Only way Adobe could justify this is that it kills a dangerous competitor, which is what EU legislation is supposed to stop..
I mean, that's exactly what my post above is saying. Figma has inherent tech advantages via their cloud-native stack. You can use the tools anywhere there is a browser. It's significantly more intuitive and easier to collaborate with multiple people. Their applications can eventually be accelerated server side such as GPU-farm acceleration for AI features. Figma is also building a community for sharing work, like the Github of design.
There's nothing really stopping Figma from creating a competitor to Adobe Cloud Suite including Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and InDesign.
Well you said:
> This means Adobe might actually have to pay a little bit more for Figma if they acquired them now.
Which is very unlikely in the current market if they were a public company.
This, I'm not familiar with. However, I will say that time to market is important too. By the time Adobe can come up with a cloud-native competitor to Figma, Figma might have come up with a cloud-native competitors to Photoshop and Illustrator.
>Which is very unlikely in the current market if they were a public company.
Why not? Nasdaq is 13% higher today than in September 2022 when they announced the deal. Adobe itself is 25% higher now. Arguably, tech valuations have stabilized and increasing again.
Figma is a private company, of course it depends on figures as well which are not publicly available but no comparable public companies are valued that high after the 2021 peak.
However unlike most comparable tech companies it is supposedly profitable (not clear if GAAP, though) which would increase it's valuation.
(Of course Adobe’s ability to execute that is far from certain)