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Comment by unstrategic | Hacker News Reader

Figma was never on track to change the world. They were an Adobe clone from the beginning, out-executing them, but fundamentally exactly as anti-innovative.

Not that $20B is anything to shake a stick at — but real innovation in this market will be worth one to two orders of magnitude more. Figma was scratching at this with their "whole org collab" vision and FigJam, but they lacked the vision to crack it, and their execution has been faltering since their early talent started jumping ship. Selling to a desperate Adobe, distressed by public markets, is the perfect chance to "fail up."

Why am I disappointed in Figma? Because they could have been so much more. Because in effect, they have held the creative world back by doubling down & cashing in on Adobe's corruption of design tooling. Play Adobe games, win Adobe prizes. It's just a shit game, and peanuts compared to latent opportunity in this space.

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Figma literally changed my world so I couldn't disagree more.

Today I have +800 users and +100 editors in my Figma system; copy writers, ux, ui, ur, pm's, analysts, bizz, everyone, is collaborating like I have never seen in any Adobe setup.

Adobe hasn't even been a contender, meanwhile Figma won over Sketch and Invision as well. So while I agree that they are still missing some features, especially for shared design systems, then I don't understand your view, care to elaborate?

So they made a slightly better Adobe.

Figma is all about collaborating on software — yet they don't touch software. They have been incrementally innovative in involving design-adjacent stakeholders in the design process, but the elephant in room is "how do we collaborate on _software itself_," rather than pictures of software?

When you have copywriters, designers, managers, and biz making pull requests to a Github repo via a design tool — that will be world-changing. This COULD have been our world already, but this paradigm is against Adobe's entrenched interests. Figma just played Adobe's game, and netted a cool $20B for it.

"but fundamentally exactly as anti-innovative."

Would love to hear more about this thought. Disclaimer: figma employee.

When Adobe acquired Macromedia, they extinguished an entire paradigm of design tool: "design tools that create software." Back in the booming 90's, this paradigm was _the future_.

Through that acquisition, Adobe shoe-horned the world into a paradigm of "hand-offs," and Figma's leadership (namely, Sho) doubled down on the "hand-off" vision. "Play Adobe games."

The future for collaborating on software design & build looks more like Flash, and less like Photoshop (though obviously, not quite like either.) "Exactly as anti-innovative."

This felt like a lot of words with little substance. What is the "hand-off" vision?

"Hand-off" describes a paradigm of designer/developer collaboration where a designer creates a mock-up or prototype, then "hands off" that picture to a developer who then creates the "real thing."

Hand-offs are wildly inefficient, and the fidelity of creativity & artistic expression gets largely butchered on its way into the final medium.

Contrast with a design tool like Webflow, Flash, HyperCard, or Visual Basic, where the product of the design process is production software. Figma could have gone down this route — a harder route, admittedly, but ripe for innovation — and they chose not to.[1]

Good for them: $20B. Bad for the world.

[1] Sho's vision is that design _should_ live in a separate world, and that hand-offs are the ideal form of collaboration — because they enable design to be unfettered by the constraints of production software. I would call this a failure of imagination: it is quite possible to explore free-form design ideas within and around production software: c.f. Macromedia Flash.

> but real innovation in this market will be worth one to two orders of magnitude more.

200 billion, maybe. $2 trillion? Maybe with 10% inflation for a few more years.

Sure, $2T — a fundamental innovation in how we "design and build" software has implications as far-reaching as the World Wide Web itself. Google IS the World Wide Web — they have previously broken a $2T market cap.

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