other way. I'm not going be surprised when Figma gets less generous with their free plan in the future now that they have such a strong network effect.
- omnimus 3y ago
  The problem with InDesign is that publishing industry is too small. Most people don't know InDesign but its used to produce practically every single print, book, label, poster ever. Yet it is too small for any company to care about to create competition (except Affinity). Funny thing is InDesign by itself already had most of what you need for digital design tool like Figma (and more). At some point (when InDesign still used to get some new features) responsive ebooks/pdfs were all the rage and InDesign even has "responsive" modes (something Figma doesnt). They wouldn't be able to make it multiplayer but with quite minor tweaks and better positioning InDesign could have been the tool for UI design. Who knows maybe it means Affinity is well positioned to make UI design tool. I know that many designers are starting too see local only software as advantage because their work can't be stolen by upcoming Figma AI designer.
  - seanwilson 3y ago
    > Yet it is too small for any company to care about to create competition (except Affinity). I'm curious about their business model for this. When the Affinity suite is ~$170 one-off cost, I wonder how many they have to sell each year to keep going and how big the market is. If someone is using this software every day as their main way to make money, that's incredibly cheap as well but could they charge more? People hate subscriptions, but paying $100s upfront when it's actually worth it given how much it earns you is unpalatable as well. I'm curious if there's any other approaching to charging. Not suggesting this would work here but for example game engines take a % of the sales generated so you only get charged when you start making money, which avoids upfront costs and subscriptions while you're getting started.
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
I still don't understand (as a DAW author) how there are so many more people doing various graphics tasks on computers, and relatively speaking so few significant apps to do them with, whereas there so many fewer people doing stuff with audio and more than a dozen serious contenders for the toolbox.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  DAW is easier because images and video involve more data?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    120 channels of 96kHz 24 bit audio? Also, images and video have either no timing requirements or very relaxed ones (human perceptual response to missing video frames is minimal; human perceptual response to missing audio deadlines is universal and significant).
    - vegadw 3y ago
      Related: Human sensitivity to "unwanted" noise is impressive. There's a lot of professionally released music out there where the noise floor is high enough to be annoying. Similarly our reaction to lossy codecs not quite preserving quality is usually visceral if we know the track well.
      - PaulHoule 3y ago
        I had a time when I listened to CDs that were ripped and then compressed to 128kbps MP3. One day I had the CD and just listened to it straight on the computer through headphones and was blown away by how much I was missing on the MP3. My take is 192kbps MP3 is a lot better and 320kbps is basically transparent. I got a really great set of Yamaha speakers at our reuse center and, similarly, found a whole new world in some recordings (everything by the Super Furry Animals except their first album) but then found others (anything by Foreigner) sounded just the same as they always did on FM radio.
tamimio 3y ago
But I use XD for more than 3 years now, not just for mockups but also for diagrams and other quick drawing.. now I have to learn figma!
- zigzag312 3y ago
  I've also been looking for a replacement for XD. I decided to try Lunacy instead of Figma and my first impressions are really positive.
  - tamimio 3y ago
    I have never heard about Lunacy, looks promising from their website! How does it compare to XD and can you import XD designs? I will have to try it now XD is abandoned, thanks!
    - zigzag312 3y ago
      No, it doesn't support directly importing XD files. I plan to keep using XD for existing XD projects. https://community.icons8.com/t/conversion-of-adobe-xd-files-to-lunacy-sketch/5168 https://community.icons8.com/t/conversion-of-adobe-xd-files-... Core experience feels similar to XD, but I didn't do deeper dive into it yet, so I cannot say what (if anything) is missing.
m3kw9 3y ago
XD was always half baked even compared to programs like Sketch
m3kw9 3y ago
For most people if you use Mac, I would use Freeform, which is included in the OS as your design till you really need all the power Figma like apps provides. You can do 80% of the stuff without the crap Web UI you are forced to eat
- sgt 3y ago
  Or Keynote, which contains everything Freeform has.
enahs-sf 3y ago
https://archive.is/E31yb https://archive.is/E31yb
michelb 3y ago
Would be nice if Figma worked on their pricing strategy or I fear a lot of companies and freelancers will probably be off-boarding.
legitster 3y ago
I'm ultimately glad Adobe is not going through with the deal, but I can still kinda appreciate the irony in this. Regulators made the deal hard to keep more offerings on the market. In the end... the consumers still lost the choice. They saved patient for it to get hit by a bus. Still, Adobe, why? Why not figure out sooner that you need to kill of your app - maybe before trying to get your purchase of the competitive product through an anti-competitive review?
DonHopkins 3y ago
It's hard to take Adobe XD seriously, because its name is a laughing face emoticon. Or was that the whole point? I can't wait till they ship Adobe 8D, which expands into Adobe 8====D after you play with it for a while.
iambateman 3y ago
I believe this is a minority opinion, but I love XD. It (1) does everything I need, (2) doesn't do things I don't need, (3) is fast and (4) is easy to teach other people. Considering none of this is true of other Adobe products, it's not surprising that the XD product felt "out of place" to their executives. I imagine several SVP's are quietly relieved to see XD hit the bin.
- tjr 3y ago
  I also like XD. I do a little bit of UX design work, and XD feels more intuitive to me than Figma. I still have XD installed as part of Adobe Creative Cloud, and would prefer not to lose it.
- acherion 3y ago
  XD may be good to use from a UX engineer perspective, but from a web developer perspective, it's not so great. I occasionally get XD files from designers that I then have to cut up / develop for in HTML/CSS/JS, and XD does not do this well. Figma on the other hand, seems like it is designed really well with considerations for both designers (creating the designs) and developers (turning the designs into a product / project) alike.
yacine_ 3y ago
Am I crazy? is it really that hard? I built a web design product that rivals figma in a web browser in like a month, and bootstrapped the whole thing lmao
- stoniejohnson 3y ago
  ding ding ding
- j-bos 3y ago
  Care to post an invite code? I see your stuff via nitter, no DMs
  - yacine_ 3y ago
    it's monkey-ohio-wrath good luck hopefully you use it before anyone else does
    - j-bos 3y ago
      Thanks! Love that it just works!
costanzaDynasty 3y ago
I always saw this as Figma looking for a life raft during an uncertain time and Adobe being a whale. Shrewd on both parties part. I'm not surprised it fell through, though I am surprised that they have no plans for this space anymore.
Lorin 3y ago
Just bring back Fireworks - it was brilliant and I still use it for quick day-to-day work.
- spartanatreyu 3y ago
  Fireworks was amazing, but it would utterly fail in today's responsive design environment.

228 points by robin_reala 3y ago

Now Figma can become the de-facto choice for its software category and a merger was proved to be ultimately unnecessary for its survival and was a clear attempt at Adobe trying to buyout their competition because they can't seem to compete. I think overall this is a good thing. Adobe owning Figma isn't a great promise that it would be make Figma better, improve Figma in any way, nor keep Figma on the path of making healthy improvements. I can't blame anyone for seeing $20 Billion dollars upfront and taking the offer, but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? I don't know that I'll ever know the actual answer to this question, but this is a sign to me that no, it didn't, it is building a healthy business as a standalone product. Now Figma can take the $1 billion USD breakup fee and do some amazing work on solidifying their position. I do, as a sense of morbid curiosity, wonder if Adobe has had discussions in their boardroom about buying PenPot

s3r3nity 3y ago
> I can't blame anyone for seeing $20 Billion dollars upfront and taking the offer, but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? It's a great question from a P&L standpoint, but like you said: the board of the company represents the shareholders, and it's likely that $20 billion was a number _far_ above what they viewed the company's value - therefore accepting that type of deal would've made 100% sense to maximize return for those investors. Note that many employees are also shareholders, and therefore would've banked quite a bit of $ if this went through. I think the better questions are: did Adobe _need_ Figma? (We'll see...) and why did Adobe overpay by so much? EDIT: after some quick searching, estimates place the value of Figma at $8-9 billion...making the offer of $20B virtually impossible to reject.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  > I think the better questions are: did Adobe _need_ Figma? (We'll see...) and why did Adobe overpay by so much? Because Figma would have undoubtedly rejected at or near market rates. And regulators were already iffy. Being overly generous, if it still will pay off for you in the end, is a good way to grease a lot of wheels. The best analogy is the person who offers to pay 25k over asking (in a market where that is abnormal) on a house they definitely want to bypass the whole secondary negotiation process.
  - radley 3y ago
    Figma actually did reject many offers at market rates. $20B was too good to pass up, particularly with the $1B cancellation fee.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  IPO is another way to return to shareholders though, as is making a profit and paying a percentage of those profits via dividends to shareholders, which any private company can do, or using those profits to do share buybacks. There's any number of ways to benefit the shareholders. Its not anything you said per se, I'm simply annoyed at the legal maxim that we must maximize shareholder value whenever presented to do so, as long as its not an illegal activity.
  - clintonb 3y ago
    If you give me the option to more than double my money now versus get dividends over the next few years, I'm taking the money now. The goal of most businesses is to make money. Building with a focus on longevity is just one of many ways to achieve that goal.
    - kelnos 3y ago
      That sounds a little like the delayed-gratification experiments where they tell children they can have a single candy bar now, but if they wait a half hour, they can have two. In general I would take the dividend, if the expected value over that time was greater than the immediate lump sum, plus what I might get for investing that lump sum in something over those few years. And in reality it's usually not over just a few years; the dividend is long-term. I'd much rather build something valuable and get steady income from it than build something to flip. Now if the risk of no dividend payout is high enough, I'll take that lump sum. But I feel like those sorts of deals -- huge money now, or very risky, uncertain money over a number of years -- just aren't really a thing that often.
woleium 3y ago
Was this the plan all along? 1B for all that due diligence information seems cheap, i imagine there are a couple of teams rushing to implement at Adobe right now.
- sfilmeyer 3y ago
  This article is about Adobe getting out of this business. I'd think if they were "rushing to implement" they'd keep the existing product around and either integrate things into it or wait to kill it until they have a replacement. Also, while it's not perfect, there tends to be a fair amount of firewalling around that sort of due diligence to keep an acquirer from just ripping everything off with inside information gained in the process.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    > This article is about Adobe getting out of this business. That's an enormous leap from, "We have no plans to further invest in it". It's more likely that they're going to create a new, Sensei-based solution in this category instead of creating yet another Figma-/Sketch-type solution.
    - tough 3y ago
      Yeah that's actually how I read it too, like they found out XD couldn't be savaged after peeking on Figma's internals, and is cheaper/better roi forthem to can that shit and just start from scratch for a collaborative real time environment like figma is build. expecting figma's adobe clone in anything like 6-24 months out
hipadev23 3y ago
> a clear attempt at Adobe trying to buyout their competition because they can't seem to compete. You paint this like it's a bad thing, that's why many acquisitions occur.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  It would have been a bad thing for consumers, which is why it's good that it was blocked by regulators. I don't believe it's always the case that an acquisition of a competitor by a large company is a bad thing, but it would have been in this one for sure. The only problem is that it ruined my optimism about Figma's leadership and direction without actually changing the status quo at all.
- phmqk76 3y ago
  Well it is obviously a bad thing, and goes to the heart of antitrust. US regulators understood this clearly all the way up until Reagan, and his DOJ instituted a paradigm shift that let companies get away with obliterating their competition through acquisitions - instead of assessing whether companies could compete in a healthy market, the focus became solely the impact on consumers. That’s why, under this new-ish paradigm, Amazon is fine, because prices are kept low through monopolistic and monopsonistic effects. The EU has a better enforcement paradigm that says a healthy economy can only exist where new market entrants can also earn a living, even if it means consumer prices aren’t the lowest they could possibly be.
- wisemang 3y ago
  Just because it’s relatively common doesn’t mean it’s good..
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  > You paint this like it's a bad thing, that's why many acquisitions occur. You paint that like it's a good thing.
  - foooorsyth 3y ago
    A lot of founders see it as a good thing -- not everyone wants to stay in the game. Some want a big liquidity event after 10 years of grind and a sale to a large competing company typically yields the biggest windfall.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
> but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? It’s pretty clear Figma in 5-10 years could make photo and video editing products that outperform Adobe and Adobe can’t even make one web product as good as Fireworks was that they killed so yeah no Figma has no need for Adobe. Figma has an outstanding engineering team you can tell just by using the app, Adobes dev team it’s questionable how much of Photoshop and AE they even understand how it works as they so rarely try and fix any of it and when they do they tend to break something. Kinda feel the Photoshop and AE codebases are probably like an ancient untranslated artifact to their current dev team.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I still use Photoshop because I know how to do a lot of things with it but I'd really like to have a similar app which is designed entirely around linear light. (It's not like the 1990s when I was always editing indexed color images) They are still keeping it relevant because of the generative AI features which I often use to touch up photos (remove a spot of grout from a brick wall, then add a row of bricks to center the pictures) I still use Photoshop to print things like https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110607460518784045 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110607460518784045 (where I touched up the bricks) and have 99% control of printing photographic and non-photographic images (more than I can say for Lightroom) although I recently improved my workflow and now I have 100% control (specifically of margins) of printing the back side of my cards https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110662093661611559 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110662093661611559 using a Python script and Epson's printing software. I used to think the neural noise reduction in Lightroom was pretty hot but when I was having trouble w/ shooting indoors Volleyball other photogs told me to try DxO and it was like getting a whole new camera. I like Premier and hypothetically I might want to make and edit a video but it never happens, so I suspect one of these days I am going to give up on Creative Cloud.
  - jcheng 3y ago
    > designed entirely around linear light Can you say more about that? What is “linear light”?
ivanmontillam 3y ago
I can also say Figma avoided Adobe going into "destroy mode" with a similar product. We recognize Adobe XD as incapable, but with Adobe's resources, they'd have thrown enough money until they achieved it. Of course there are exceptions: same cannot be said of Google Video and YouTube.
- drcongo 3y ago
  Adobe could have thrown $40B at it and never made a product to rival Figma because it would have been riddled with Adobe Updater, Adobe Service Manager, Adobe SwitchBoard, AdobeARMservice and all the other crap they force on their users, and nobody would bother. They get away with this kind of user hostility for software they're entrenched in, they'd never get away with it if they were trying to challenge something that's better and doesn't hate its users as much.
  - HlessClaudesman 3y ago
    Yeah I hear what you are saying about services bloat, but the timing of today's XD discontinuance leaves me scratching my head. If this providing a web design / prototyping service was so valuable to Adobe subscribers that Adobe were willing to pay 20 billion for it, surely it must still be worth something to Adobe to prevent subscriber churn today. I don't get why Adobe would abandon a foothold in this corner of design, offering a good enough service is still compelling when bundled when all their other products. Three explanations I can come up with are: 1. Maybe XD was a huge cash hole / or massively underperformed in some other metrics, 2. If Adobe cant dominate a market they take their ball and go home, or 3. Maybe more charitably, Adobe bigwigs still like Figma and have some sort of personal incentives to walk off the pitch and offer their competitor a massive open goal. Is this how corporations are supposed to act?
    - toyg 3y ago
      You just have cause and effect the wrong way around, IMHO. Adobe might have tried to buy Figma precisely because they already knew XD was a dead duck. Announcing it before acquisition talks, however, would have strengthened Figma's hand; so they waited and pulled the plug only after that situation was resolved.
lrivers 3y ago
Adobe has a record of acquiring products and then killing them. Fireworks & Freehand for example.
- smilespray 3y ago
  They also kill good internal products because of infighting. ImageReady was nixed by the Photoshop guys.
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    ImageReady’s tooling (slicing, 2-Up/4-Up Save-for-Web, GIF frame editing, etc) was incorporated directly into Photoshop. It wasn’t “nixed”.
    - smilespray 3y ago
      Of course it was. ImageReady was lean, fast and web-focused. When they killed it you had to buy a PS license and deal with the monolith PS was becoming. If you're making web pages, you don't need CMYK workflows.
      - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
        > ImageReady was lean, fast and web-focused. When they killed it you had to buy a PS license and deal with the monolith PS was becoming. To my knowledge, ImageReady 1.0 was the only version sold standalone - and that was back in 1998; the very next version (in 1999) was sold in-box with Photoshop 5.5 - but the separate ImageReady.exe program was around until 2005 - whereas the way your post is worded implies Adobe were being more customer-hostile than they usually are (hah). I see your point about not needing the weight of Photoshop's print-and-photo tools when web-design folks back then were just wanting a flexible raster image editor - but my recollection of the web-design scene back then was that most web-designers tended to already have a background in print design work (e.g. think about all the print-shops who expanded into website-design in the late-1990s) - so it makes a lot of sense for Adobe to extend their tooling to support the web and "new media" as we called it - rather than create a new tool which would operate on a completely different, "web-first", domain-model (of course, that's exactly what Macromedia did, and they rightfully have their fans for that).
duxup 3y ago
>but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? I've worked a company that was profitable, operated well, growing ... but were sold and the CEO said (I'll get the words not quite right): "I fought for keeping independent and not selling, that's how I've kept that company and I wanted it to stay that way. But the offer was increased into the range where I didn't feel like I could survive a legal challenge (if it came to that) as far as my requirement to do what is best for the shareholders." In the case of that CEO, I believed him (i'm not usually inclined to do so). I could be wrong, of course he made a lot of money, but this guy really did seem like he really did like building companies so to speak and that was more a motivation than anything else. But in his case I think he was right, he couldn't seriously argue that he could likely provide a return to investors even for a decade or more than they could get taking the offer right then and there. It is a problem I always worry about, good businesses are there to return value to the stockholders, it makes sense. But in the face of gobs of cash they must fold.... and so often poorly managed after that and some things are lost. It's a black hole in the free market.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  *good public businesses Private businesses don’t have to do anything and is where you get some of the best companies that exist and care about their customers like Patagonia. https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/gear-news/patagonia-axios-harris-poll-2023/ https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/gear-news/patagon... Maybe it’s the only way out of the enshittification death spiral because there are no shareholders to destroy the company to “create value” for.
  - dyno12345 3y ago
    There is still a fiduciary duty even for private companies
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Private companies often have so few shareholders that you can simply talk to all of them, together.
runako 3y ago
For a company like Figma, the shareholders often include many/all of the employees. Choosing not to take a deal that could net staff retirement money (or realistically in SF: "homeownership money") can also be a bad choice for morale. Consider that many of the employees will have joined the risky startup instead of taking a larger cash compensation at a company like Adobe; helping them get liquid is part of the bargain. This all assumes the company won't go public, the traditional path for companies to generate liquidity and raise capital while remaining independent. For whatever reason, companies like Figma are waiting much longer than historically to go public. HubSpot serves a similar market and went public in 2014 with a valuation near $1B, in a normal IPO with top-tier bankers. It's not a prerequisite for companies to wait until they are $10B-$100B to go public.
burningChrome 3y ago
> but did Figma even need to sell in the first place? My two cents would be no considering they already surpassed and put both Sketch and InVision out of business. They were predictably emboldened to think if they were able to beat out two other competitors, and more and more enterprise companies are moving to their product, taking on Adobe or even sharing the lions share of the market with them wouldn't be that bad. The fact the only remaining real competitor went all in and attempted to buy them was a clear signal Adobe saw them as a threat and were willing to clear out their bank vault to acquire them. Figma rightly played their hand perfectly and not only shut down the offer, but now have a clear path to being the sole software provider in a rapidly dwindling market. My anecdotal evidence would be if you go on LinkedIn or any other job board and start looking at the job descriptions for UI/UX designers, none of them list Sketch, InVision or Adobe XD. Its 100% Figma now. At my current company, everything has been moved to Figma and we've even had several enterprise tools that we're using that integrate with Figma.
paulddraper 3y ago
> did Figma even need to sell in the first place? In order to not bankrupt? No. In order to maximize discounted cash flow? Maybe. Define your objective, get your answer.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  You’re saying the same thing in a different way. Any reason for selling would be a reason. I suspect there is no strongly compelling reason for it other than it was a big offer they couldn’t refuse
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
5 years and Figma is oob.

brycewray 3y ago

https://archive.is/E31yb https://archive.is/E31yb

pjmlp 3y ago

I still remember when Microsoft alongside Adobe, proudly presented Adobe XD at BUILD as one example of UWP applications, and Microsoft Store integration.

DHPersonal 3y ago

Killing Adobe XD because they couldn't buy Figma for $20 billion means to me that they would never have been a good owner for Figma. XD may have not had as many features as Figma, but it was still a decent program and could have been a very good competitor to Figma for far less than the cost of buying out that company. The buy-in of Adobe's subscription model was a compelling reason for my employers to provide only XD to me for my work.

asah 3y ago
Google Video was killed after the YouTube acquisition and YT flourished under Google.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  YouTube was bought mainly because Google Video was failing as a platform. About the only thing it ever offered over YouTube were longform lectures and presentations. Combining the two platforms (e.g. allowing longer videos but using YouTube's social interface) just made YouTube better.
  - silvestrov 3y ago
    Isn't there something about that seeking in movies was only possible in Google Video and not on (original) YouTube? So they ended up with the YouTube frontend and mostly Google Video backend?
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      Yes, modern YouTube's infrastructure inherits more from Google Video than classic YouTube, but the frontend descends from YouTube's (albeit, completely Ship of Theseus'd at this point).
  - jwells89 3y ago
    I was a bit bummed when Google Video was shuttered. In some ways its simple to-the-point UX was nice compared to that of YouTube, which had become cluttered pretty early on. It was also sometimes a backup for when videos on YouTube got taken down.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Related/flipside from last week: Figma Offers Employees Shares and Buyouts After Collapsed Adobe Deal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39133000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39133000

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
htrp 3y ago
> In a companywide note posted to Figma’s Slack work collaboration software channel, reviewed by Forbes, Field also announced a one-time ‘Detach’ program by which any employee could voluntarily depart the company in exchange for three months’ pay. Does this detach program accelerate equity vesting?

htrp 3y ago

Reading between the lines, Adobe fired all of the people who were working on XD when they did the Figma deal.

aabhay 3y ago
Implausible to me. Keeping that team going would put pressure on Figma. My read between the lines is that Adobe negotiated a partnership before ending talks.
Eric_WVGG 3y ago
There's no "between the lines" here, it was discontinued all the way back in June. Dunno why that's headlines today. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/22/23769586/adobe-xd-discontinued-shutting-down-figma-design-app https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/22/23769586/adobe-xd-discont...

jack_riminton 3y ago

Doesn't mean they've given up on a web platform completely, rather they've realised the one they were building on was built on the wrong foundations. Perhaps they even got some insight into how Figma architected theirs during the negotiations and will run with that

qingcharles 3y ago

Adobe not continuing XD seems like them throwing their toys out of the pram. They competed fairly with Canva and built their own, Express, which I think does a very admirable job. No reason why they couldn't have competed fair and square with Figma, and competition is usually good for the end user.

karaterobot 3y ago

Adobe XD was meant to take on Sketch, and failed at that, which meant it was fully two generations behind Figma. They couldn't compete, and as a company they have no capacity for making innovative web design products. They do seem to have a capacity for ruining the ones they buy, so I'm glad this attempt failed.

DHPersonal 3y ago
In that time between XD's inception and Figma's buyout attempt, hasn't Sketch caught up to Figma and become a decent competitor to it? I haven't used it in a while because my employer doesn't support it and my freelance work has effectively ended.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  I don't know, as I stopped using Sketch the day I discovered Figma. Maybe so? I'd be happy about it, because it's nice to have real competition, but it'd be quite an achievement for them to have caught up at this point.
- jmull 3y ago
  I used Sketch recently and it was a good and effective communication tool between dev, design, client, and pm from my perspective (dev). I assume design too, since it was their choice. I'm not sure what it was missing before, but it seemed to have everything we needed. There were some things missing from the web app that the native app had, but it seemed like that was just the hook to upgrade from the free-tier.
- jwells89 3y ago
  I don’t know how Sketch compares on the collaboration front, but I still use it a lot personally for three reasons: - It still has a one-time/annual purchase option available - It’s still offline-first, with a fully first-party-documented file format[0] (no lock-in) - It’s suited well for screen-destined vector graphics creation, whereas Figma has a strong prototyping bent to it [0]: https://developer.sketch.com/file-format/ https://developer.sketch.com/file-format/

stronglikedan 3y ago

Well, crap. I just learned XD, since it was included in the Adobe suite that my job provides. I don't need the functionality frequently enough to pay yet another monthly subscription. Man I miss pay-once software.

rhspeer 3y ago

Meh, Mockflow & Lucid Chart consistently deliver better outcomes. Figma is optimized for invoicing & silos. I know these are fightin words for some, but I've personally never seen Figma be a good thing for product goals or the whole team.

sumanthvepa 3y ago

I'm really disappointed for two reasons. First the existence of XD as a competitor kept Figma innovating and the price in check. Now, ironically Figma is the monopoly here! Second I have a creative cloud subscription and XD was good enough for me. Now I have to purchase Figma separately and also pay for Adobe CC because I still need the other software. So much for preserving consumer choice.

mcmoor 3y ago
That's exactly what I thought. Do we end up with monopoly after all this time?

zeroq 3y ago

Adobe gave up on web design products right after they bought Macromedia.

jasim 3y ago

It is hard to believe that a company with the expertise of Adobe in graphics programming (Photoshop, Premier, After Effects, Illustrator) cannot build a vector design program. Adobe XD was almost there, and they made some great decisions in nooks and crannies usually forgotten - like bringing in Chrome rendering engineers to build a subset of HTML and CSS for the plugin ecosystem. While there are hundreds of little decisions to be made - from the runtime, text rendering, gpu vs cpu rendering, to how shadows are rendered and line heights are determined - none of these are engineering problems beyond the ken of a good team of systems and graphics engineers and designers, the likes of which Adobe has in spades. The attempt to acquire Figma for such an enormous sum itself felt like a serious decision making mistake, and the final nail in the coffin is the complete abandonment of vector design tools. I would pay good money to read the insider account of the corporate politics inside Adobe that led to all this.

staplers 3y ago
It is hard to believe that a company with the expertise of Adobe in graphics programming (Photoshop, Premier, After Effects, Illustrator) cannot build a vector design program. Not for the workers using those tools. Adobe has been coasting for a decade if not more. Probably difficult to see from the outside if you're not directly using it daily.
- jwells89 3y ago
  Moving to a subscription model is largely a symptom of that coasting. They couldn’t consistently come up with compelling reasons to upgrade to new versions of Creative Suite, with users being perfectly happy to run what they had for as many years as possible. They were always going to hit a ceiling on interesting features to implement, but they could’ve sold new CS versions on improvements in stability, performance, responsiveness, and efficiency (things that users care quite a lot about), but that kind of engineering work doesn’t work well with the cheaper model of continuously adding to the ball of mud.
  - omnimus 3y ago
    With the software professional industries really care about (like InDesign) instead of messing with it they instead took approach of never changing it to not upset anyone. And instead of paying 1200usd one time people accepted paying 60usd month rent. I know places that still use CS6 and InDesign CS6 vs the current one is almost indistinguishable software. There are maybe 5 minor new features that anybody cares about in the current one. It's insane that in those 10 years somebody payed adobe over 7k. Users should revolt.

seanwilson 3y ago

I wish Adobe InDesign had more competition for desktop/print publishing as well. Affinity Designer/Publisher seems a popular alternative for Windows and Mac for a one-off cost. Scribus is open source and runs on Linux but I found it hard to use and slow on a modest document. Does anyone know of other good options on Linux? I've seen some posts about Affinity running unofficially in Wine but it seems a risky choice. There's LaTeX but that's not for everyone. Figma isn't open source but at least you can use the web client on Linux. I'm curious if Figma will even get into print design also, as it doesn't seem like they'd need to add that much to support the basics (like CMYK color model and exports for different printer color profiles). Unfortunately, Figma, Adobe and everyone else have the broken incentives to make money by locking teams into expensive subscriptions via closed file formats and a family of products that don't play nice with products from other companies. I recall that Sketch had a documented file format, which Figma used so you could import your Sketch files into Figma to escape Sketch but you can't go the other way. I'm not going be surprised when Figma gets less generous with their free plan in the future now that they have such a strong network effect.

omnimus 3y ago
The problem with InDesign is that publishing industry is too small. Most people don't know InDesign but its used to produce practically every single print, book, label, poster ever. Yet it is too small for any company to care about to create competition (except Affinity). Funny thing is InDesign by itself already had most of what you need for digital design tool like Figma (and more). At some point (when InDesign still used to get some new features) responsive ebooks/pdfs were all the rage and InDesign even has "responsive" modes (something Figma doesnt). They wouldn't be able to make it multiplayer but with quite minor tweaks and better positioning InDesign could have been the tool for UI design. Who knows maybe it means Affinity is well positioned to make UI design tool. I know that many designers are starting too see local only software as advantage because their work can't be stolen by upcoming Figma AI designer.
- seanwilson 3y ago
  > Yet it is too small for any company to care about to create competition (except Affinity). I'm curious about their business model for this. When the Affinity suite is ~$170 one-off cost, I wonder how many they have to sell each year to keep going and how big the market is. If someone is using this software every day as their main way to make money, that's incredibly cheap as well but could they charge more? People hate subscriptions, but paying $100s upfront when it's actually worth it given how much it earns you is unpalatable as well. I'm curious if there's any other approaching to charging. Not suggesting this would work here but for example game engines take a % of the sales generated so you only get charged when you start making money, which avoids upfront costs and subscriptions while you're getting started.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

I still don't understand (as a DAW author) how there are so many more people doing various graphics tasks on computers, and relatively speaking so few significant apps to do them with, whereas there so many fewer people doing stuff with audio and more than a dozen serious contenders for the toolbox.

PaulHoule 3y ago
DAW is easier because images and video involve more data?
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  120 channels of 96kHz 24 bit audio? Also, images and video have either no timing requirements or very relaxed ones (human perceptual response to missing video frames is minimal; human perceptual response to missing audio deadlines is universal and significant).
  - vegadw 3y ago
    Related: Human sensitivity to "unwanted" noise is impressive. There's a lot of professionally released music out there where the noise floor is high enough to be annoying. Similarly our reaction to lossy codecs not quite preserving quality is usually visceral if we know the track well.
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      I had a time when I listened to CDs that were ripped and then compressed to 128kbps MP3. One day I had the CD and just listened to it straight on the computer through headphones and was blown away by how much I was missing on the MP3. My take is 192kbps MP3 is a lot better and 320kbps is basically transparent. I got a really great set of Yamaha speakers at our reuse center and, similarly, found a whole new world in some recordings (everything by the Super Furry Animals except their first album) but then found others (anything by Foreigner) sounded just the same as they always did on FM radio.

tamimio 3y ago

But I use XD for more than 3 years now, not just for mockups but also for diagrams and other quick drawing.. now I have to learn figma!

zigzag312 3y ago
I've also been looking for a replacement for XD. I decided to try Lunacy instead of Figma and my first impressions are really positive.
- tamimio 3y ago
  I have never heard about Lunacy, looks promising from their website! How does it compare to XD and can you import XD designs? I will have to try it now XD is abandoned, thanks!
  - zigzag312 3y ago
    No, it doesn't support directly importing XD files. I plan to keep using XD for existing XD projects. https://community.icons8.com/t/conversion-of-adobe-xd-files-to-lunacy-sketch/5168 https://community.icons8.com/t/conversion-of-adobe-xd-files-... Core experience feels similar to XD, but I didn't do deeper dive into it yet, so I cannot say what (if anything) is missing.

m3kw9 3y ago

XD was always half baked even compared to programs like Sketch

m3kw9 3y ago

For most people if you use Mac, I would use Freeform, which is included in the OS as your design till you really need all the power Figma like apps provides. You can do 80% of the stuff without the crap Web UI you are forced to eat

sgt 3y ago
Or Keynote, which contains everything Freeform has.

enahs-sf 3y ago

https://archive.is/E31yb https://archive.is/E31yb

michelb 3y ago

Would be nice if Figma worked on their pricing strategy or I fear a lot of companies and freelancers will probably be off-boarding.

legitster 3y ago

I'm ultimately glad Adobe is not going through with the deal, but I can still kinda appreciate the irony in this. Regulators made the deal hard to keep more offerings on the market. In the end... the consumers still lost the choice. They saved patient for it to get hit by a bus. Still, Adobe, why? Why not figure out sooner that you need to kill of your app - maybe before trying to get your purchase of the competitive product through an anti-competitive review?

DonHopkins 3y ago

It's hard to take Adobe XD seriously, because its name is a laughing face emoticon. Or was that the whole point? I can't wait till they ship Adobe 8D, which expands into Adobe 8====D after you play with it for a while.

iambateman 3y ago

I believe this is a minority opinion, but I love XD. It (1) does everything I need, (2) doesn't do things I don't need, (3) is fast and (4) is easy to teach other people. Considering none of this is true of other Adobe products, it's not surprising that the XD product felt "out of place" to their executives. I imagine several SVP's are quietly relieved to see XD hit the bin.

tjr 3y ago
I also like XD. I do a little bit of UX design work, and XD feels more intuitive to me than Figma. I still have XD installed as part of Adobe Creative Cloud, and would prefer not to lose it.
acherion 3y ago
XD may be good to use from a UX engineer perspective, but from a web developer perspective, it's not so great. I occasionally get XD files from designers that I then have to cut up / develop for in HTML/CSS/JS, and XD does not do this well. Figma on the other hand, seems like it is designed really well with considerations for both designers (creating the designs) and developers (turning the designs into a product / project) alike.

yacine_ 3y ago

Am I crazy? is it really that hard? I built a web design product that rivals figma in a web browser in like a month, and bootstrapped the whole thing lmao

stoniejohnson 3y ago
ding ding ding
j-bos 3y ago
Care to post an invite code? I see your stuff via nitter, no DMs
- yacine_ 3y ago
  it's monkey-ohio-wrath good luck hopefully you use it before anyone else does
  - j-bos 3y ago
    Thanks! Love that it just works!

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

I always saw this as Figma looking for a life raft during an uncertain time and Adobe being a whale. Shrewd on both parties part. I'm not surprised it fell through, though I am surprised that they have no plans for this space anymore.

Lorin 3y ago

Just bring back Fireworks - it was brilliant and I still use it for quick day-to-day work.

spartanatreyu 3y ago
Fireworks was amazing, but it would utterly fail in today's responsive design environment.