Figma will IPO on July 31(figma.com) |
Figma will IPO on July 31(figma.com) |
what else you could expect - Figma was born out of founder’s need to find a proof of concept test case for real-time collaboration JavaScript engine they created. They stumbled on this idea. Back then everyone used Sketch and wanted better prototyping and interaction design, and Figma appeared with its real time collaboration as major point which you used once just to try and never again. For occasional demos and in large organisations maybe it is useful, but with your average design team size is one person it’s not a problem to solve first. And yet despite having this real time collaboration you still couldn’t collaboratively present your design. You have to shout all the time “and now, what screen you’re on, what do you see?, yes click on that button on the left”. It shows how to this day, the UX is not at the table at Figma. They focus on opening offices all over the world and courting big clients. Because need growth, IPO.
Figma was first to employ an army of customer support “yes men” with sole task to answer in support forums and defuse frustrations this way, thus allowing Figma instead of fixing embarrassing bugs for years, to divert development resources to products nobody asked for, to fuel that growth.
Figma has became a product for investors rather than designers. And doing that it poisoned the design community, normalised bad UX and business practices.
I distinctly remember that it's possible in Miro, and I'm pretty sure figma too. I think the problem you bring up has been pretty much solved.
I would like to know about design tools that are so much better than Figma. I am trying to actively avoid it because it’s Thiel company but it is pretty hard.
Jumping from "I don't need the features this popular software provides" to "Figma is one of the worst evils of capitalism" is a ridiculous leap.
There's a "follow me" feature to see what other users are doing. It's been around for several years.
Isn’t the growth proof that those products ARE what people want (whether or not they ask for it)?
I’ve worked with many people over the years who are good enough at their job, but will be replaced by AI (management’s choice, not mine). I’m probably one of those people as a mediocre engineer who prioritized family over career.
I have some backup plans, but it’s still tough and going to affect lots of people.
We have the tools to do anything imaginable with film and video but the top box office films right now in the US are all completely derivative, non-creative human slop.
"Good design" is so trivial to do with generative AI.
We hardly live in 1910 Paris with all the cool people drinking absinthe in between cranking out all these artistic masterpieces.
I personally think that a key fact that is driving adoption, is that from the very beginning they used a web app instead of going native with a heavy desktop app.
Thanks to this, you can share designs with just a link and everyone can access it, users interact with a mockup, devs look up the styles and components.
…and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
Their secret sauce seems to be making a complex web app fast and snappy with webassembly and an ecosystem of plugins secured with quickjs sandboxes.
The ease of collaboration in teams, and being able to just click a link on any platform to preview or start working on a design without installing anything is a killer feature.
The risks of vendor lock-in, losing control of your files, or price hiking sucks though, but convenience outweighs this for most. Coming from a dev background, I'd love open file formats and being able to pick where the files are stored though.
> …and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
I have to use both and switching to Adobe for stuff is painful and feels so archaic now because you lose the ability to have multiple people live edit/preview a document, you have to muck around with syncing files + installing, there's no free plan, and nobody on Chromebook or Linux can use it.
For example, it's so much easier, faster and with better results to just let a client edit copy directly on a design, rather than the clunky way of having them message you a list of edit suggestions that doesn't let them iterate properly. Or live pair editing with another designer. Really hoping Figma add CMYK/printing support too (would it really be that hard when they already support P3 and non-P3?).
For Sketch, it being Mac only feels very restrictive and not a good business choice for them. I personally use so few native Mac apps, a native UI isn't something that influences me and I'm not even clear on what differentiates them now. Native UIs can also be bad as well as good, I just want an app with a good UI. I often prefer a web app because it feels like it would be more sandboxed, especially for installing plugins (like Figma allows).
I have a browser extension that I sell, and I'm so glad I didn't go the native app route. It's higher friction than a web app for users to get started, but much lower friction than a native app, and it lets me easily target Linux, Window, Mac and Chromebook.
E.g., take Blender, Adobe Premiere, Ableton Live, Photoshop, Illustrator, in all of those cases, what you export is the actual real asset (it's the movie, the drawing, the song, etc...).
It's not like that with design and it ends up pushing design apps away from native apps and towards web apps, because at some point someone, usually an engineer has to get in there and figure out all the details of how this actually needs to get built. So if the app only runs on a Mac that's annoying. But that's not an issue with say, Final Cut Pro, where the person editing the movie can just export the movie themselves, they don't need to involve someone that's maybe using a platform that Final Cut Pro doesn't run on.
The failure started with the Adobe Acrobat being such a dog slow app and never being fixed. Adobe looked too much at market share and forgot to be a tech company, so every platform now has their own PDF reader instead of using Acrobat Reader.
It's like the old story about Steve Jobs. He asked a bunch of engineers to make him a printing application. So they scoured the printer manuals and made this app that implemented every feature possible and took it to Jobs. He instantly dismissed it as being way too complicated, went over to the whiteboard, drew a box with a button, and said something like "You drag the file you want to print on to the box and then click the print button."
As for Figma, being able to export SVG is lock in really a concern here? Many tools support .svg. So to me lock-in ain't even a concern for a tool like figma.
And you noted it well - I seem not to care if it is a web app if it works well: Figma, VSCode (Performance as a feature)
Also you don't really have proper version control, and what little you have isn't integrated with the rest of your project.
Also replying to this re Sketch, especially it being a business choice for them, Sketch is a Mac app through-and-through. That entire application would never in a million years have existed were it not for being Mac only. Sketch leveraged the Mac specific APIs created by Apple in the 2000s (e.g., Core Image and Core Graphics), this is exactly why Sketch was able to innovate on the UI-side (whereas Figma pretty much took Sketch's UI innovations wholesale, as pointed out several times in this comments section), because they didn't need the technical depth that Figma had, which had to re-implement all the low-level graphics APIs themselves in order to be cross-platform (Figma is not exactly a web-only app, it runs on at least Mac native as well, I don't have a source for this but I've heard it a few times [and I don't mean the separate app download Figma makes available, which is just a web wrapper, but there's a real Mac-native internal-only version of Sketch that's used for development]).
This is why for example Sketch was able to launch a compelling product with, I think two full-time employees(?) when it initially launched, that was competitive with Adobe products. This purely a product of the Apple ecosystem and specifically the climate in the 2000s when Apple was still pushing desktop-first technologies like high-quality image and vector libraries. Note also that Sketch didn't take funding until 2019 (and only then because Figma forced their hand), whereas Figma were VC-funded from effectively day one (Field was a Thiel fellow in 2012, first funding round in 2013).
There's two patterns here that were happening during the 2000s, one is bootstrapped Mac-first applications were often quite successful. Two, applications were using the AppKit to quickly iterate on interesting UI innovations, the fuzzy finder (LaunchBar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaunchBar), the entire native-app-with-an-API-backend (Watson, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson), the extension-based editor (TextMate, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextMate), are some other examples of this.
I, for one, prefer web apps for almost everything. The less I have installed on my computer, the better. Exceptions are for really critical stuff like my text editor. Personally, if I was someone who actually used Figma, I'd prefer that to be a native app, too.
For almost everything else-- anything I only use lightly-- I want to keep that crap off of my machine.
Canva (which is a tool ACTUAL non-tech people care about) proved that years ago
It may be than in US, and countries of similar income levels, all designers carry Apple gear around, however 70% of the world does not.
Before Figma, we were using a mix of InVision, Adobe XD or Balsamiq.
It runs impressively well for a web app, but I still get multi-second freezes all the time on high-end hardware.
A lot of apps start as single player and then try and bolt the multiplayer experience on later.
But Figma was designed around collaboration.
I actually think this was more crucial than whether it was web or native.
In 2018 I signed up for Figma because of the Notion integration (you can embed Figma frames in Notion), and the generous free tier. Notion took off that year as well and I think both profited from another.
> …and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.
This wasn't possible before flat design, design was a hard technical skill requiring use of light sources, noise for texture, and carefully constructed gradients and shadows. Flat design is mainly just text on large swaths of color, which makes it much easier for someone to just jump in and edit a Figma file (e.g., this was not possible with the much more complicated Photoshop setups folks were using before to create designs like this https://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/4485?cPage=3&all=False&...)
(Note on a long-enough timeline, it's not clear how this is all going to end up. E.g., if something like Apple's Liquid Design catches up that'll move the needle back in the other direction towards more complicated software to create complex lighting and refraction effects. Note that the problem with Figma isn't that it can't add these features, it's that adding them will make the software more complicated, which will reduce the value-add of it being a web app, because the more complicated the software is, the more difficult it is to use collaboratively. Simplicity is really what facilitates collaborative editing.)
And your resident mobile designer who knows everything about iOS and Android probably isn't the best at rolling brand new design systems with or without really pretty gradients.
Because these are two different skills, I don't think the style of the design system really impacts the barrier of entry. Most UI designers aren't fiddling with the finer details like that. They're composing already defined "atoms" into the "molecules" of components and pages.
Sketch were nice and comfy and said NO to everything.
When you are coming into an established space, it must feel real good to have a competitor like that who gives away the full market to you kindly!
Your most tech-savvy friends couldn't even reliably install the correct Adobe product, never mind be productive with it. Meanwhile, your grandma could crank out a deck in Figma Slides if she needed to.
Just look at FB, GitHub, LinkedIn, etc…
https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-...
https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-... (old but interesting still)
[1]: https://penpot.app/
I decided to give it a try. It’s pitched as a Figma alternative, but as essentially an expensive advertisement for Icons8 (the stock marketplace is built into the app), I didn’t have very high expectations.
Honestly, I was blown away. As a product designer who relies on a lot of advanced Figma functionality, I wouldn’t rely on it as my daily driver, but for a side project? I would choose it over Sketch. It covers all the basics of a modern UI design application, and even a few of the more recent additions to Figma like color variables. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more coverage of it.
The technical term is enshittification.
Can someone explain the advantage of simultaneously having these four massive companies as book runners?
I don't think they can afford to be a follower on AI but being a leader will also be untenable.
We are in a bubble.
Now, the enshittification, price increases and lock-in begins when they ring the opening bell to list on the NYSE.
What an incredible journey!
is this happening with most ipos? what green flags should we look at as hits that "this company is different"?
The only possible green flag os "Did not ipo"
it's sustainable if it doesn't need growth (and market beating growth at that). that would be a green flag.
it's a sad reality, I wish we've found the cure already, or perhaps nothing is broken and I just have to zoom out (for ex., smaller bow-and-arrow players now have a chance to take down the nerfed mastodon)
Congrats to Figma on building well the first time though! The deliberately craft thought out web architecture made a difference!
Edit: I said IPO but I meant first tick.
Edit (1 hour later): I was allocated 2 shares @ $33. My request was for 100 shares, fwiw.
Figma came in with a web app that made designing and sharing as easy as sending a link. They also had... let's say creatively viral approaches to licensing where anyone that edited a file automatically got added as a seat. But unlike those desktop applications, you could also leave notes - that's editing! So it wasn't just for designers the way photoshop or sketch was. Now instead of your team of 2-3 designers, it's like half the company. It's beautiful in a way that the latter group is way more numerous and uses <1% of the software features, yet gets charged just as much. Beautiful. And lucrative.
Anyways, they're similar because Figma made a web-based ui tool, and the base model for the workflow was already established by Sketch, so their fundamentals are very very similar.
No before the current iteration there was Fireworks, then the smaller web apps for wireframe prototyping (Balsamiq, etc).
Professional Designers used inDesign for bigger portals or complex and vast UIs. Or AI for the prototypes.
Photoshop lacked good vector tools and comprehensive styling of corpus.
I know that I'm in a small/medium European company (~400 people total), generally very mindful of how we spend money but this is the exact billing model that would turn us away because too expensive for the features actually used.
- Design sharing was great and easy, yeah. - Autolayout easily won over folks who didn't wanna learn Sketch - Sketch was moving too slow at a critical time, leaving a lot of ground uncovered for Figma to jump in
But most important:
It was free.
You could also get a constraints plugin for Sketch. That’s built-in on Figma.
The reason why I ditched Sketch (even though I loved it) was because Sketch had quality control issues over time and they started messing with my work, even losing some of it (cloud saves). The frustration grew over a longer period of time until I lost all hope and just had to admit that it was a lost cause. I peeked at Sketch's changelogs for a year and saw only bugfixes and no features. I assumed it was dead; either way the chapter was closed, the entire company shifted to Figma.
P.S. which is not to say that Figma is in a good state now, or that I don't feel history repeating itself.
It's funny how the successes and failures of these two companies ultimately comes down to a single architectural decision that both took different paths on. Sketch's biggest drawback (even back in the 2010's when they were on top) was always that they didn't support Web, Windows or Linux and focused only on Mac's. Honestly it paved the way for Figma to just come up and eat their lunch.
The biggest mistake that Sketch made was not realizing there was a sea change sooner and shifting their focus to a web based app or even releasing Windows and Linux clients. Even now I went to their website and they only offer basic viewing tools on the web, if you want to create with Sketch you need a Mac and there's no way around that.
I loved that tool
There is a ton of focus on going from Figma to something you could presumably dump into react or html. But I found nothing in the reverse.
Realistically, for a lot of applications, there are more things in production than in Figma. It's just not practical to spec everything out when you're moving fast. But when you do want someone to look at it or tinker, it's a huge lift to migrate your current production to Figma. I wish they would use some AI for that. Just take a webpage, and build the Figma design docs. Doesn't even have to be perfect, just good enough to get help from designers
[0] https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1075741140914731351/s...
Turs out people don't want "quick dump as HTML" but rather "maintainable, understandable, performant HTML". I don't see how that has changed with AI.
You’ll be able to go from figma to production in weeks.
AI tools are still just that tools - they're not abstraction layers from "intent" to "production product".
There may be no moats. Just distribution winners.
adobe tried this 10 years ago (Adobe dream weaver) and failed
I literally can drag and drop design photos from drawing board to claude or open ai chat and they recreate it themselves instead of needing figma
not sure where you know that "we are cooked" its for them not us
The key difference in the specific context of Figma is that a layman without any technical skills can give pretty good feedback on a design system, but say, wouldn't be able to give good feedback on how a 3D modeling material is constructed.
> which apparently using the gradient setting in photoshop is a Big Scary Skill™ that flat design solved
This isn't what I mean, I meant combining layers to create 3D effects like this https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/kj9yut/guide_to... i.e., creating the gradient itself isn't complicated, it's composing layers to achieve a specific effect that's complicated (and "technical").
E.g., you couldn't do this with the type of design I was doing in the 2000s, because the assets we were making didn't scale and recontexualize as easily as flat design elements. I.e., I think flat design not only paved the way for Figma, but also design systems in general.
> They're composing already defined "atoms" into the "molecules" of components and pages.
You'd lose things like shared components within and between files/libraries, interactive prototypes, shared design-tokens/variables, and responsive layout features, which is huge if your team are all-in with UI design system stuff. If you're mostly doing mockups, coding them, then copy/pasting old mockups to create new ones without using an extensive component system, SVG export is more bearable.
For UI work, it's much harder to be productive in a regular SVG editor like Inkscape though compared to something like Penpot.
Hmm, can you explain more about why the Apple APIs were important for this? Isn't the screen rendering for UI design content modest compared to what cross platform 3D games at the time had to render?
E.g., this one https://www.provideocoalition.com/after-effects-performance-...
Figma renders everything with webgl in their own engine and has 0 performance issues.
AFAIK penpot is now working on same approach.
One of the greatest companies, Valve, is privately owned.
I also respect 37signals, which isn't publicly owned.
Those are the two companies that crop in my head when I think "Good company"
Anyone with good SwiftUIfu care to take over? Then hopefully jsx-lite gets submitted to the ES specs like E4X. Then we can have UI write once and runs in all places.
Figma files are relatively light so previews and exports are fast - you can't even import images that are more than a few MB.
Also remote solutions like Jump Desktop (https://jumpdesktop.com) are pretty popular in the media editing world, so folks are choosing to edit remotely, they just aren't using web apps to do so.
So I still think the unique combination that Figma has is that unskilled folks are viewing, commenting, and editing on the document along with designers themselves, using the same tool. And that's facilitated by the tool itself being relatively simple. It's a common workflow that we see with the office suite software that I mentioned.
Maybe just a matter of time? I'm not familiar with all these domains, but I'm sure there's vendor lock-in, proprietary file formats, integrations/automations, plugin ecosystems, and general popularity/momentum (plus maybe lack of full GPU and other hardware support?) for certain tools that make it hard to switch and slows down competition. It wasn't that long ago that spreadsheet and word processor software being local only was the norm either.
I will say that some outsourcing phases/efforts would definitely not be possible with Sketch though. It's one thing when we as a company all have company-provided Macs, but another when remote hiring/collaborating.
They are not getting investments anymore AFAIK, but they're profitable because of the paying users.
I don't think you have to add X features every hour to stay relevant. The software is pretty powerful at this state already, and I might be discovered 15% of its capabilities probably, despite using it relatively heavily.
Did you open tickets for these? Some Notion developers frequent here I believe, maybe you can reach them if they provide contact information?
I always found it beneficial to reach-out to provider/developer. The results were not positive all the time, but at least I managed to add an entry to their bug tracker, and the problems are solved 99% of the time, after some time.
"Figma is basically Google Docs for design — a fast, browser-based tool where multiple people can edit the same UI file in real time. No installs, no emailing files around.
Its magic as a business is the frictionless onboarding (just share a link), viral team adoption, and a freemium model that naturally expands into enterprise contracts. Works cross‑platform, so it spreads fast.
That combo — great product + viral growth + strong enterprise lock‑in — is why it became the design platform and why Adobe was ready to pay billions for it."
In the longer form it was also enthusiastic about the WASM part, but that didn't make the cut.
If you're talking about the IPO price, I think that's unlikely without some exogenous event.
At my former app dev agency, the design team stayed on Sketch + inVision until Figma was already very well established.
In this case, `asm.js`, which was the original the core technology that made any of this possible, was released in 2013, which is ancient in this day and age.
It's normally very fast from technology to creation of the initial product to wide-spread adoption (typically about five years from release of the first version, per my blog post). So more likely if this does happen, it will require another core technology breakthrough, e.g., `asm.js` (now WebAssembly) isn't enough to facilitate it on its own.
But they can be successful if you spell out the exact specifications. And what is Figma if not an exact specification of the design you want? Within a couple of years the Frontend Developer Market might crash pretty hard.
I don’t think Figma goes way, but I do see it receding.
I mean..
you can create a lot of wealth for yourself by finding the bigger fool so to speak. And arguably, that's what a lot of tech IPOs are in any case, so why single out Figma for engaging in the practice?
The difference here is - Adobe tried using a proprietary stack. Figma can spit React. Everyone knows React - even if you use something else. It’s perfect timing with AI coding agents and every, single, UX team using it.
You can literally do this NOW without needing figma
like literally require minimal effort, like do you think this designer so "technology" ill ??? so they need the chatbox and preview page directly into the same page?
But like no-code or low-code, the niche in which it's useful to a business is limited. I commonly say that if software (esp FLOSS) serves even only one person well, it's a success. By that criteria, it was massively successfull.
But 27 years later, we are still mostly writing "html" (or jxl, or whatever todays frontendframework has come up with) by "hand". Or writing code that churns out this HTML for us. And not dragging around stuff in Dreamweaver.
Some figma-export will serve niches, some of which I probably cannot imagine even. Prototyping, one-offs, cousin-erik-building-james-craft-brewery-site, etc. But even combined with generative- or transformative AI, it won't serve as the source for UI "code".
The problem with Dreamweaver is that you still needed a developer to upload and run the site. And back then, you couldn’t run single page applications (web stacks hadn’t evolved that far yet), so still needed developers to write the backend.
Thus there wasn’t a huge amount to gain in using Dreamweaver for the professional world.
AI has changed that in that it doesn’t have the same limitations as Dreamweaver. However, like yourself, I don’t think we’ll see AI replace developers. Or at least the current crop of LLMs still have a long way to go before they can be used without developer oversight.
Edit: also worth noting that Flash was everywhere back then too. So many web designers opted for Flash instead.
Building stuff from scratch is easy. AI can do it, dreamweaver could, that sweatshop worker on fiverr, newest junior hire, etc.
Maintaining legacy isn't. AI isn't there yet: at most it can replace existing with new, but it cannot "understand" context, history, The Reason Why Kevin Built This Weird Unintelligable Abstraction, or how the three different ways of validating an email are actually a business requirement.
Let alone building stuff that withstands the decay of real constraints and time.
I've been around long enough (30+ years software dev/engineer) to have seen this decay over and over and to know what works and what doesn't (It's a people issue, hardly a technical one).
I've never seen AI, that sweatshop worker on fiverr, newest junior hire, or any low- or no-code tool, amongst which Dreamweaver, churn out something that's easy to change, maintainable for months, years, decades.
There's software that gets a few hours a year of attention and keeps running, securely, performant. That can be picked up, changed or added to and deployed in hours. And there's software that will explode the moment you even glance at the files, let alone anyone fixing, updating, or g*d forbid, adding features to.
AI generated stuff almost exclusively falls in the last category. And we don't have anything AI around yet that can do this fixing, updating, adding features for us.
So currently it successfully replaces many of the code monkeys, fiverr-freelancers and junior devs churning out forever-greenfield-projects. But little else.
Adobe is going to get absolutely trounced by GenAI. They've got so many competitors coming at them from all angles.
Also, innovation capital (engineers at startups) experience outsized rewards at startups when disruption happens. The better engineers will flock to more nimble outfits and reap the benefits.
Adobe is a dinosaur.
I got to talk to a product engineer about some of their work back in 2021, and he was describing generative (and even generative-editive) capabilities they had in hand that most associate with the last two years, they were just figuring out how to productize them, many of which they have.
I have my own complaints about Adobe products and choices but they are far from out of the game, and they’re probably going to be fine, especially if a lot of people make the mistake of thinking of them primarily as a dinosaur Figma competitor.
Figma is a whole lot easier to replace actually you can now actually with a self host OSS that came up with and bring your own api key from antrophic or open ai
MongoDB wants a word.. another "this will never amount to anything" HN special.
Imagine being charged to use variables. Crazy.
My hope is that at least with Penpot I can submit a PR if I am motivated enough. With Figma, I've done all I can.
It has no way of setting for example, designs to always use auto layout.
That’s my frustration with this product
A full professional seat is $16 for individual, $55 for organizations and $90 for enterprises. Either price is a nothing burger for a professional tool.
Today? The full CC license is 70$ a month for individuals (30$ for students) and 100$ a month for businesses. Despite inflation, assuming a two year upgrade cycle you still get the same price for the full Adobe package when comparing CS vs CC.
One may complain a lot about Adobe (RIP Flash, and anything Gen AI can go to hell for all I care), but "enshittification" is one thing that can't reasonably be thrown at them.
As for Adobe Credits, AFAIK that's credits for fonts and assets - and again, I vastly prefer dealing with one storefront (Adobe) than having to buy and license individual font files or stock photos.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/23/2968192/adobe-cs6-pricing...
A junior can never be that, due to lack of the experience. But too many long-term developers haven't failed, or haven't learned from these mistakes.
For example, about five years ago, I worked a few months with a 40+ years-of-experience software developer, who worked almost his entire life on one single product (in C++ and Java) in one company, solo. I was asked to assess if/how it was possible to get new people for this project because he was retiring. Part of the code was marvelous and a true beauty. Other parts were horrors or inintelligable mess. He truly did not like Java (at first) so a giant part of the java codebase was there to make it look-and-feel somewhat like his (also non-standard) C++.
Ironically, the nice parts were those that were hardly touched or changed - infrastructure, boilerplate, etc. But the worst parts were those that needed frequent changes due to business demands or the ever changing outside world. He honestly never realized that there were patterns and systems (by now), to keep software manageable under real-world-demands and changes. That turned also to be the saving of this project: he loved "DDD" and "Design Patterns" (both he heard about, but never dove into), and implemented some core ideas in this project before handing it over: anti-corruption-layers, ports-adapters, dependency-injection, testing.
I wish for some real competition in this space, but it will take a LOT of effort to dethrone Adobe. My 2c.
Adobe has RunwayML, Midjourney, and a hundred other startups chasing after them.
The number of things you can do without Adobe is increasing every day.
Yes, and it's not clear that those startups will fare better than gimp.
Adobe spends inordinate amount of effort to understand the problems that users are solving and make UX that users love. As the result Adobe has tons of money to improve the product. Users curse its business practices, white an occasional "goodbye Adobe" or "FU" messages but keep buying subscriptions.
The moat around this should not be underestimated. My 2c.
are you sure that these people don't exist???
talk about arrogant
Are you in design? How does increasing complexity benefit you personally?
what else do you think they do that ????
and Yes I do design, not only just operate but learn money with it professionally
The new breed of tools can already do your Adobe workflow. There simply is nothing for Adobe to add to the table.
Adobe had a huge moat for image and video tools because they were historically very hard to develop. Now it's easy for anyone to models up to a new UX and deliver 90% of the useful surface area of Adobe Photoshop.
Adobe's labyrinth of menus is legacy. That's not how editing of the future will work.
Besides, the number of creators is going to increase by at least an order of magnitude, if not more. Those creators are growing up on new tools. Adobe is stuffy. Someone using CapCut is never going to download Adobe Creative Cloud.
This game is already lost.
I am not sure. I heard the same arguments from the gimp crowd for years. But they always kept talking about solving their own problems (programmatic changing of imagery for web development), not the problems creative, non programmer users had and were willing to pay for solving (interactive manipulation based on visual feedback, which is how many creative types tend to work). They vehemently opposed improvements that were critical for hobbyists and professionals, like insisting on staying with 8-bit colors forever.
As a result, 25+ years later, gimp is a niche tools with its main draw being that it is free. Adobe spent a lot of time understanding workflows of target users.
When I, a pure hobbyist, work on my photos in Photoshop my feeling is immediately "ah, it really does what I want". As much as I hate Adobe business practices I gladly pay their subscription ransom to have Photoshop when I process my travel pictures.
I am not sure the new crowd understands paying users (and not "I will use it for free and watch ads" folks) any better than gimp used to. But I wish them luck. My 2c.
A secondary issue is that rent-a-software stuff is driven by pea counters and they'll never be able to resist constantly raising the price once they can increase revenue x% with an action that, in the short term, will probably result in absolutely no decline in users. Of course in the longer term they're setting the stage for their own disruption, obsolescence, and revenue trending to $0.
I also expect this whole business model will be heavily regulated in the future, because what percent of recurring revenue, especially on things like mobile, is from people who simply forget to cancel or were not aware it was recurring in the first place?
Yesterday there was an article saying an AI is used to infer the “right pricing for you”, and suspected it used variables such as your skin color, gender, job and location, probably discriminatory but mangled in a big AI engine.
In fact, I’d sell a REST API for adaptive pricing to mum & pop shops if I had time.
It also upset paying customers. It's no longer possible to _own_ Adobe software, and so I don't anymore. Up until just a couple years ago I was still using the copy of Photoshop CS4 I paid for (as part of the Master Collection CS4, Student Edition) in 2008.
A monthly subscription is a complete non-starter for me.
Imagine how these you-own-a-license-not-the-thing-itself shenanigans would play out for any other product we purchase. "No, you didn't buy that $40k car in cash upfront! You only bought Toyota's permission to operate the car, and we reserve the right to repossess it at any time."
InDesing for example is used for every printed book, magazine, packaging, poster… ever. Industry standard with insane amount of users.
Yet InDesign basically didn’t change since CS6. It got some mostly minor features but that is like 12 years of nothing. The app also got more unstable and only thing they work on is making their fileformat incompatible with prior versions.
That means paying 50+ usd month for licensing a software that hates you but you are required to have it. Perfect monopoly capture.
Very very very few people have a legitimate need to upgrade Adobe product versions every 2 years.
I suspect that most, even a lot of professional users, could get along just fine with CS1 or CS2. The core functionality hasn’t changed all that much and in a lot of ways, CS/CC apps have gotten worse. The only reason these individuals aren't still using those old versions is because they aren’t well suited for modern machines.
I’d personally be elated if Adobe started selling a lightly modernized single-purchase Photoshop CS1, even if it cost what single purchase PS licenses used to. The lack of cruft and UI churn alone would be worth it before even getting into the savings compared to a subscription.
There are no other workflows that 100% match Adobe Photoshop. Until you like-for-like replicate the workflow, professionals will continue to use PS.
Thankfully there are better competitors like Affinity in that space now.
RIP Macromedia Fireworks though.
The Mac version has lived through 68K MacOS pre and post System 7, PPC Mac pre and post OS X, x86 Macs pre and post Carbon support and now ARM Macs. After each transition , there was a limited amount of time that you could use the same version and even a smaller amount of time that you would have wanted to.
But the same argument applies that applies to Figma. It’s a professional tool that should help you generate income far greater than the cost
I know you just ragebaiting
Only “Premium Connectivity” aka the internet data plan (streaming media, live traffic, and live sentry video feeds) is exclusively a subscription.
Tesla has always offered the option purchase the Full Self Driving upgrade outright. The option to subscribe monthly to FSD was added later.
Maybe you’re thinking of the free trial of FSD that new vehicles come with?
There is a lot of criticize Tesla for, but they aren’t locking features behind subscriptions.
In the past, BMW has locked heated seats, wireless Apple CarPlay, even software updates behind their ConnectedDrive subscription.
https://electrek.co/2022/07/26/tesla-ransom-customer-over-80...
> Later, Tesla started to offer owners of those software-locked vehicles the option to unlock the capacity for an additional cost. Tesla phased out the practice over the years, but the company still used software-locked battery packs when doing warranty replacements of battery packs of certain capacities that it doesn’t produce anymore.
Upgrading the head unit for a 2013 Model S triggered an error and reverted this old generation battery to software lock.
This clearly was a software bug and Tesla reverted it for all customers using these older batteries.
This has literally nothing to do with subscriptions (the word subscribe isn’t even in the article once). I don’t even think you read the article.
> He has the car for a few months, goes in and does a paid MCU2 upgrade at Tesla after the 3G shutdown.
> ...
> Tesla told him that he had to pay $4,500 to unlock the capability:
It's all in the article.
You can get all stuck-up about the word "subscription" but guy goes into Tesla for a non-battery related service and loses 2/3 thirds of the range the car claimed it had unless he forks over 5k.