What Figma plans to do inside Adobe | Hacker News Reader

What Figma plans to do inside Adobe

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What a non-interview.

I’m not expecting Adobe to kill Figma or raise the price overnight. I’m not angry about any of that, I’m angry that I’ve now built team workflows around a product that means I have to pay money to a company that doesn’t spend it on making products better and relies on vendor lock-in to propagate.

Could have asked if they think selling to Adobe has limited the potential of what Figma could accomplish. Could have asked about how users who supported them as a solution against Adobe might feel betrayed.

But you didn’t. Great journalism guys.

Both those questions could, and would, be answered with the usual “trust us, it’ll be great!!” message that every acquisition announcement contains.

I've repeatedly heard the sentiment from interviewers that it's not worth the time asking questions you know you won't get an answer to. As a sibling noted, both of your questions can reasonably fall into that category.

Not disagreeing, just lamenting the sad state of journalism nowadays, at least as I perceive it.

I’d have to ask why even do the interview at all then. Like I can save everyone involved a lot of time and just imagine the interview if you’re not gonna ask a difficult question.

I assume it is PR. Previously, broadcasters and their journalists held some bargaining power in interviews such that in exchange for being able to access a broad population, the interviewee would be willing to subject themselves to the journalist’s questions.

The internet kind of obviated that role, so now there is no need for an interviewee to subject themselves to questions they do not want, because they can reach everyone they want at no cost by putting up a blog post on their website.

Bingo. Discard this so-called interview as a fluff piece. It provides no signal.

Sometimes the lack of an answer can be just as telling, making it still worth asking even if they won't answer the question directly.

A good interviewer would then ask follow up questions to either get a straight answer or highlight the absence thereof. Unfortunately, much of the mainstream tech "journalism" is just repackaged press releases written by people hoping to get hired by the very same companies that they "report" on. Thence the softball questions and toothless interviews all in an effort to not upset any potential future employers.

I believe Matt Stoller, who studies and writes about monopolies is collecting feedback about the effects of this merger on professionals in the industry [0].

From the sound of it you could be a valuable voice in there. The merger will probably have to go through approval in DC. Perhaps if sufficient evidence is collected it could be blocked in accordance with anti-trust law. He wrote about how there is a heap of evidence about Adobe’s history of mergers and acquisitions which only lead to reduction of consumer choice.

[0] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/should-the-government-blo...

I can't understand why the Figma purchase isn't being blocked for antitrust. Have we learned nothing??

Definitely over the past two years antitrust went from a niché topic that nobody knew anything about to front page news. Something definitely did change.

With Lina Khan heading FTC antitrust and public sentiment on board I think we can expect real progress in the coming years. However, it is also clear that discrete and methodical protection of monopoly power is also significant source of stability and income for all political parties.

> Could have asked if they think selling to Adobe has limited the potential of what Figma could accomplish. Could have asked about how users who supported them as a solution against Adobe might feel betrayed.

Well, it's a business, not a non-profit.

In business everything is for sale at any moment in time, if the price is high enough. Especially, when there are multiple shareholders with different goals.

As an entrepreneur he simply did his job: he built an extremely valuable company and took the best deal he could probably get for it.

Maybe a few years later he won't even be with Adobe anymore. Just like the founders of Instagram and Whatsapp are no longer with Meta.

Building tools to dethrone Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects IS a good business though. You’ve essentially swapped just over 1 year of Adobe revenue for a quick exit instead of building the system that delivers $15B+ yearly by dethroning them.

Claiming this is a good move is the same as claiming selling the iPhone or Android to Nokia for short term profit would have been a good business move.

Lots of people shared the same sentiment you just did about Instagram selling to FB. Look at them now, if IG had continued alone the idea to sell to FB would be a joke at this point.

> Claiming this is a good move is the same as claiming selling the iPhone or Android to Nokia for short term profit would have been a good business move.

There is no objective “good” or “bad” move. If the owner feels like selling and that helps them meet their goals in life, then that is “good” for them. If iPhone or Android owners want to bet they can usurp Nokia and want to take on more risk, then that is “good” for them.

Or maybe they just sold RiM or HTC at the peak. Certainty has significant value.

> You’ve essentially swapped just over 1 year of Adobe revenue for a quick exit instead of building the system that delivers $15B+ yearly by dethroning them.

The question for Figma was, if they would ever reach $20B+ market cap after an IPO, and how long it would take them to do so.

The decision to sell to Adobe was surely based on many calculations. Just like Whatsapp's decision to sell to Facebook for $19B.

> Claiming this is a good move is the same as claiming selling the iPhone or Android to Nokia for short term profit would have been a good business move.

Android Inc. was a company sold to Google in 2005 for short term profit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His...

Where would Android be now without the backing of Google? Where would iPhone be now without the backing of Apple?

> Lots of people shared the same sentiment you just did about Instagram selling to FB. Look at them now, if IG had continued alone the idea to sell to FB would be a joke at this point.

There are multiple accounts of how many resources, human capital, and know-how Facebook put into Instagram to scale it. The same can be said about YouTube in the hands of Google.

You would probably say, that selling Vine to Twitter was a great decision, because it got eventually shut down as being worthless. But look at where Bytedance is with TikTok now.

> As an entrepreneur he simply did his job: he built an extremely valuable company and took the best deal he could probably get for it.

Sorry, but: no.

There are many ways to work in the world, and certainly one way is to be an amoral mercenary in search of profit.

But if you think "the job" of the entrepreneur is simply to have a good exit, well the world would be gravely impoverished if entrepreneurs in general shared your view.

The fact that many of the acquiring companies in these stores are still largely controlled by their founders is telling.

> But if you think "the job" of the entrepreneur is simply to have a good exit, well the world would be gravely impoverished if entrepreneurs in general shared your view.

The job of an entrepreneur is to calculate everything and to make the right decision in every situation.

There could be many reasons behind the decision to sell to Adobe for $20B:

– Maybe reaching the $20B market cap after an IPO would have taken a very long time for Figma on its own;

– Maybe were was an extremely high risk of Adobe acquiring another competitor or building a competitive product in-house;

– Maybe the investors wanted the have an exit now, 10 years after the company's creation;

– Maybe the founders had other ideas they wanted to work after their vesting with Adobe expires.

> The fact that many of the acquiring companies in these stores are still largely controlled by their founders is telling.

For some companies the right exit is IPO, for others – acquisitions. But if they took any money from investors, they must have an exit.

You're right, my comment was overblown (night-posting) and I wasn't even reacting to the Figma acquisition but rather to the general implication that entrepreneurs should want money as opposed to wanting to create a good thing (like Figma!) in the world. In the best case they want both.

I wish both Figma and Adobe well, and I hope they do cool stuff together.

How often have seen that speech of “we are going to stay autonomous!” , probably way too many times. As soon as hard time hits, or the current leadership changes, that goes right out the window.

I understand the lure of a big pile of money, surely. It probably creates a lot of opportunities for Figma in the short run, but long term I feel it will be Macromedia all over again.

Currently going through this.

"We'll have lots of autonomy", "they want to learn for us as much as we learn from them", etc. A year down the line and our founders have left and we've been gutted of anything that made us a special place to work and it's all going to hell in a handcart. My perfect job at the best place I've ever worked has turned incredibly sour post-aquisition. We had so much potential and it's been utterly screwed.

I'd love to know if there has ever been an acquisition like this that has turned out how they claim it will.

I’m so sorry to hear. I went through something similar, as a founder. All the promises were forgotten, even the ones we wrote into contracts. Especially the ones about supporting development of our complementary product. It was absolutely crushing.

Ouch, that sucks! It’s hard to find a good company/fit. Only about 1/4 of companies is a pleasant environment in my experience. It takes a while to find a new good one. Hope you do find it, could you contact the old founders perhaps and see what they are up to?

Long-term we're expecting to have to move away from Figma because, you know, Adobe. Whatever they say now isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

There doesn’t seem to be much new in here, but it’s good to hear Dylan’s perspective. I really hope Figma find a way of transforming Adobe from the inside.

I’m still pained by the Adobe/Macromedia acquisition. Fireworks was the best UI, and arguably “screen” focused, graphic design tool of the time. So much better in every way than Photoshop (because thats not what it was trying to be!), but Adobe couldn’t see that, thought they were competing products, and killed it.

If Adobe had kept Fireworks, invested in it, and eventually added the UI focus and collaboration feature of newer products they would continue to own this market.

Fireworks is the true predecessor to products like Figma and Sketch.

I fear Adobe are not particularly good at seeing how a new product tailored to a new design pragmam doesn’t compete with the older products. Reinvention is good! Maybe this is the start of them approaching that differently.

I hate to be the pessimist but I suspect it has never happened and why would it? To allow Figma to bring their culture into Adobe will mean massive changes to a lot of people who have been doing a terrible job for years, it will mean power shifting, it will mean older people accepting that the world has changed and they aren't worth their inflated salaries any more.

Even if they wanted to, I doubt they could change, these things just don't scale. 26K employees, most will just carry on doing what they do.

I think the best way to run any of these things is to keep Figma at arms length. Own it, yes, but let them carry on doing what they are already doing well. Don't force them to make their product more enterprise friendly otherwise they will start doing loads of one-offs, complicating it, basically turning it into Creative Suite.

> it will mean older people accepting that the world has changed and they aren't worth their inflated salaries any more.

Kind of a sideline - but very worried to see this combination of ageism and the "we're hiring" in your profile.

As an “older” person I think you’re right to call this out, but perhaps a more generous reading would suggest “old timer” rather than “elderly”; as in, the people who have been at Adobe for years, and underlie the culture that gives us the Adobe of today.

For those that don’t know Fireworks was essentially Sketch 10 years earlier. Adobe had a tool with vector based bitmap graphics creation and non destructive styling. That could how multiple pages, states and a basic form of component all in 1 file with one click export to flats.

Adobe didn’t understand their own software or users so killed it to try and force us to use a painting/photography tool for UI layouts.

Makes this all a cruel joke for those of us who used it daily then moved to Sketch then moved to Figma.

If any Figma are interested in an alternative, try the free & open source alternative Penpot (https://penpot.app/). I like it and the team behind it (Kaleidos) always does great work (I love their JIRA alternative Taiga to bits).

More content… so we can extract more money from existing customers… yay

Meanwhile the race is still on to merge real actual code components back into the design tools, and out again as workable screens. The first one to properly crack that nut is going to snatch so much market share. I thought it would be figma since they did auto layout but they don’t seem that interested in the code side

Do you mean HTML/CSS/JS ?

If so that's a very very difficult task to do.

You would essentially have to offer the entire tech stack for that to work. Like all of them. Like every lang, framework and library there is.

Funnily enough it was Dreamweaver that sort of had a functioning system for that. Until it became a bloated mess post acquisition.

https://pinegrow.com/ is also interesting in that regard.

Transforming adobe from the inside is about as likely as Boba Fett transforming the Sarlacc from the inside. Instead of being slowly digested.

I see a lot of negative comments here, but is Adobe really that bad? Photoshop isn't a perfect application and the creative cloud bulk it comes with can be a bit irritating, but it's still an incredibly powerful market-leading application. The AI editing features they've added in recent years have been great and I've also found their iPad version of the application to be surprisingly good.

I guess what I'm saying is that while Figma might get some additional bulk I don't think it's fair to assume the product will stagnate under Adobe? They're paying a lot for Figma in an attempt to secure their market position, given that I doubt they plan to push people away from the product. I understand the apprehension, but it seems a little premature to me?

My guess is that people are fearing that they’ll just roll it into creative cloud and try to shove all the other crap down their throats.

We are just starting to use Figma now. We might consider penpot but the community content around Figma wins. Can figma files/assets/components be imported into penpot?

This feature for Penpot is now their #1 priority, they said that they'll be available soon.

Installing CC immediately cripples your machine and it can’t ever be uninstalled. The only course of action is throwing it on a good old plague pyre.

You can’t cancel your Adobe subscription without sacrificing your first born.

Fireworks was dead the moment they bought it. PS always was shite for UIs. AI was good, but Sketch crushed it. XD is a bad joke. Adobe is utterly hopeless at this. I can’t see Figma carrying its momentum for more than 5 years.

So of course there’s a lot of negativity in here.

> Installing CC immediately cripples your machine and it can’t ever be uninstalled.

Yeah, it sucks, I get why people don't like it, but I've also never had a machine "crippled" by CC.

> You can’t cancel your Adobe subscription without sacrificing your first born.

It's a nightmare to cancel a lot of subscriptions. The Amazon Prime cancelation process is hilariously obstructive.

> Fireworks was dead the moment they bought it.

Yeah, that was a shame. I used to like Fireworks. It also felt like a product without a good market fit to me though.

> PS always was shite for UIs.

It's called "photo"shop for a reason. I don't think they optimise Photoshop for UI design. It's absolutely great for photo editing.

> AI was good, but Sketch crushed it.

I guess there is where I don't have enough experience to comment. I still use AI, but my graphic design friends do seem to prefer Sketch these days.

> XD is a bad joke. Adobe is utterly hopeless at this. I can’t see Figma carrying its momentum for more than 5 years.

Fair enough. I guess I just don't see all Adobe software as terrible and I'd argue lot of it is pretty good or at least competitive with competitor products on the market. My main issue with them is the bloat. Unless you need several CC applications you're often better going with something else because of all the crap they'll install in addition to the one application you need.

I guess as an example here, 5 years ago I used to use Notepad++ to write JS, then I used Atom, now I use VSCode. Things change quickly in the tech. The fact that Adobe products fail really isn't all that surprising. Is there any software you used 15+ years ago that you still use today? I think the difference with Adobe is that people attach their brand to those product failures and say, well if `x` failed why won't `y`? But I don't think it's entirely Adobe's fault, it's more a result of them operating in a very competitive space where things are changing quickly.

> Installing CC immediately cripples your machine and it can’t ever be uninstalled.

My multiple computers from which I uninstalled CC would beg to differ.

Photoshop is Adobe’s flagship application so it’s probably not what you’d want to look at as a comparison. I’d look at the current status of all the products they bought from Macromedia (which were all wildly popular at the time) to get an idea of where people’s concerns lie.

Did the Macromedia products die because of Adobe or because the market shifted? The iPhone, somewhat famously, never ran Flash for example. Things like Dreamweaver and ColdFusion were cool at the time, but fell out of favor with accelerating web standards.

Accelerating web standards are not why Dreamweaver fell out of favor. Adobe could have accelerated Dreamweaver to keep up, but it didn’t. They abandoned it and it fell behind.

Same with Fireworks, which did what Figma does in a more basic and client-side way. Again: Adobe let it fall behind the marketplace and that is why it failed.

Flash, ironically, did advance and is used today in professional animation. Bojack Horseman (for example) was animated in Flash.

I think the move to subscription really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Many people didn't want or need the features that added the subscription value, so they felt cheated.

Personally, I'm ok with the subscription because I already upgraded LR every year. I use LR on all my devices, syncing photos and edits. It's great when I'm shooting on a trip, and can import photos on my iPad and start proofing, then they are already available on the computer when I get home. And you're right, the AI editing features are getting very good.

But, for the person who was using LR to edit their family vacation photos once or twice year, the move to subscription was not a good value.

My spouse is a designer and Adobe has her locked in. To be active in the market she must personally pay a monthly fee and the software she needs most is Adobe Indesign (for print publishing). This software has drastically gone downhill in quality, but there are no viable alternatives. The situation is bizarre, because older veteran print designers keep old laptops alive with old versions of Indesign. Meanwhile she isn’t even sure whether her project will blow up or render/print the way it’s supposed to. It boggles my mind how something so big and so simple doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to in 2022.

You’re probably not upset because it’s just photoshop for you. But specialists like her feel like they will end up paying more for even shittier buggier tools.

The Affinity Suite of tools (competitors to PS, IL, ID) are very much great alternatives to the Adobe ecosystem. Pricing is significantly less too.

> is Adobe really that bad?

No. Adobe is worse than that.

https://news.hitb.org/content/adobe-denies-responsibility-dm...

So are there Figma clones? If not, how many teams are starting on one right now? :)

Why are they allowing this acquisition? This is anticompetitive.

Who is "they"

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/antitrust-division

Isn’t it “what Adobe plans to do inside Figma”?

No?

That would be "what Adobe plans to do with Figma", as opposed to what figma plans to do as a part of the Adobe org, which is what the headline means.

In this title, Figma probably refers to the company, not the software product.

The fate of all acquisitions.

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