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Comment by kolbe | Hacker News Reader

Adobe's stock is down 17% on the news. So, it's bad for consumers. Bad for Adobe. Probably only good for the ego of a few executives and investment bankers.

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17% is huge. That means the market values Adobe as worth 26B less than yesterday [0], which is more than the acquisition price of 20B.

They also released quarterly earnings today, but those beat the market’s expectations. What’s going on?

[0] market cap = 144B * 17% = 26B

There is a lot more to earnings than market expectations, mostly guidance. And it was fairly bad.

Also this is being reacted too negatively, they are paying a HUGE price for a company that only has a AAR of 400 million a year.

They may have considered that by bundling Figma's functionality into their cloud subscription, with the number of new subscribers that would bring, that revenue attributable to that added functionality would be much more than 400 million annually.

It would need to be much, much more than 400 million to justify the purchase, and I'm not sure numbers of that size will ever materialize.

Another way to look at it is, what amount of investment would Adobe need to make to bring equivalent functionality in-house. Certainly less than 20 billion, by an order of magnitude at least. But then you have to wait, and manage with inspiration and dedication, and possibly fail. Not for the faint of heart.

They lowered their forecast.

Also just a horrible and desperate play.

good for figma employees, founders and investors

My guess is there are a lot of Figma employees who would rather not be working for Adobe, regardless of whatever incentives they get in the deal. It's hard to overstate how little regard software designers have for Adobe.

It gives me whiplash to see Sean Parent's deeply technical public talks on Adobe's experiences with C++, and Adobe's disdain for customers (and presumably other programmers' disdain for Adobe).

I’m sure they’ll totally fine with in as they cash their massive checks.

Why do you assume they all get massive checks? Why do you assume they're as materialistic and indifferent to the quality of their work as you?

Well they wont all be massive now that mostly VCs and sometimes founders soak up all the benefits from an acquisition before the regular employees get much.

50x revenue would be plenty to go around, no?

These barbarians probably deposit their pay checks instead of ripping them up too.

Well, good for the founders and investors anyways, who knows how many employees had meaningful holdings that outweigh the hurt of being integrated into Adobe

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