Adobe have already canned XD, which was a poor alternative to Figma, but Adobe had to at least pretend to compete.
Problem is, even though Figma have captured a large proportion of the digital design market, they took on so much funding that their only real options are a purchase or IPO.
I don’t believe that subscriptions alone would bring in enough for the kind of returns the VCs are looking for, especially as it’s almost free for individual designers.
And so the enshittification begins.
Clicking on ‘uninstall’ booted up their cloud launcher app, and then I had to log in with an account, and then it had to install four or five different updates in sequence, and then it tried auto-updating the software I had installed, and after about thirty minutes of making sure Adobe obtained all of their analytics I was finally able to uninstall everything.
It is one of the worst user experiences I’ve ever encountered in recent times and it is a sign of what will happen to Figma under Adobe’s leadership. Figma is too much of a threat to them, so they can just squash it in an acquisition.
The revamped Serif suite is much nicer.
They all need to realise one thing. You can choose to start something, but it's only the audience that can choose to end it.
Whether that's a new app, series, or web tool: the problem is the same, no one is going to invest their time and effort on something that will be canned if it is not an instant success.
Each are now trapped in a problem of their own making: people avoid their new offerings for fear of wasting their time, dooming the new entry.
Even though I would rather pay less — if the integration between a Design System and Github is clean enough it might be worth it for my DSM team? It's real value. It's also why they launched Figjam — which has gotten Miro off of my balance sheet.
I want Figma to scale up and be the anti-Adobe. Financial balance of Figma aside - this acquisition kinda sucks.
This [1] page has more details on the case, and has an invitation to comment at the bottom. In my experience, detailed comments from relevant industry participants, e.g. customers, competitors, are given serious weight and consideration, and very few are supplied. It's a useful mechanism for those concerned about a tech merger.
"Invitation to comment: closes on 18 May 2023 3 May 2023: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is considering whether it is or may be the case that this transaction if carried into effect, will result in the creation of a relevant merger situation under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002 and, if so, whether the creation of that situation may be expected to result, in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services.
To assist it with this assessment, the CMA invites comments on the transaction from any interested party.
These comments should be provided by the deadline set out above.
Contact Please send written representations about any competition issues to:
xxxx@cma.gov.uk"
Other cases can be found here [2].
[1] https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/adobe-slash-figma-merger-inquir...
[2] https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases?case_type%5B%5D=mergers&market_...
And probably rename it Figma XD Max Pro.
Probably.
It will replace XD.
That said, I can't see the acquisition being a problem for competition in this particular space. It's not hard to imagine someone just making figma-but-different and becoming the next big thing. There are also countless other existing options.
Ie, they are driving innovation by killing the leader.
Whilst Quark totally dropped the ball and failed to innovate and update for modern MacOS.
Quark had as good as a 100% of the market before InDesign came along.
If it becomes more of a common occurrence, I agree it could stifle innovation.
1) Cancel the merger/acquisition completely.
2) Work out some sort of mitigation with the country.
3) Spin off/discontinue business in that country.
Did people here really think that the regulators are going to allow this merger to happen?
Adobe might as well pay the $1BN break up fee and the Figma will just use that to fund their IPO.
In the current environment, money-losing software companies aren’t exactly hot. The valuation from an IPO would be extremely disappointing for investors compared to the $20 billion Adobe is paying. A price/sales multiple of 10x would be generous, and that would be a $5B valuation.
This comment is so ironic because Apple has been the #1 innovator in so many arenas for decades.
Or let's take a step back: Can I develop the app without buying a $1000 macbook? You can develop for android using any platform. Apple's build tools are limited to only work on macos.
The large tech acquirers have extremely high market valuations partly because of the expectation that they continue to get away with doing exactly this.
If we had more competent competition regulators and this sort of acquisition was basically not on the cards at all, ever, once a company reaches a certain size then that value would stay in the innovating startups until they IPO or are acquired by a smaller, less predatory/monopolistic company. Either way there’s still an attractive exit.
We need to stop inventing reasons to tolerate and justify this behaviour that is clearly bad for society and start pushing for a more diverse tech ecosystem with proper antitrust enforcement.
The basis of my argument comes from the director of competition policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, who explains it all in depth here: https://www.ft.com/content/b7fdbb35-e104-47bf-9e03-ef5d8b324...
> Moreover, start-ups depend on acquisitions. Along with
> an initial public offering, being bought is the main
> way entrepreneurs and venture capital investors can
> “exit” the firms they have built. The harder it is to
> sell your company, the harder it is to make a
> return. Fifty per cent of US start-up executives said
> that being acquired was a long-term goal, and 90 per
> cent of US start-up exits in 2008-18 happened thanks
> to acquisitions.
>
> Empirical evidence suggests investment in start-ups is
> sensitive to rules on acquisitions. One paper found
> venture capital activity grows by about 40-50 per cent
> in countries that enact pro-takeover laws, and US states
> that introduced anti-takeover laws saw a 27 per cent
> decline in VC investment deals compared with those that
> did not.There are some business models where acquisition is the only viable way to make money.
Deepmind, Shazam, and Giphy were largely valuable because they create value for other big tech companies with respect to customer acquisition, market positioning and intellectual property. These companies had limited ability to make profits on their own.
One can still argue though that such acquisitions are still against the public interest even if they’re helpful to a class of startups.
Maybe the real innovation that we need is how to create companies that are designed to operate indefinitely as a going concern, breaking even or turning a profit without the need for an "exit" event.
Let's work on business fundamentals that aren't three financial engineering schemes in a trenchcoat, for once.
Restricting owners from being able to sell is an idea, although not sure it has enough merit, since society can benefit from businesses being able to be acquired. Perhaps the pendulum has tilted too far, or technology makes economies of scale too good to compete against.
I was really unhappy about switching my design team to Figma because their only ways forward are to either IPO or get purchased, with all the pain they involve. Or worse, if they actually have to start making a profit, then prices will be raised immensely and features will be diminished.
None of those things lead to a stable platform to base on potentially years of work.
E.g. “That Netflix show is fantastic but I wouldn’t bother starting it as it got Googled at the end of the first season.”
Or:
“Google’s new messaging service looks cool but I’m not going to get everyone to use it as I bet they’ll only go and Google it in about 18 months.”
Training LLM is like a child play compared to it.hack , even NEETs from 4chan are training erotic roleplay LLM for fun.
Obviously it's easy to think of laws that could be enacted that would make founding a startup more attractive and increase the number of startups and amount of investment in them that everyone would agree would still be bad and shouldn't exist.
This is obviously not such a clear case, but I personally fall on the side that reducing startup formation/investment would be an ok price to pay here.
I have some (but not 100%) confidence that this could mostly or entirely be offset by other improvements such as making going public easier for smaller companies (perhaps similar to London's AIM for example) or creating market/tax incentives that favour startups and smaller companies, and/or penalise companies that become larger, especially by acquiring other companies or entering many relatively unrelated/independent verticals.
We really needed the real-time collaboration features, which Sketch didn’t have at that time so we went with Figma. I was concerned that it only had a couple of years left in its current state, which sadly seems to be true.
Penpot is an interesting upcoming alternative, though it’s not ready for prime-time yet.
Really tho I think we collectively use that term whenever it suits us, without much clarity on what innovative outcomes actually are. We need a better definition and better yardsticks.
Maybe so, but blocking a dominant company from buying out its closest competitor is not quite the same thing as banning all acquisitions.
Google would never have allowed a third party to use search results as training data, for example. Shazam might've had more flexibility unless Apple wanted to link it with customer data.
Exclusive long term licensing is effectively acquisition by another name.
And that explains why antitrust authorities around the world are interested in this deal: that kind of discrepancy suggests a market distortion in progress.
It doesn’t fit in Autodesk’s portfolio, and their acquisition activity tends to be frugal.