My understanding, pieced together from conversations over the years with Adobe employees, is that they do try to do this, and they don’t have success with it. I have no idea if they’ve done something like this with a Figma-like goal, though.

They basically did exactly this with XD and it started with some good ideas and then basically just fizzled out.

Yeah, kind of wonder what would have happened had Adobe instead pulled a pair of engineers aside and said, &quot;Hey, we want you two to create a Figma rival. You&#x27;ll have no directives from up above, have all the freedom to write the app how you want. You can work where you want, when you want ... if you need more specific expertise on the team you can take who you like. The first version you roll out doesn&#x27;t have to have Figma parity, just has to be something you&#x27;re proud of. We&#x27;ll put it out as beta ... it can stay beta for as long as you feel it needs to be. We&#x27;re hoping you can get us to have a Figma-like presence, maybe Figma-parity within three years or so?&quot;I suspect Adobe are too behemoth these days. A scrappy start-up&#x2F;skunk-works within Adobe might have been able to pull off some nice code and for a lot less than $20B.

Why improve your software when Apple can just release better hardware? \s

Ahh, Adobe.. they have earnings for billions and billions and they can not improve their software suites on performance..

Yeah, over the last five years illustrator has added no useful new features (at least for my use cases) and XD has wandered around with no clear direction. Meanwhile Figma has been a rocketship of features that massively improve workflows. I’m worried they’ll sink into the Adobe pit of complacent mediocrity if they’re bought out.

Good for Figma founders, they&#x27;ll make a lot of money, bad for Figma users and design authoring tool in general suffering from the lack of competition in the space for the last 25 years.I&#x27;ve seen what happened to Macromedia products after Adobe bought them.

&gt; Adobe and its forever subscription model will eventually get applied to Figma.Figma is already a “forever subscription”. It’s a SaaS subscription.

End of the line for Adobe XD if this happens?I like Figma a lot, but I&#x27;m glad I have an old copy of Sketch to fall back on. Adobe and its forever subscription model will eventually get applied to Figma.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;EawX9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;EawX9</a>

For image manipulation is, nonen omen, GIMP.For drawing I would say Krita.

Use Keynote with a custom canvas size. You can do literally anything in Keynote.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;100377108" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;100377108</a>To repost their comment:“ In my work, there&#x27;s constant discussion about which is the best and hottest new design tool to use. I’ve tried many of them, but in the end I still keep coming back to Keynote. It’s easy to learn and use, swapping assets is a breeze (using media placeholder), and most complex animations can be tested with Magic Move (the secret sauce to it all). Producing animations can span a range of fidelities; I can produce all the assets in Keynote, or I can copy out of Illustrator or drag and drop from Sketch (how seamless this works puts a smile on my face every time). As an interaction or visual designer, if you’re not using Keynote to test and bring your work to life, then I think you should start now! At least I hope this little experiment inspires you to try.”

It was photopea.com, but he went to a subscription model too. Free with ads, but they&#x27;re pretty distracting to me.Affinity products are decent, but they&#x27;re not free, it&#x27;s a one time purchase.There&#x27;s Krita, which is good, but I really want something that mirrors the traditional tool layout of Photoshop. Both affinity and Krita do their own thing which is tough when you&#x27;ve been using Photoshop for 25 years.

Adobe consolidates. Where is the Blender equivalent for Photoshop? I don&#x27;t think GIMP is the answer, but it seems like Photoshop is ripe for an open source competitor in the category. I just don&#x27;t know of any realistic candidates.

Yeah, as a Figma and Adobe consumer this feels like an intentional effort to limit my choice and enable Adobe creative cloud to continue to be more-or-less the only realistic option for design work.I’m perennially frustrated that I live in an era with nearly-dead antitrust.

Adobe has an excellent team of machine learning experts who are very well aware of what&#x27;s going on.  I attend their ML lecture series regularly and see speakers from FB, Google, OpenAI, universities, etc, especially on recent advances in large language models and their application to zero-shot learning and text to image generation.

Adobe will be facing an existential crisis trying to maintain this monopoly vs AI generated content, AI augmented content generation tools and cheap image and layout apps.

This is a blatant effort at maintaining a monopoly.

&gt; By bringing powerful capabilities from Adobe’s imaging, photography, illustration, video, 3D and font technologies into the Figma platform, we can benefit all customers involved in the product design process, from designers to product managers to developers. Figma’s community will ultimately have a continuous user experience across ideation, screen layout, interaction design and content editing, allowing product designers and their stakeholders to operate at a whole new level.smart objects and cloud libraries, just kill me now

Adobe&#x27;s statement: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adobe.com&#x2F;about-adobe&#x2F;intent-to-acquire-20220915.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adobe.com&#x2F;about-adobe&#x2F;intent-to-acquire-20220915...</a>

&gt; I really hope this incentives Krita, Ink, Gimp or other OSS to focus more on UI design features.A comment in another thread mentioned Penpot <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;penpot.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;penpot.app&#x2F;</a>

Big win for the Figma team. Big loss for consumers who have benefitted from the competitive market. I really hope this incentives Krita, Ink, Gimp or other OSS to focus more on UI design features.I think there is a value for Adobe to add Figma to CC, Photoshop can fully focus on photo manipulation while Figma (perhaps merged with XD?) will be target UI designers.

Me as well, I refuse to give Adobe any money if I can use Affinity&#x27;s products.

I used Photoshop for 20 years and really tried to switch to Affinity, but holy cow it&#x27;s so extremely different. I tried finding a good &quot;Affinity for Photoshop Users&quot; resource and wasn&#x27;t ever able to before giving up on it and using photopea (which is great).

As others will no doubt call out, Affinity have been my main-stay graphics apps for some years now. Affinity Design, Photo, Publisher....I refuse to pay a monthly fee for something I use on a scattershot basis.

&gt;[ACQUISITOR] is deeply committed to keeping [STARTUP] operating autonomously and I will continue to serve as CEO, reporting to [NEW OVERLORD]You won&#x27;t believe what happens next.

Every time one of these &quot;statements&quot; happens I&#x27;m reminded of what Palmer Luckey said about Oculus when Facebook bought them, or what Jan Koum said about WhatsApp. How long before Dylan leaves to &quot;spend time with family&quot;?

I&#x27;m just going to assume he&#x27;ll leave Adobe in one year to move on to his next adventure.

He must know his statement is pointless. How many times have we seen big aquisitions with promises not to mess with things, only for it to happen a year or two down the line.You don&#x27;t drop 20bn on something to let it sit at it&#x27;s current level.They&#x27;ll be integrating creative cloud and making it part of the subscription. I dare say they&#x27;ll close the loophole on the free plan as well that lets you have unlimited designs.

&gt; Like many of you, I grew up using Adobe software and it was a critical part of my personal creative journey.Yes, it was the part of your journey that made you realize it was a company that made bad design software, and you devoted your life to making an alternative to it. For me, it was the part of my journey I was happy to leave behind to use your alternative.I think it&#x27;s okay if he wants to make $20B, but don&#x27;t spin it! A blog post like this makes me lose trust, it doesn&#x27;t reassure me.

UPDATE n. 2: Dylan Field (CEO of Figma) has addressed these kind of concerns on their public disclore of the fact: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.figma.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;a-new-collaboration-with-adobe&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.figma.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;a-new-collaboration-with-adobe&#x2F;</a>Citing him:&gt; Adobe is deeply committed to keeping Figma operating autonomously and I will continue to serve as CEO, reporting to David Wadhwani.As others have said, there’s really a missing OSS version out there that can compete feature-by-feature with Sketch &#x2F; Figma &#x2F; XD. Layout engine capabilities are the biggest missing feature in competitors.

I&#x27;m a long time user of Trello. After the acquisition, Atlassian foisted their login system on Trello users, but otherwise didn&#x27;t substantially degrade the product.The integration with other Atlassian services improved. There is a variety of plug-ins now, and new ways to display the data for paid plans.Do you feel different? Any specific examples of what became worse?

If true, congratulations for Figma founders, and a bad day for designers that were looking for a way to escape from Adobe.I don’t think that in the long term this will give Figma as an ecosystem any benefit — unless Adobe will keep it separate from the main Creative Cloud.This reminds me of the Trello acquisition.As a loyal Figma user I’m pretty sceptical of the future. Hope to be wrong.UPDATE: Looks like it is indeed true…
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.adobe.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;news-details&#x2F;2022&#x2F;Adobe-to-Acquire-Figma&#x2F;default.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.adobe.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;news-details&#x2F;2022&#x2F;Adobe-to-Acqui...</a>

Sketch actually surpassed Fireworks in every aspect. After many many years with Fireworks, I was astonished by Sketch how they fixed every little thing that bothered me in Fireworks, and did it just right.

Same here, best design software i’ve ever used, especially for web stuff. Sketch came close, although I haven’t used it in a while.

Ugh, I&#x27;m still sad about what happened to Macromedia Fireworks after Adobe takeover. Have been boycotting their products ever since.

Did they? Typically, the intent to merge comes before any anti-trust investigation.

Probably because anti-trust enforcement only seems to get involved when two already huge companies are involved.

can antitrust prevent public companies from acquiring private companies?

The antitrust agencies in the United States (FTC and DOJ) do not proactively give approval for companies to merge. After official merger filings have been made (which they have not in this case), the FTC or DOJ have a process in which they gather evidence and determine whether they have grounds to challenge the proposed merger. [1][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;advice-guidance&#x2F;competition-guidance&#x2F;guide-antitrust-laws&#x2F;mergers&#x2F;premerger-notification-merger-review-process" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;advice-guidance&#x2F;competition-guidance&#x2F;gui...</a>

Anyone here can lodge this simple form and I&#x27;d encourage you to do so. Especially if you think this merger will substantially lesson competition and stifle innovation lodge a complaint: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;enforcement&#x2F;report-antitrust-violation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;enforcement&#x2F;report-antitrust-violation</a>At a minimum, they will investigate this and make inquiries (typically within months) if they see a high volume of complaints.See
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;advice-guidance&#x2F;competition-guidance&#x2F;guide-antitrust-laws&#x2F;mergers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;advice-guidance&#x2F;competition-guidance&#x2F;gui...</a>
For more info on the relevant law :)

Totally agree I don’t get why antitrust gave the okay to this…

Sketch cloud displays sketch designs quite well. I wonder if they&#x27;ll be able to turn it into a web editor eventually...

They are hiring for people with WASM&#x2F;Emscripten experience so I&#x27;d say there&#x27;s something planned, even if only a more sophisticated viewer...

&gt; WhyBecause statistics. If you make one option less appealing (which is the presumption) all competitors will indirectly benefit, statistically, for various reasons, none of which might resonate with your specific personal needs.

&gt; if I can&#x27;t run it to look at their work and actively comment&#x2F;collaborate with them, it&#x27;s not a useful workflow.But you can do that though:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sketch.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;browsing-web-documents&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sketch.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;browsing-web-documents&#x2F;</a>

&gt; This is huge news for Sketch.Why, do they have an online editor yet?As a cto&#x2F;admin&#x2F;manager&#x2F;hiring person: Sketch is worthless for me because I don&#x27;t have a Mac. But because of that, my company does not use it: despite designers working on macOS, if I can&#x27;t run it to look at their work and actively comment&#x2F;collaborate with them, it&#x27;s not a useful workflow. Therefore instead we hire people familiar with Figma (sadly, because I wanted to avoid giving Adobe money. Well, fuck, eh?)

Oh sure they would. Have you ever dealt with the stupidity in the C-suite of a large corporation?

Big company executives do not see the world the way you do.Creative Cloud alone has at least 5x the users of Figma. I have no idea how to even calculate all the users of all Adobe products. I guarantee that a lot of people at Adobe see Figma as just adorable, but not really, you know, a product. Some people at Adobe get it and are hoping to revolutionize their company with new blood, but… they probably won’t succeed.At big companies that have captured a large portion of the market, they are usually not interested in “disrupting” themselves. Steve Jobs was a rarity. There are far more attainable revenue and careers to be made optimizing the existing revenue streams.If killing Figma entirely made Creative Cloud revenue go up by a few percentage points that would be worth it for them. Even if the acquisition has negative value the people who pioneered it have more influence in their company, and an achievement that advances their career narrative.They may tell themselves they’re going to integrate Figma, and some people are going to definitely try, but if that doesn’t work out that’s probably fine.

I&#x27;m an Adobe employee, and I think that this is most likely what will happen.  I think maybe the transition to web-first wasn&#x27;t going as planned.  I think that Adobe&#x27;s going to move their features into Figma (integration with creative cloud assets, easy importing&#x2F;exporting to other programs, collaboration workflows) and close out XD.

I&#x27;m betting they will leave it alone, at least for a while. I&#x27;m sure the C suite at adobe is not blind to their reputation and they know that if they start tacking on &quot;Adobe&quot; features to Figma, user growth will stall out.Everyone is referencing the Macromedia purchase but I would argue that it was a very different kind of purchase. With that Adobe spent $3.4B acquiring them, in Figma&#x27;s case they paid $20B. I could see how Adobe is willing to throw away $3.4B to kill their competition but I&#x27;m not sure they would be willing to do that to a $20B purchase.If anything they keep is exactly the same, kill Adobe XD, and rename Figma to Adobe XD.

I’d put the odds at about 95% that Adobe will ruin Figma with bloat, 14 different “Creative Cloud” background processes, and hostile pricing models within 5 years.This is huge news for Sketch.However, to be honest, this is the type of acquisition that should be blocked IMO. Adobe is literally acquiring a direct competitor here.To me the consumer harm is pretty clear. Instead of a more competent org (Figma) growing further to disrupt more of Adobe’s business, we’re going to be stuck with Adobe forever.Great outcome for the founders and investors in Figma, terrible outcome for consumers.

&gt; &quot;Was enjoying the competition and thought Figma was well ahead of Adobe to be honest.&quot;They were… That&#x27;s why Adobe bought &#x27;em.

Fair enough. Preferred to stay clear of Adobe and their trash subscription model so naturally I feel some resentment. Was enjoying the competition and thought Figma was well ahead of Adobe to be honest.I hope the deal fall through NGL

The founders of Figma must be very happy: &quot;Adobe announced it has entered into a definitive merger agreement to acquire Figma, a leading web-first collaborative design platform, for approximately $20 billion in cash and stock.&quot;

From Adobe&#x27;s end: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.adobe.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;news-details&#x2F;2022&#x2F;Adobe-to-Acquire-Figma&#x2F;default.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.adobe.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;news-details&#x2F;2022&#x2F;Adobe-to-Acqui...</a>

Inkscape, penpot and&#x2F;or maybe gimp afaik.

We have „figma for xyz” but more often it should be „blender for xyz”Would be awesome if all software tools were gravitating towards the non-profit financed-by-big-stakeholders model like blender is.

It’s not free, but Sketch is a fantastic (also MacOS native) alternative.

N̶o̶t̶ ̶o̶p̶e̶n̶ ̶s̶o̶u̶r̶c̶e̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶B̶l̶e̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶A̶f̶f̶i̶n̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶s̶u̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶t̶t̶y̶ ̶c̶h̶e̶a̶p̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶f̶a̶i̶r̶l̶y̶ ̶g̶o̶o̶d̶ ̶j̶o̶b̶ ̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶s̶e̶ ̶s̶o̶r̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶.̶Ok it is the multiple user editing that people liked so much about figma. Ok that makes sense. Ignore me.

Although it’s still great software I’m stopping usage today because a) I refuse to support adobe and b) I’m confident the software will progressively get much worse, so any investment today is a waste of time I should spend finding and learning something else.Is there a blender of tools like this?

It&#x27;s ironic to think that VCs, who enable a company to start and build, are ultimately invested in its demise.

A textbook example of capitalism squashing innovation.

Well that’s the end of Figma then. It was fantastic while it lasted.

Collaboration is an interesting choice of words

Will get bloated and overpriced in no time.

That’s too bad. Good for the individuals and groups benefiting from it, I am happy for you, but I expect Adobe will ruin this product for users. Especially since this is an anti-competitive acquisition.

Announced officially <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32850591" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32850591</a>

Are there any examples when an acquisition actually led to improved value for the users rather than ruined or straight killed the product?

And here I was, having a good day, when you had to remind me of EA&#x27;s atrocities...Kane Lives!

IMO, Skype was on the way out either way. The P2P model it used only really made sense on desktop computers running most of the day with unmetered cable broadband, which is a very limited market, vs. the increasing percentage of mobile (and laptop, and desktop-but-4G&#x2F;5G-connected) users that were a net negative on Skype&#x27;s resources.So Skype was looking at a major rewrite, and building up massive server infrastructure, both of which needed lots and lots of cashflow that Skype&#x27;s business model just couldn&#x27;t generate.I doubt any other company taking over Skype could&#x27;ve avoided ruining it.

Skype was already dying. Are you remembering correctly?

&gt; Adobe is where software goes to die.After EA acquiring Westwood, Macromedia is the second biggest let-down of a sale in the software industry in my book. Perhaps Skype comes close.

with figma’s adoption as a standard, we gave up cyclical innovation for continuous improvement, and have a trade where technical skills are highly transferrable and highly teachable. the cost of bad stewardship of figma won’t just be the loss of a tool, it’ll be the breakdown of a whole layer of the digital design practice.seeing that adoption of framer has been so poor they have to lean on web export as a selling point, i don’t think we’ll get another tool as powerful as figma that young designers are as willing to spend five years mastering and collectively adopt as a standard—-more likely the design tools ecosystem will look like the front-end frameworks ecosystem.do you remember what it was like in the field ten years ago? even with promising upstart sketch in play, it was unlike anything i deal with today, and it sucked

On the flipside, this opens up the space for a new upstart with an innovative take on design tooling, just like how Figma came up.

It sounds like a &quot;market opportunity&quot; for someone with graphics coding skills. I hear if your app gets big enough, there&#x27;s $20B waiting for you.

AllDevelopment&amp;OperationsBecameEnd-of-life

&gt; Adobe is where software goes to die.AFAIK Corel has the same reputation. What is the problem with design software companies?

Oh hell no. Adobe is where software goes to die. Which is big shame because Figma has been great, and had serious potential to turn into the first WYSIWYG tool that would actually generate code you&#x27;d want to use. But Macromedia software was also great, and now it&#x27;s mostly non-existent. I&#x27;d love for this to turn out different, but I have very low expectations.

but are you willing to walk away from your current job where your employer won&#x27;t share your sentiments? Are they going to switch to a Figma alternative because of ideology and emotions tied to the change in ownership? Isn&#x27;t it more likely that the product will work as is and businesses won&#x27;t face any direct interruption because owner changed?I think Adobe made a smart decision, businesses are locked in and unlikely to switch once something is deeply integrated to their application design workflows.&quot;Corner the market, and raise the price.&quot; In this case, outsource the former and in-house the latter.

Same here.  This is going to do tangible damage to my daily life as someone who opens Figma daily.  I also spend time hunting rogue Adobe spyware processes in activity monitor daily.  Adobe destroys everything they touch and Figma was finally innovating despite them.  I hope we get real anti trust laws someday.

As a long time Figma champion, this breaks my heart. Every time I am forced to go back to an Adobe product I find it worse off than I left it. I worry that I will no longer see rapid updates and features that benefit me as a user and not the grater &quot;cloud ecosystem&quot;.

Oh no...Well, I guess it was good while it lasted!

And here I was thinking of switching to figma after getting frustrated with adobe, sigh...

I wonder how long before Figma and XD become one product then?

Figma has a free tier, which doesn&#x27;t exist under CC. On the other hand, Figma costs at least $12&#x2F;$45&#x2F;$75 per editor per month depending on the level, and they don&#x27;t charge users without editing rights.Those prices are not far off CC plans, $20 for Photoshop, $55 for the full suite of apps. If they keep offering the free tier, I am sure they can include a standalone plan for Figma around $20, and add it to the Suite without increasing the price, and they won&#x27;t lose customers except from Adobe hate, which I totally stand behind because I prefer having a competitive market.

Please, Adobe, please don&#x27;t add Figma to Creative Cloud. It would be great to keep using it, I&#x27;m not going to change my file system to case-insensitive.

Not sure how I feel about this. Figma is great and all their feature releases have been impressive, but I feel it was due to competition and worry about similar products coming in from big corporations (like Adobe XD). I feel this competition really push Figma hard.Now being part of the same owner, just makes it feel like any aggressive progress will just stall out.

Can’t begrudge anyone involved, but this feels kind of lame. I thought Figma really could compete long term with Adobe.

downside: Adobe acquired yet another piece of software, one that even competes with Photoshop XD.upside: I now can roll out Figma anywhere we have adobe CC licenses without a rigamarole from management

I don&#x27;t think so. Webflow is all marketing and PR IMO.The issue with Webflow is that GUI-based web design that exports static HTML files doesn&#x27;t fit with how most large websites are coded and deployed. It would be one thing if Webflow CMS and Ecommerce was gaining market share vs Squarespace and Wix, but I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s really happening.When I go on Twitter, I mostly see PR-type posts about Webflow. Lots of &quot;Webflow experts&quot; but few real companies that are willing to build large sites with it.

They literally did the same thing with dreamweaver as well. And now dreamweaver is a fast growing business in the form of Webflow.It’s the same story over and over again. Adobe acquires and then stifles innovation. 10 years later we realize what we were missing out on when a challenger eventually gets big enough—-until Adobe kills that company too.I’d bet a nice chunk of money that Webflow is next.

There&#x27;s a recent comment of mine someplace about how much I miss the _genius_ of Fireworks as a combined pixel&#x2F;vector art tool that saved everything to standard PNG files - which anyone could read since the additional data was inserted using PNG tags.That and it being very fast and effective for Web design (miles ahead of Photoshop at the time).

I miss those days too. Built so many sites in Dreamweaver + Fireworks. But it&#x27;s probably not the internet that has changed, but you. It&#x27;s not magical anymore because we&#x27;re no longer kids and because it has become normal to be online. After having to deal with 56k modems for years, every moment of being continuously online felt special.

Ah, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Geocities. I miss the days when the Internet was full of magic and wonders, and not dumpster fires.

I guess you are being ironic,  but if not, that applies to individuals commenting here, not companies acquiring other businesses.

That rule certainly doesn&#x27;t apply to Adobe.

Nothing in the rules say anything about malice or incompetence. The most charitable interpretation I could find for your assertion is this line:&gt; Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that&#x27;s easier to criticize. Assume good faith.Of course, the subject of this is a user&#x27;s comments, not a corporation. I suggest you read the rules a little more thoroughly before accusing others of breaking them.

Please stop breaking the site rules by incorrecting assuming malice when incompetence is sufficient.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

I reluctantly moved on to Affinity Designer. I still miss Fireworks but I knew I had to get off it cold turkey.

I still keep a copy of CS6 installed just for Fireworks. It was the first design tool that made sense to me as a programmer that wanted to think of everything in terms of pixels and object groups. I should probably move on at this point but it still does what I need it to do.

I just did, since I have WINE installed to run music software. It runs _perfectly_, although with early 2000s era UX conventions (i.e., very small fonts, some pixelated). Edits seem very fast, although it is hard to say on my hardware (Ryzen 7). As a curio, it&#x27;s a fun experiment, but being a bit less nostalgic and more realistic now, I&#x27;d quicker reach for GIMP or Krita on Linux (on the Mac, I use Pixelmator Pro and Affinity Designer for the semi-advanced editing I need)... Although I do love this thing.FYI, the download of version 8 was available to use as a 30-day trial, which seems legal enough today, if only for experimentation, and I actually have a license of MX someplace from my G4 Mac days.

Those two pieces of software were undoubtedly the thing that got me into websites, which led to building computers, which led to my current career.Incredible stuff.

I actually do that myself. I also use Fireworks 8 on windows when  possible. I am yet to find a software that actually replaces it.

I too really loved Fireworks (and Dreamweaver) back in the Macromedia days. As a kid then, it was really very intuitive to do all sorts of odd creative projects easily.Riding on nostalgia fumes, I went searching for screenshots and in the process amusingly found: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;askubuntu.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;244128" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;askubuntu.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;244128</a> - a Linux user still running Fireworks 8 in WINE. I&#x27;m almost tempted to try the same...

Yeah, there&#x27;s still nothing as good as fireworks at what it did. Figma is better in some ways with autolayout, etc. But fireworks also had excellent bitmap editing support.

Microsoft bought GitHub years ago and announced the &quot;sunsetting&quot; of the Atom editor (a GitHub-company project) and its official ecosystem a few months ago. The archiving of Atom and all related projects will occur on Dec. 15th, 2022: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom&#x2F;</a>.

I was heavy user of Fireworks back in the day. Looking back — it had enormous influence over where I’m now today. I still can’t get over what Adobe did to it. It’s like Microsoft or some other behemoth buying JetBrains and then slowly killing it in favor of its own IDEs.

It amazes me that people posting on a YC controlled board whose entire purpose for existing is to fund startups long enough to get an exit - statistically most likely through an acquisition by a bigger company - wants to stop acquisitions.The funding environment for startups would be a lot worse if investors thought that the only way they could recoup their investments is through exits. Look how few of YC companies actually go public.Even companies that do go public are often just surviving long enough to hopefully get acquired.The founders at Figma chose to be acquired. It’s their product and their company.

Adobe’s direct competitor is Adobe XD, which launched with practically no features and was slowly developed only to dwindle to death as a rarely used cloud service, while everyone does the important work in Figma.The parent comment is spot-on. Antitrust legislation needs to be invoked to prevent this acquisition from happening.

&gt; This is an online collaboration &#x2F; network effect acquisition. Not a tech acquisition.One could also make the argument that it&#x27;s an acqui-hire.If one wanted to build a real Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere, etc. for the web, you&#x27;d want the Figma team. Nobody else understands how to build desktop-like experiences using the latest web technologies (Wasm, etc.) better.

This is an online collaboration &#x2F; network effect acquisition. Not a tech acquisition.(This is like Microsoft acquiring Github due to GitHub network effect)While I too loved Fireworks and Dreamweaver, neither one had the network effect that Figma does (granted, SaaS software in the late 90s &#x2F; early 00s was rare).Even if Fireworks were to have flourished while at Adobe, it&#x27;s not entirely clear they would have successful made both the pivot to web AND also gained the network effect that Figma has created.

Well if your definition of bonafide smart is that they’re an engineer, then there are pretty few. If you think design and visual communication has any value whatsoever, then yeah, lots of people are using it, some of whom are very smart. That’s why they’re worth $20B after all.

One of the top users of Figma by time-spent-in-app in its early days was the founder of a little tool called Notion.So apparently spending your days in Figma can result in negative ROI shit like designing a billion dollar product.But hey, I used to have the same gut feeling…that anyone who does something different to what I do all day is worthless. Then I got older and learned my model of the world, with me at the center of it, was naive and incorrect.

Making 9 sliced graphics for the web is obsolete though.That said Flash also supported a bunch of innovation for its time, and it too was obsoleted.Maybe 9 slice graphic were already dead at Fireworks’ peak.Figma is officially way more overrated than this stuff ever was.Does anyone know a person who’s like, bonafide smart, using Figma? I feel like everyone I know who does “Figma” day to day is doing negative ROI shit. It’s like anti-R&amp;D. It’s the ultimate bullshit job for non engineers.

&gt; I used Fireworks for years for web design stuffI still use it as my primary web&#x2F;ui design tool and in fact am stuck on MacOS Mojave because I&#x27;d have to say goodbye to it forever if I upgraded.

&gt; I&#x27;m not totally sure if Figma will suffer a similar fateI strongly suspect not. It&#x27;s in a lot more use than Fireworks (which was cool -I used it- but was always a bit &quot;niche&quot;).If they play their cards right, they can use it to leverage their way back into many designers&#x27; good graces (who had been leaving the Adobesphere for the Figmasphere). They would probably add ways to leverage their cloud storage and other apps.That said, it&#x27;s pretty much a textbook &quot;buy the competition&quot; move, and the kind of thing that&#x27;s getting a lot of scrutiny from regulators, these days.But $20B is a lot of yachts. I don&#x27;t blame the Figma people for selling out.

I used Fireworks for years for web design stuff - it was simple to use, but fully featured, a real joy to use.As soon as Adbobe bought Macromedia, I knew they would shitcan it because of Photoshop and Illustrator. And I knew other nice Macromedia tools, like Dreamweaver, would have a similar fate. Such a shame, and buying a competitor just to kill it feels so wrong :(I&#x27;m not totally sure if Figma will suffer a similar fate, but I do think it&#x27;s going to get progressively more expensive, harder to use, buggier, and generally be more user-hostile.

Was looking for this comment. I loved Freehand. It was so much better than Illustrator. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, Illustrator today has come a long way. But I can only imagine what Freehand in 2022 would be like.

I used to always check out new releases of Illustrator to see if they had caught up to CorelDraw circa 1999… behind those cheesy vector and free-font CDs was a vastly superior vector editor. (to be fair, they seem to have mostly caught up around 2010-ish?)

Don&#x27;t forget Freehand, which was, in many ways, superior to Illustrator.

I was part of the first wave of animators who found Flash and mucked around in it - I made a cartoon early on that went viral before that was a thing.
An exe file as an attachment to an email, that went round the world. Crazy days.

I remember how Fireworks *felt* to use. Just seeing that name written again gave me warm fuzzy feelings. Fireworks came about at a time when web design was almost entirely something you did in HTML. The workflow to go from bitmap to web was really bad, so most of us just did things natively.Fireworks was the first tool that allowed you to draw, but maintain the constraints (and portability) of HTML and CSS as it came in to prominence.The closest thing I have had to that feeling again was when a friend of mine did some design for me and shared it in Figma. What I thought were bitmaps were vectors!! I had so much fun bringing that in to my site (which I ended up doing in Webflow, because apparently I haven&#x27;t kept up with the times enough to hand code reasonably quickly).I&#x27;ve used the latest and greatest Adobe products, they definitively do not have this feeling. There is really no delight to be found. I know they are incredibly powerful and near and dear to many people, but for the young and restless they are boring.

&gt;The only hope is that since Figma is subscription revenue, they will immediately feel the pain of neglecting the product.I honestly haven&#x27;t observed this to be the case with subscription software. They will continue making cash because people want to continue to use it. Meanwhile, if it were individual sales, they would actually have to maintain and improve it to get people to buy new versions.

The only hope is that since Figma is subscription revenue, they will immediately feel the pain of neglecting the product. I’d imagine it’s a mature enough, well known enough product that you could say it’s already stolen as much share as it would from adobe’s cash cows. Potentially it’s the place users get started nowadays and adobe could leverage it by making it easier for those users to explore adobe’s other products.

Yeah but we will still have Sketch, which rules. Nobody uses Illustrator and Photoshop to do web design anymore.

Adobe killed Fireworks hoping their competitor ImageReady would prevail.

I still use Adobe Animate (formerly Macromedia Flash), for simple vector drawings. For example, you can just draw a circle, draw a line through it, delete part of the circle that is bisected on the line, then click and drag the line or the remaining curve to curve those two segments. It&#x27;s so much easier than using the pen tool or having to deal with vectors in Illustrator.

&gt;except Macromedia apps had far better UX, better performance, and better integration with the webLest we only remember the roses smelling side, Macromedia also made the pile of crap called Flash.And Both Fireworks and Dreamweaver had their fair share of bugs under Macromedia too.

In case people are too young to remember, Macromedia was well on its way to matching Adobe&#x27;s application suite – except Macromedia apps had far better UX, better performance, and better integration with the web. There&#x27;s a good case that Adobe would no longer exist today had Adobe not acquired Macromedia.

Well, you can do that with almost any very lightweight app, including apps costing like $10 and having hardware acceleration and everything, like Acorn and Pixelmator (examples on the Mac side) and also &quot;be on to your next task&quot;.You can even fully automate it (well, at least the resize, you&#x27;ll still need to pick where to crop) with both.

A basic image viewer included in your OS can probably do that - and a lot quicker than two minutes! How does Fireworks make it so slow to open, resize, and close?

You can open Fireworks PNG files in www.Photopea.com :) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.adobe.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;fireworks-discussions&#x2F;open-fireworks-png-files-without-fireworks-and-convert-them-to-layered-psd&#x2F;td-p&#x2F;11716164" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.adobe.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;fireworks-discussions&#x2F;open-fi...</a>

There is absolutely zero need to keep a 22 year old copy of fireworks around just to resize and crop an image. None.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;squoosh.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;squoosh.app&#x2F;</a>
Web app that has much better encoders.

I still run a 22 year old copy Fireworks 4 because of Adobe&#x27;s shenanigans. Just this morning I had to crop and resize a 1 MB image for display on a website and was able to do that in Fireworks in about 2 minutes resulting in 15k PNG and was on to my next task.

I loved fireworks. I had the first version on my laptop and it was slow but amazing.

it hasn&#x27;t yet passed that review. which is standard for deals like this, announce first then the regulators have their say.

But when these big corps buy and potentially kill products shrinking competition, where the hell is antitrust to be found? Like are the guys there sleeping well? Would they like a massage?

Ah, Fireworks brings back good memories. I used Fireworks way back in high school to design websites - you could throw together a basic multi-page website with a clickable&#x2F;hoverable image navbar in literally minutes, no code required. And it looked good too, at least by the standards of the early 2000s.Later, I did the vast majority of the visuals I used throughout my PhD in Fireworks CS6, long after it had been abandoned by Adobe. It was fast, faster than Photoshop or Illustrator is today. The shape libraries meant that doing diagrams and illustrations was a breeze - these days I do most of that in Keynote&#x2F;Powerpoint, with much poorer bitmap editing support. Photoshop and Illustrator are simply too big and slow for quick-and-dirty editing tasks.The thing that ultimately killed Fireworks for me was that it crashed more frequently every time I updated macOS, to the point where it simply would no longer launch. For a couple of years I maintained a set of binary patches to Fireworks CS6 to work around startup crashes and such, but that ultimately got to be too time-consuming to keep up with.I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever been as productive in any other image editing software. Photopea gets surprisingly close for me - despite being a Photoshop clone, it&#x27;s both faster (just a web app!) and has a few of the nice features I miss from Fireworks.

Oh man, I totally forgot about the slice-into-HTML stuff. Back before everyone decided table-based layouts were &quot;harmful&quot;.

We still use Fireworks! I open it every day, and it remains a decent vector and simple image editor. Back in the day we used to create our web designs in Fireworks and then (before we knew better) &quot;slice&quot; them to HTML and export using Fireworks. Even after we transitioned to building by hand, we still used Fireworks for things like creating mouseover menus.Bad news for Figma.

&gt;I&#x27;d argue this wasn&#x27;t simply negligence, but a calculated decision to kill an innovative product because it threatened the profits of their cash cows.Well, that product was also theirs at that point, so it wouldn&#x27;t be threatening anything (profits of its sales would go to them anyway).If you people people would stop buying Photoshop and Illustrator, then no, Fireworks was meant for other use case entirely (web mostly), and it had 1&#x2F;10 the capabilities of Photoshop and Illustrator pertaining to their own domains (yes, many use just 10% of a program, but many must-have features included in that 10% differ from person to person, so Fireworks having that 10% wouldn&#x27;t be enough).

Pretty sure that&#x27;s the long term plan.

These tools aren&#x27;t interchangeable. Photoshop is for editing images. Illustrator is for editing vector graphics.Figma is a multiplayer layout tool, which can be used for web, print, or anything else. The main use cases for enterprise are a) it&#x27;s web-accessible, and b) the realtime collaboration&#x2F;revision&#x2F;commenting tools.The smart thing would be to just sunset Adobe XD and replace it with Adobe Figma.

I remember Fireworks very well and completely agree it was exceptionally well optimised for UI. As well as the ability to easily edit both bitmaps and vectors, the combination of frames and layer sets nested within the frames allowed for super rapid iterations on layouts. The export features were super optimal too at the time. Rather irrational of me, but I took the slow death of it rather personally and never forgave Adobe.

I have such great memories of Fireworks prior to the acquisition by Adobe. It was my go to tool for 90% of all web graphics: simple to use, no need to fuss with layers for selections, vector + bitmap in one app, easy exports, and everything editable within a PNG file. Such a wonderful tool! I truly hope Figma doesn&#x27;t suffer the same fate. Hopefully the $20B price tag, justifies resources.

Adobe ran Flash into the ground. Flash was developing at such a rapid pace until it was acquired, and then quickly stagnated. Adobe too way too long to get Adobe Air performant and the tooling was abysmal.If Flash was in capable hands, it would have become a major player in the game development space, which is where most of its strengths were.

How does this analogy make sense though? Fireworks was, to Adobe, some third-rate app that Adobe had to acquire because they had acquired Flash, the thing they really cared about. Adobe certainly maintained Flash - anyone remember ActionScript 3?In this Figma acquisition, Figma is the main prize. They&#x27;re not just going to leave Figma to languish, no more than they left Flash to languish. Eventually Flash did die, yes, but that was more Apple crushing it than a direct decision of Adobe.

I wouldn&#x27;t be so sure anything will be similar to Adobe-&gt;Macromedia. That was 17 years ago and Adobe is a very different company today operating in a different competitive environment with a different business model. Also, Adobe&#x27;s competitor to Figma isn&#x27;t PS or AI, it&#x27;s a newer tool called Adobe xD. Adobe has sunk a lot of effort into getting xD &quot;right&quot; but so far failed to make it competitive. This massive acquisition is Adobe admitting that the xD effort failed and giving up.In recent years, Adobe&#x27;s approach to mega-sized acquisitions has been to put the newly acquired company&#x27;s management in charge of the relevant business unit, not the other way around. The users who should be worried by the news are those who love Adobe xD vs Figma (I assume there must be some). If the post-acquisition integration goes well, I&#x27;d estimate the chances at better than 50% that in a couple years former Figma management end up running Adobe&#x27;s creative professional segment entirely (ie PS, AI, etc).(note: none of this means you personally will prefer whatever the impact of that may be in any particular product.)

I used fireworks back in the day! Loved macromedia as a young fledgling tech person

I can’t believe Fireworks is already considered “once upon a time software”. It’s what got me into webdesign, together with Dreamweaver.

How quickly did Adobe fold the Macromedia products into their own product eco-system?I ask because Adobe have been sitting on their Substance aqusition without making part of the Creative Cloud Suite.Hopefully they may leave it alone.

Many years ago, when Adobe bought Macromedia, they acquired a tool called Fireworks[1]. This was a combined bitmap and vector editor that was incredibly well-optimised for user-interface and web design, at a time when most designers were paying exorbitant license fees to do such work painfully and slowly in Photoshop and Illustrator. Fireworks was cheap, powerful, and hugely ahead of its time. Many of the features and flows people love in Figma and Sketch were pioneered years earlier in Fireworks.After the acquisition, Adobe starved Fireworks of resources and marketing. They broke things, left major bugs and performance regressions unfixed, and eventually discontinued it altogether. I&#x27;d argue this wasn&#x27;t simply negligence, but a calculated decision to kill an innovative product because it threatened the profits of their cash cows.As much as I hope otherwise, I believe the acquisition of Figma will go the same way. Once it&#x27;s under the Adobe umbrella, the simple mathematics of profits from Photoshop and Illustrator vs. those from Figma will result in the latter being starved, stripped of functionality, and eventually left broken.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adobe_Fireworks" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adobe_Fireworks</a>

It is. Unfortunately our laws against anti-competitive behaviours are very weak.

This is not correct. There will almost certainly be a second request issued by the FTC or DOJ in this matter, and my guess is that it will almost certainly get challenged by one of those agencies. [1] In building their case, the agencies will reach out to users and competitors of the companies. Adobe and Figma know that this merger will certainly be contentious on antitrust issues, and I bet there is a large breakup fee that Adobe would have to pay for Figma if the merger was blocked for this reason.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;advice-guidance&#x2F;competition-guidance&#x2F;guide-antitrust-laws&#x2F;mergers&#x2F;premerger-notification-merger-review-process" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;advice-guidance&#x2F;competition-guidance&#x2F;gui...</a>

Anyone here can lodge this simple form. If you think this merger will substantially lesson competition and stifle innovation lodge a complaint: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;enforcement&#x2F;report-antitrust-violation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;enforcement&#x2F;report-antitrust-violation</a>At a minimum, they will investigate this and make inquiries (typically within months) if they see a high volume of complaints.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;advice-guidance&#x2F;competition-guidance&#x2F;guide-antitrust-laws&#x2F;mergers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;advice-guidance&#x2F;competition-guidance&#x2F;gui...</a>&quot;Some mergers change market dynamics in ways that can lead to higher prices, fewer or lower-quality goods or services, or less innovation.Section 7 of the Clayton Act prohibits mergers and acquisitions when the effect &quot;may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly.&quot; &quot;

I don&#x27;t think &quot;the government&quot; does anything unless someone complains. In this case, the process is to send a letter requesting a &quot;Business Review&quot; [1]. It&#x27;s probably a &quot;fill out this simple 30 page form, wait 2.5 years (max!) and then have your review request politely declined&quot; situation, but I suppose it&#x27;s foolish to complain before trying. It feels like one of those processes that costs lawyer money that another business would usually pay for; however it&#x27;s not clear what business would pay for this - maybe a heavy user of Figma? But then even if you &#x27;win&#x27; and stop the sale, doesn&#x27;t that alienate you from the founders?1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;atr&#x2F;business-reviews" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;atr&#x2F;business-reviews</a>

Acquiring a competitor isn&#x27;t going to automatically trigger antitrust laws. For one, web design is so far from critical infrastructure that it&#x27;s just unlikely to be on their radar. And secondly, there&#x27;s still a ton of competition. Even if Adobe and Figma are the two leaders, there&#x27;s still loads of alternatives available. You can still use Sketch or Canva or any of the all-in-one beginner tools like Squarespace.

&gt; but calling daddy governmentI pay for them, I may as well try to get them to do something that benefits me for the astronomical taxes I&#x27;ll be paying this year.

It&#x27;s not anti-competitive because there are plenty of other options available (and anyone can go and make their own if they&#x27;re willing to invest the time).Anti-competitive would assume that there&#x27;s no other viable option or means for replacement.FWIW, I think Adobe is a shit company but calling daddy government in to thump them for (presumably) taking away or breaking the favorite toy sets a terrible precedent. If anything, this is pro-competitive because it should light a fire under the ass of indie&#x27;s to replace it (which is already underway by the looks of Penpot).

I don&#x27;t understand how this acquisition is not anti-competitive behavior. It was such a joy to see Figma&#x27;s growth and technical innovation, and now it will just get eaten by the established power.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adobe_Inc.#Anti-competitive_practices" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adobe_Inc.#Anti-competitive_pr...</a>

Agreed, that is very strange positioning. Clearly they understood how Figma users would take this news, but trying to obfuscate or spin it is a mistake.

Figma&#x27;s blog post title [0] being &#x27;A collaboration with Adobe&#x27;, when it&#x27;s really an acquisition seems like a warning sign.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.figma.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;a-new-collaboration-with-adobe&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.figma.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;a-new-collaboration-with-adobe&#x2F;</a>

The market is caught up in the long-term value of Figma, but it&#x27;s worth it to Adobe even if they bought it to run it into the ground.

Adobe’s PR includes the price:“…approximately $20 billion in cash and stock”Apparently it’s roughly half in cash according to other news reports.Adobe stock is down 8% premarket, so seems like the market thinks they overpaid. (Personally I disagree — this is a good acquisition for Adobe)

Adobe and Figma says that Figma will remain autonomous. I think if this acquisition is treated the same way as the MS &#x2F; Github model then things will be fine. Im a little surprised at the timing. This deal must have been in the works for quite awhile.

If I had to pick a single product that I thought could upend an entrenched competitor, this was it. Congrats to everyone who benefitted, but it&#x27;s a bit of a letdown to see them go this route and give up the opportunity to build a lasting company.

A win-win situation:Figma founders get money.Figma competitors get a huge developed market to sell to when Adobe inevitably only sells Figma as part of their hellish subscription model.Okay, Figma users lose. But that was a given.

Is this level of pedantry needed? Even without the clarification, everyone knew what the parent comment meant.

The company is Autodesk, the product is Autocad.

&gt;we need new antitrust laws that are a bit more proactiveBingo! Adobe has a de facto monopoly on vector and bitmap editing software tools, and it would make total sense for this acquisition to be stopped by the government on that basis. &quot;The government&quot; in this case would be the DoJ&#x27;s antitrust division headed by Jonathan Kanter [1]. Looks like the process is to send a letter requesting a &quot;Business Review&quot; [2]. It&#x27;s probably a &quot;fill out this simple 30 page form, wait 2.5 years (max!) and then have your review request politely declined&quot; situation, but I suppose it&#x27;s foolish to complain before trying.1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;atr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;atr</a>2 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;atr&#x2F;business-reviews" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;atr&#x2F;business-reviews</a>

What do you think happens to VC investments when it’s harder for companies to be acquired?If you were a founder and wanted to sell your company, would you want the government telling you that you can’t sell it for the best price?

No, we just need to fund the SEC and FTC and let them do their job. We also need to enforce consumer protection not simply maximize shareholder value.

I actually think we need new antitrust laws that are a bit more proactive when it comes to super-massive companies like Adobe. Such companies have learned to be much more cunning when it comes to get around existing laws, and plus they have much more money than ever.

They do, but it’s not nearly as popular (or as valuable) as Figma.In the last couple of years Figma has essentially overtaken Adobe and Sketch in terms of designer mindshare and usage. I don’t know a single designer (I know hundreds), that doesn’t use Figma. Of course, I’m focused 100% on software, so I’m strictly talking about product, UI&#x2F;UX design. Not print or graphic design.The way I see it, Adobe had to buy Figma.

Announcing an intent to acquire a company is not against any competition law. The merger has not been finalized or even officially announced by the parties it seems. The FTC or DOJ will review this merger and if they deem it anticompetitive, they will challenge it.

Yeah, i don&#x27;t get this. Seems like textbook anti-competitive behavior to me. Doesn&#x27;t Adobe already have their own version of Figma (XD)?

As an amateur who didn’t have extensive use of Illustrator&#x2F;Photoshop&#x2F;InDesign, Designer&#x2F;Photos&#x2F;Publisher have been godsends. Relatively cheap, quality usable software.Could not praise Serif enough for what they’ve done. I gladly paid the license on Mac and windows.

The point is, if Affinity gets too good or competitive, Adobe will acquire them too.

&gt; Same will happen for graphic designers.I&#x27;m not so sure about that, I know quite a few graphic designers who&#x27;ve either reverted to the pirating ways of their youthful years, many years ago - or have moved over to Affinity&#x27;s offerings.The latter&#x27;s still a bit rough around the edge - I can&#x27;t work with Designer (I&#x27;ve been using Illustrator for too many decades to), but I&#x27;ve stopped paying for old rope and nixed my once-beloved Photoshop as it&#x27;s frankly a waste of cash. Affinity Photo&#x27;s got some quirks and has a wholly different workflow that I struggle with, but it does the trick in the end.

I don&#x27;t know what specific piece of software you&#x27;re referring to, but I think of Fireworks. It was never a 1:1 replacement for Photoshop, but for my uses (as a web developer, during the era of slicing up designs) it was leaps and bound better.

&gt; Same thing happened with Architecture software eg when Autocad bought Revit - end result is extortionately priced software that many architects cannot affordI only hope Macromedia&#x27;s story doesn&#x27;t repeat itself: Adobe buying the superior offering just to take it off the market.

I think that the fitness app is more strategic than figma by far.

Meanwhile FTC blocking Meta from buying a VR fitness app and gif keyboard lol.

&gt; Anti-trust laws were written to address certain perceptions of how businesses operated back in the late 1800sSource? First I’ve heard of Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting being a grandiose PR campaign.

Anti-trust laws were written to address certain perceptions of how businesses operated back in the late 1800s. They were not particularly grounded in reality, and as such they are hard to actually implement as written in most situations.

The FTC and other regulatory bodies could still move to block this, it’s not final in any way.

I rolled up my sleeve too. And found it completely impractical. Especially for non technical experts to undertake such a massive project.

&gt; Same thing happened with Architecture software eg when Autocad bought Revit - end result is extortionately priced software that many architects cannot afford because they are paid so poorly.Architects rolled up their sleeves and are solving the problem by writing open source software: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osarch.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osarch.org&#x2F;</a>

I used to be a graphic designer, have my degree in it etc before I switched to development.Adobe&#x27;s pricing is more than fair. At least compared to what it used to be, where you&#x27;d have to shell out a couple of grand every 2-3 years to keep up with major releases. For me, it worked out a bit cheaper now than it did back then, but I also got a massive, high-quality font library thrown in as well as a bunch of other newer programs like Dimension.They already have a functional monopoly in the industry and the prices aren&#x27;t too bad.Also Figma was a rival to Adobe XD, which was already actually cheaper than Figma was&#x2F;is.

VCs have just been given 20B new reasons to fund a new startup in this domain. Could result in a cornucopia of new startups.

Fam - we can’t even make climate change laws without oil lobbies paying lawmakers off…what makes you think that yet another corruptible organization in govt is going to help?

It’s a shame that the competition authorities don’t seem to have any interest in these type of acquisitions which destroys competition and harms consumers.
Same thing happened with Architecture software eg when Autocad bought Revit - end result is extortionately priced software that many architects cannot afford because they are paid so poorly. Same will happen for graphic designers.

&gt; Adobe is deeply committed to keeping Figma operating autonomously and I will continue to serve as CEO, reporting to David Wadhwani.[0]&quot;autonomously&quot;. There, I fixed it for you :-) More seriously, I do hope that this will become an exception to the rule, but I&#x27;m not getting my hopes up.0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.figma.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;a-new-collaboration-with-adobe&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.figma.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;a-new-collaboration-with-adobe&#x2F;</a>

Gah, I love Figma. Heres to hoping it doesn’t go downhill.$20B price is interesting, Canva was valued at $25B recently and does way less.

$20 billion dollars for Figma? What the actual f...?

Yeah, M&amp;A are joining of forces. So it might well be what you said.

I apologize in advance for breaking the usual rules of HN when it comes to quality of discussion.Fuck.

I think one of the reasons I hate Adobe so much is that I genuinely like a lot of their software. They make great (if bloated) products but they make terrible managerial decisions. They’re one of the few companies I think are evil to the very core. They employ dark patterns at every turn. It’s not about providing a product or even a service to customers; it’s only about extracting as much money from every customer as they possibly can.

It exists because some of its products are productivity monsters and are enterprise staples.

I&#x27;m dismayed by this acquisition but glad to see the near-universal dislike towards Adobe in this thread. How can a $150B+ company exist with this much disdain for its business practices and products? I&#x27;m guessing Adobe&#x27;s primary customer base is large corporations who don&#x27;t care rather than individual users?

Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B