Adobe gives up on web-design product to rival Figma after deal collapse

In general I would take the dividend, if the expected value over that time was greater than the immediate lump sum, plus what I might get for investing that lump sum in something over those few years.

And in reality it's usually not over just a few years; the dividend is long-term. I'd much rather build something valuable and get steady income from it than build something to flip.

Now if the risk of no dividend payout is high enough, I'll take that lump sum. But I feel like those sorts of deals -- huge money now, or very risky, uncertain money over a number of years -- just aren't really a thing that often.

expecting figma's adobe clone in anything like 6-24 months out

Yes, for themselves. But I doubt anyone on this current thread is a Figma founder, meaning we’re discussing if it’s a good or bad thing for users.

Most GFX tools use some kind of color space with a curve such as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRGB

This is a practical answer to the problems of 8-bit technology where you would have terrible posterization in some values and also wasted bits in other values if you used linear light. sRGB is reflective of how the human eye works but not the physics of light. If you want to, say, average or subtract two images or rescale an image you should do it in linear light.

The right thing to do is to do transformations with linear light with at least 16 bit depth but output whatever color space the display expects. Most people (like the creators of Photoshop) do calculations that would be correct in linear light in sRGB and are oblivious to the results being wrong. It drives me nuts because my photog friends think I am nuts to write my own (correct) Python code with Pillow meantime they process everything with tools like

http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/

which makes everything look dark because the developers just didn’t think about color spaces.

I can’t guess what their reasons were but I have worked in and near teams that have given up on being competitive with their rivals (but “it’s part of a winning bundle”). It was extremely rough on morale for those teams and everything those teams touched.

If you're making web pages, you don't need CMYK workflows.

It's way too easy for hostile shareholders to force companies to do things that the workers, even CEO level workers, don't want to do.

1. The current economic situation is causing a lot of investors to tighten screws and demand profitability where they had previously been fine with just seeking growth because it becomes clearer that fewer investors are willing to participate in the next round of hot potato in the hopes of catching a unicorn.

2. Investors generally seek growth and at some point you've hit the physical limits by having caught nearly every customer you can and the only way to drive up those numbers is by upselling to the same people which often means kneecapping user experience to help upselling on the cure (e.g. Amazon Prime Video "channels" as extra subscriptions on top of the Prime Video ad-free subscription on top of the buy/rent for individual movies and shows on top of the Amazon Prime subscription that also includes access to Prime Video itself).

With streaming services specifically there's also the effect where Netflix itself ended up figuring out its niche's business model only to have every IP owning distribution studio try to copy it and become its competition, removing their IP from it (and any additional IP they can get exclusive licenses for) and locking it behind their own subscription model to cut out the middleman even if for the customer this means having to sign up to at least five different platforms if you want to watch every episode of the Pokemon animated series (for some reason). This is obviously enshittification for the customer and would still be so even if the individual streaming services all used the same exact pricing and business model as Netflix did a few years ago (before the price hikes, ads and measures against account sharing) - although it could be described as a monopoly being replaced by a market (which we're normally told should be a good thing).

Well it would be a stretch to say that Google has any focus.

A shareholder whose children will inherit the business one day will have a very different outlook to one who is looking at their annual performance numbers, which is the sort thing institutional shareholders are looking at.

Even if you take a slightly more expansive take on that, there is nothing that inherently means a corporation should exist to maximize profit. Its minimally viable definition is pretty well understood: A legal organization of people to act as a singular entity and are recognized as such under the law, typically formed as commercial entities to transact commerce on their behalf.

I don't think that misses anything.

Anything piled on top of that seems like something that should be specific from business to business. Thats my general issue with the US courts siding with maximize shareholder value to the point its now seen as a decree.

Especially when such rulings tend to trounce majority shareholders by minority ones.

The market should decide that. And somehow, “shareholders” (what a giant tent) are currently destroying corporations and thus markets in the chase of ever higher returns.

A good metaphor for a this as a whole is the Ultimate Ears Roll 2. For its time it was a really good Bluetooth speaker, punching far above its weight compared to competing Bluetooth speakers, but also within Ultimate Ears’ product line. There was almost no reason to go one or two product tiers higher.

In a healthy market, the other competitors would have stepped up, and Ultimate Ears would have improved their other products to create sufficient differentiation.

Instead, Ultimate Ears just discontinued the Roll 2 and replaced it with a relatively inferior product. In a rational market without shareholders this doesn’t make sense, but once you consider that the company isn’t optimizing for sales (good and/or cheap products) but for shareholder value, the picture fits.

Yes, they had responsibilities to their shareholders, but those did not automatically override literally any other consideration.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

[1] The Amsterdam Stock Exchange was founded for the trading of shares in the first real publicly-traded joint-stock company, the Dutch East India Company, in 1602. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euronext_Amsterdam

My point is that there is nothing inevitable about the board representing the interests of shareholders alone. A typical company where the shareholders appoint most or all of the directors is not the only way to set up a board, and I'd argue that there are legitimate reasons to set up a company where other stakeholders (e.g. employees [1][2] or customers [3]) appoint directors.

Also, consider this: There is a risk/return continuum between bondholders and shareholders (through holders of various other convertible and preferred securities). It is always an arbitrary decision as to where to draw the line separating investors who get a say and those who don't.

So my view in all this is that as long as Figma’s board was appointed in accordance with its constitution, and the board members weren’t acting corruptly (e.g. bribery, conflicts of interest) or exceeding their authority under the company's constitution, shareholders should NOT get to challenge that board’s decisions. (IANAL; this is my view, not necessarily what the law says.)

p.s. A stock exchange may require that boards be primarily represent shareholders as a condition for listing; but this should not affect privately held companies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers%27_co-operative

If every single shareholder agrees, then yes.

Another (perhaps more drastic) approach would be to force shareholders to hold their shares for a minimum period of time, or institute a mechanism that distributes losses across the shareholders of the last X years. That would incentivize long-term investment strategies over short-term rent-seeking.

Or you use taxes. In Germany (where I live) we have a speculation tax on property, for example: If you (as a private individual) sell a property less than 10 years after you have acquired it, any profit from that sale is taxed as income. After the 10-year cut-off you don't have to tax it at all.

While that isn't true, if a corporate board takes actions that are contrary to shareholder interest, they open themselves to liability. In the case the GP is talking about, where a buyout offer exceeded any amount of return that the company could possibly provide while remaining independent, shareholders would absolutely have a case if that acquisition offer had actually been turned down.

Also, all other things being equal, why wouldn’t I trade my labor for the most money possible?

That is as long as it doesn’t require working for Amazon (been there done that) or Facebook (I don’t hate myself that much).

Are paychecks still coming in, and do I still have a mortgage to pay?

This would put them under immense pressure to come up with new features (useful or not) to get people to upgrade. At some point for certain users, the current version is going to cover 90% of what they need and they won't see the point in upgrading.

I didn't look into it much, but Sketch moved from a one-off payment for the current version plus 1 year of updates, to subscription-based charging. I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason was most didn't need the latest features.

Aside from this, has any software ever done something like "$170 upfront, or $20/month for 12 months only, then you own this major version"? I'm aware of Adobe's approach where if you cancel the monthly plan they'll surprisingly charge you the rest of the payments to make up 12 months, but you don't own anything after.

I got a really great set of Yamaha speakers at our reuse center and, similarly, found a whole new world in some recordings (everything by the Super Furry Animals except their first album) but then found others (anything by Foreigner) sounded just the same as they always did on FM radio.

Push is not locked to Live at all. I wrote the support for it for Ardour.

Osmose uses MPE, just like other MPE devices, and it's not weird, its actually quite elegant.

Sysex was always meant to support device specific control, so of course it's "strange". And almost every bit of MIDI software "deals with" sysex in some way.

"Pretty much every DAW has some non-standard plugin/scripting system" - there is no "standard" scripting system, and in fact most DAWs have no scripting facilities at all.

CLAP offers nothing that existing plugin APIs do not, except for modulation ala Bitwig, and since no other DAW so far can do modulation like Bitwig, the value proposition here is low (not zero, but low).

This dismissal of the complexities of audio programming is fairly common in general (and particularly bad on HN). Remarks about "less data", "less formats", "less demanding" are typical. But throwing in the specific mention of visual resolution as if somehow sample rate and depth are not more or less precise analogs seems like a fairly major red flag.