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Comment by DHPersonal | Hacker News Reader

Killing Adobe XD because they couldn't buy Figma for $20 billion means to me that they would never have been a good owner for Figma. XD may have not had as many features as Figma, but it was still a decent program and could have been a very good competitor to Figma for far less than the cost of buying out that company. The buy-in of Adobe's subscription model was a compelling reason for my employers to provide only XD to me for my work.

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This isn't the first time Adobe has taken a decent app w/ potential and run it into the ground:

Dreamweaver did many things, not all of them well, but it was never actively terrible. Over time, its functionality got split out into more apps that didn't actually require people to write web code - a disappointment that shouldn't surprise as Adobe's heart was still w/ print production and never really committed to the development side of things.

I would have expected that after Flash went EOL that more resources would go to the editor, but they just mined it out before going subscription, a dealbreaker that made me seek out Panic's Coda and (later) BBEdit.

I know it still exists in Creative Cloud, but unless you are deep in the Adobe ecosystem, there are better options available.

Fireworks actually had a lot of features people gushed about Sketch and Figma having close to a decade before they existed.

Adobe never understood this and tried to push web design into PS and AI then killed FW.

> and AI then killed FW.

I did a double take here before remembering that AI is also the acronym for Adobe Illustrator. I'd totally forgotten about AI!

I want to believe in Dreamweaver but when I try it "just doesn't work" or it does work with a 5 second delay for the screen to update when I type. Webstorm doesn't promise as much but at least I can get stuff done with it.

Adobe just didn't manage the pivot to web design very well. Dreamweaver had been run into the ground. So was Fireworks. And look at where Flash is.

> Adobe just didn't manage the pivot to web design very well.

I'd argue they didn't manage it at all. Almost all of the web focused apps that people think of were acquired as opposed to being developed in-house. Adobe (correctly) recognized that the web was becoming more important and they could play in that space, but the mindset for what these apps were designed to address missed the mark.

A web-focused IDE as opposed to a designer's tool that writes things for you are vastly different in terms of what these apps do and how they work.

Oh so true. Adobe also had a product that is the same concept as Webflow, called InFlow (if I am not mistaken), and killed it, before Webflow existed. Some of its employe went to work for Webflow.

Staff likely fled teams working on XD as soon as the news surfaced around the acquisition. They probably have no one left who can move quickly with the product or the code base to catch up now.

Interesting guess, but citation needed.

You will never get confirmation or citations for this sort of thing.

What you can do is think for yourself as a dev in that team, would you stick around?

> What you can do is think for yourself as a dev in that team, would you stick around?

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

Most people move between jobs.

You'd stick around until when the Figma team is expected to replace you, and not take any proactive steps to better your situation in the meantime?

And you'd work just as hard, too?

> And you'd work just as hard, too?

I never said that.

Well, this is why groups in this situation struggle to make forward progress.

People are uncertain of their jobs (even with promises) and look for work elsewhere.

And even if they stay, they feel their work doesn't matter, and it's hard to work under those circumstances.

Even if they didn't make business changes in anticipation of this...

Imagine you're one of the top employees working on a product, and that your company announces it's going to acquire a competitive product to yours for $20B and replace your product with that product, and this is looming for 15 months.

Are you still employed there in that group? Are you still an effective employee? How's morale?

Unless I had a really long history with that company and was happy to move to another team I would immediately ask for a raise.

Google Video was killed after the YouTube acquisition and YT flourished under Google.

YouTube was bought mainly because Google Video was failing as a platform. About the only thing it ever offered over YouTube were longform lectures and presentations. Combining the two platforms (e.g. allowing longer videos but using YouTube's social interface) just made YouTube better.

Isn't there something about that seeking in movies was only possible in Google Video and not on (original) YouTube?

So they ended up with the YouTube frontend and mostly Google Video backend?

Yes, modern YouTube's infrastructure inherits more from Google Video than classic YouTube, but the frontend descends from YouTube's (albeit, completely Ship of Theseus'd at this point).

I was a bit bummed when Google Video was shuttered. In some ways its simple to-the-point UX was nice compared to that of YouTube, which had become cluttered pretty early on. It was also sometimes a backup for when videos on YouTube got taken down.

And because the owners of YouTube couldn't afford to run it, so it needed a wealthy investor.

"The buy-in of Adobe's subscription model was a compelling reason for my employers to provide only XD to me for my work."

Yep, Adobe XD was at least something I could use when in a giant 'enterprise' company that already partnered with Adobe on subscriptions and didn't like using any other companies for creative products.

> The buy-in of Adobe's subscription model was a compelling reason for my employers to provide only XD to me for my work.

And this is how we all end up using spatulas to drive nails.

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