Comment by robenkleene | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robenkleene | Hacker News Reader

This is analysis is spot on.

I made the same argument about Figma (that what made Figma successful is that design software had started to be used more like office suite software) in my overview of the historical transitions in creative software https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...:

> In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extension, Figma’s, success: That flat design shifted the category of design software from professional creative software to something more akin to an office suite app (presentation software, like Google Slides, being the closest sibling). By the time work was starting on Figma in 2012, office suite software had already been long available and popular on the web, Google Docs was first released in 2006. This explains why no other application has been able to follow in Figma’s footsteps by bringing creative software to the web: Figma didn’t blaze a trail for other professional creative software to move to the web, instead Sketch blazed a trail for design software to become office suite software, a category that was already successful on the web.

Regarding this, I'm curious how big this market is really. E.g., for me, working on software, I almost never see design work from folks that aren't professional designers (and if I do, they use Figma already, not the Creative Suite). But I'd be curious to hear other folks impressions, even just anecdotally:

> To explain what I mean: Let’s say you’re a company that subscribes to Adobe Creative Cloud. You might buy it for one department—like your video team, or your web team, or your print team. But there are a lot of other people in your office, and they need design too. They need to build social posts and presentations and email signatures and graphical work that your $150,000-per-year senior designer doesn’t have the time for.

I disagree with the comparison to / characterization of “office suite software”. At least the desktop class of office suites have a lot of power features and power users.

It’s not that power users aren’t a market, it’s that casual users are now the larger market and cheaper to serve, and software companies have been catching on to that, to the detriment of power users.

Do you mind getting more specific about what you disagree with around the comparison / characterization of "office suite software"? I can't tell what you're disagreeing with. E.g., it sounds like you're saying I don't think office suite software is powerful, which I don't think I said? (And I don't believe, e.g., I think Excel is one of the most powerful applications there is). I do think the most popular web-based office suite software (e.g., the Google suite) is less powerful than the more desktop-orientated competitors (there's an obvious reason for this, web-based software facilitates collaboration, and complex features hinder collaboration, so they're in natural opposition).

But I definitely struggle with the comparison between power users and casual users. Like I wouldn't characterize designers that use Figma as casual users, it's that the needs of software designers have changed so much, and those changes mean treating design software more like office suite software make sense.

I guess the comparison of casual users and power users is more apt when comparing the Adobe suite and Affinity suite. And, e.g., Final Cut Pro X and CapCut are evidence of a wider industry trend towards serving that market. I wouldn't necessarily say that's to the detriment of power users though, it seems like there's software to serve both markets now?

The article is about how software is changing to target casual “normies” over power users. You agreed with this take and likened it to how software is becoming more like office suites. From this I inferred that you don’t think that office suites are catering to power users.

So I don’t understand what properties of office suites you are alluding to here. Or is your point that the previously desktop-only software suites now have web-based counterparts, and the latter aren’t catering to power users anymore?

> Or is your point that the previously desktop-only software suites now have web-based counterparts, and the latter aren’t catering to power users anymore?

Yes this. More specifically collaborative software (e.g., with features like live-collaborative editing) tend to be less capable than non-collaborative software.

These are not 1-for-1 comparisons though (Figma vs. Canva), I didn't mean to imply they were. E.g., Canva isn't emphasizing collaboration. But office suite software does also have a lower barrier of entry than creative software, which I think Canva's strategy should probably capitalize on. E.g., the market has already been split for pro vs prosumer/casual, I think Canva strategy will probably be to emphasize this split short term, which would mean focusing on ease of use at the expense of complex features (and then consider the more technically complicated led shift to collaborative web-based versions later, leveraging what they've learned so far).

I don't agree.

What made Figma successful was being able to share via a URL. Period.

No program version problems. No file extension problems. No problems between Mac and Windows. No problems with anti-virus blocking your email attachment. etc.

Figma exists because sharing a bloody file between computers is still a clusterfsck in 2025.

I'm not sure what part of this you think I'd disagree with, if just looking at the microcosm of Sketch to Figma. In other words, the ease of sharing and collaborating via a URL I think is the underlying reason office suite software has become successful.

But I suspect you're arguing against the wider arch of the point I'm making (that design no longer requiring as sophisticated features helped facilitate the transition to the web-based software). If I have that right, I suggest making sure that your hypothesis about motivations behind the market transitions also incorporates the transition from Photoshop to Sketch. Because that transition (which preceded the transition to Figma) made every problem you're describing worse. Which means for example that you can't attribute the transition from Photoshop to Sketch to Figma just to the URL.

That was and is also possible in Sketch.

What made Figma the go-to tool is the in-browser approach, collaborative editing, and features like design tokens and constraints which were an afterthought on Sketch and required third party extensions.

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