T-Mobile famously got a $4B breakup fee after DOJ blocked ATT from acquiring them. That $4B was used to buy more spectrum and overhaul the brand, leading to huge growth to the point that T-Mobile is now a big 3 player (it used to be big 2 only).
If Figma wrangles $2-3B cash out of this, they could probably take down the entire adobe ecosystem.
Do you think that just $2-3B would be enough to push for developing alternatives to at least Photoshop and Illustrator and Lightroom and After Effects and successfully going after their markets? During what timeframe? Doesn’t feel like it tbh.
There are alternatives out there and Figma has a huge grip on web design among other things. Adobe has nothing good for web design. Nobody wants to use XD.
So you can see that there is already strong push away from Adobe. I don't know if Figma is going to eat Adobe's lunch in the next couple years, but they will be poised to be competitive.
Affinity is looking pretty attractive now too after hearing about it today.
I cut my teeth on Macromedia Fireworks and Dreamweaver but all Adobe did was run them into the ground.
Affinity Photo is a pretty good Photoshop replacement, but I'm still waiting for them to release a Lightroom replacement.
Lord knows someone needs to start eating Adobe's lunch. They've had a stranglehold for too long.
They acquired Macromedia dreamweaver back in the day and killed it. RIP to a fallen hero.
Prior to moving to Figma 100% of the time, my current agency, and prior agency, were using Sketch. Adobe products were secondary. Others in my field have reported largely the same. Most of the time people simply don't want to change what's familiar and works, regardless of how much they are paying or who they are paying.
Where I work we dropped Adobe Pro because of the subscription model and switched over to FoxIT
I’m not saying Adobe’s looking at a similar collapse, but trends can be misleading.
Procreate is f**king amazing.
The combination of the 12-inch (or, in my case, Mini) iPad (with PaperLike screen protector), Pencil 2, and Procreate is awesome.
Adobe has intellectual property, not innovation.
My business would dump 50% of our Adobe footprint just for leverage.
Interesting detail about the prior 2014 Softbank/Sprint bid to acquire T-Mobile:
> "It was reported that... Sprint had insisted on a low termination fee to prevent regulators from being given an incentive to block the deal, as had occurred with AT&T's failed attempt to purchase T-Mobile."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merger_of_Sprint_Corporation_a...
Unless you’re asking why a small fee would hurt a small company. In that case my understanding is that acquisition talks really stall the business and defocus the company for a non trivial amount of time, not to mention that you’ve given a rival deep insights into your business that they can then use to go after you.
The US now only has three nationwide cellphone networks so there are lots of concessions that can reasonably be demanded. (They should have never allowed the number of carriers to be consolidated down to three, but that's another story).
I think you highly underestimates how much lock-in adobe has (and intentionally pushed, e.g. by doing what they can to prevent other programs from parsing their file formats, similar to what Microsoft used to do but fortunately no longer does).