Adobe aren't buying Figma to kill it. It's their future.
That's for sure. And I can be sure that Adobe knows they are stuck having driven down a wrong road for some time.
The big question is: can they revamp? Figma is designed from the ground up to be cloud<-> web, while Adobe's big money spinners have a long legacy of all-on-the-desktop. It's very very hard to retrofit the latter into the former. And they have a huge legacy customer base most of whom are unlikely to want to change.
It will be interesting to see how they proceed. Use Figma as an excuse to "eat their own lunch" (instead of, say, porting Lightroom, build from scratch the competitor to Lightroom that someone else could have written?). Or try to retrofit Lightroom?
My suspicion is that if they try the retrofit path they will not make it.
Me? I hate browser apps. But that’s just me.
I'm a pretty advanced-level Photoshop user and I'm almost fine with Photopea except for the speed and general annoyance of it being a web-app -- if it were a desktop app I'd probably be fine with it.
Which is to say, I'd be fine with a $10 product vs. a $1000 one. In the same way that some professional 3d designers I know switched from Maya/c4d to the free Blender and are fine with it (except for the renderer, we still don't have a really good industry-grade GPU-accelerated renderer).
Point being that a compelling alternative can be made by a small, focused team in this day and age and offered at a pricepoint that big companies cannot compete with. I fully expect Penpot to take over Figma very soon, AfterEffects will be interesting because really what makes AE what it is is not necessarily AE itself but the killer RedGiant&VideoCopilot plugins so it is equally as vulnerable. There's really no telling where Adobe will be in another 5 years. I would not be surprised if it's 1/10th its current size; in fact I think it is the likely possibility..
That's the problem - and what makes this a true silicon valley story. Big entrenched competitor buys innovative competition. Maybe they won't kill Figma, but they will definitely make it worse.
The current CEO of Adobe has been CEO since 2007 and has led their awful Creative Cloud strategy. There's no regime change here. I see people comparing this to Microsoft acquiring Github. Microsoft is both orders of magnitude larger than Adobe and they paid way less for Github. They can afford to have Github as a form of "soft power" in the developer space, supporting their cloud work/developer stuff but indirect to their core revenue and business without needing to monetize it directly. Their CEO wasn't a moron and understood intrinsically there'd be a lack of trust and a hands off approach was needed. I'd be really surprised if Adobe shows the same grace in this situation. Figma was a direct competitor of their core business.
I do think that comparing Adobe to Microsoft in general is reasonable though. They are both software companies that make terrible software and have little incentive to improve because of how entrenched they are in the market. I've always thought of Adobe as the Microsoft of creative software.
I know it's fun to rip on Adobe, but it's worth putting this in context.
In '07, Adobe's stock price was around ~$40. Today, even after the (undeserved, in my opinion) thrashing the stock has taken for the Figma acquisition, it's at $300. He 10x'd a multi-billion dollar company in about a decade and a half, while also simultaneously redoing its entire monetization strategy. It's nothing to sneeze at.
A quick search turns up interesting numbers from this press release a year ago (literally the first result in my search, so not digging too deep here) [1]:
- all-time record revenues in Q3 2021
- 20-30% YoY growth in every segment they play in
- the DocuSign acquisition has turned into a cool ~2B/yr business
- and creative revenues of 2.4B, i.e., almost 10B/yr
Is Adobe a dinosaur? Absolutely. Stock buybacks are a great indicator of this, in my opinion.
Could Adobe screw this up? Absolutely possible. As a good example, they do plenty of dark-pattern UX in their subscription and cancellation flows that I really don't like.
With all that said, I think there's a decent chance that we in the peanut gallery might look back on this in a few years and see it as a brilliant acquisition in the vein of WhatsApp and Instagram. Figma is a world-class product, leaps and bounds ahead of anything else. Considering the price they paid, I bet Adobe understands this is an existential issue for them.
[1]: https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2021/Adobe-Reports-...
It's fair that you made this assumption given the rest of my comment but when I said "awful" I meant as a user/customer, not necessarily from a business/revenue perspective.
You can juice a company and have it be more profitable even if the changes are unpopular with your customers, especially if you enjoy an almost monopoly status in terms of your software being what is used and taught in schools.
>As a handy rule of thumb, I like to assume that any long-term CEO of a profitable multi-billion dollar enterprise probably isn't a moron.
Fair, but he's used to running the company in a very "fuck the customer" kind of way. If Microsoft didn't have a new and not hated CEO, opened up private free repos on Github and basically not touched it in any other meaningful way I think it would have galvanized a big change in that space.
I just don't think Adobe is going to avoid pulling some kind of "fuck you" move that triggers an exodus the way Microsoft did. This is a much bigger acquisition for them than Github was with Microsoft.
I also don't think the transition to SASS/Subscription was some brilliant business insight, rather par for the course with the rest of the industry changing.
>Considering the price they paid, I bet Adobe understands this is an existential issue for them.
It's funny to me that you make this point in the same comment where you talk about how great Adobe's business is. If they're crushing it so hard, why are they in a position where they have to spend 20 billion dollars to buy a company that is an existential threat to them?
If I was a shareholder, I'd want an explanation for how they ended up in this situation and what changes can be made to prevent it from happening again. But Adobe is culturally incapable of making good software, and it's clear they don't have product people in charge anywhere. At best, they don't do anything to Figma and it stagnates. At worst, significant price increases, reduced performance, worse UI is introduced, etc...
I think you're right their monopoly position has spoiled them, and it's led them to treat their customers rather poorly.
> I also don't think the transition to SASS/Subscription was some brilliant business insight, rather par for the course with the rest of the industry changing.
The impressive part is not the insight; it's the fact he was able to pivot a multi-billion dollar behemoth through a change like this. There's lots of ossified incentive structures and politics in a giant company like this, and it does demonstrate real leadership that he was able to pull it off successfully.
It is admittedly more of a feat of execution than of innovation.
> It's funny to me that you make this point in the same comment where you talk about how great Adobe's business is. If they're crushing it so hard, why are they in a position where they have to spend 20 billion dollars to buy a company that is an existential threat to them?
Good question. And my answer is a bit of a cop-out, but I'd say it's basically the dictionary definition of disruption.
Once Adobe moved their business models to SaaS, they were puttering along and making little attempts at web-based software ("sustaining innovation"). Figma came along and grew from a prototyping tool to capture more and more of the design workflow; their disruptive innovation was baking collaboration in from the start.
The one insight as to "how to grow from this failure" (if you will) might come from the parallel to Instagram. After the acquisition, the Instagram product leaders were given more scope, resources, and power. Thanks to that, FB/Insta were able to successfully head off the threat from Snapchat by introducing Instagram stories. [1]
> At best, they don't do anything to Figma and it stagnates. At worst, significant price increases, reduced performance, worse UI is introduced, etc...
IMHO it would be (relatively) straightforward to leave the product team alone to continue iterating, while supercharging their GTM efforts by plugging Figma into Adobe's existing customer base.
To the Instagram example above, it would be very interesting if Figma's product brilliance was allowed to spread to the rest of Adobe's portfolio. As with most BigCo acquisitions, though, that's vanishingly unlikely. FB is IMHO a relatively unique counterexample in this respect. It's more likely people will drift off after their golden handcuffs disappear. They'll create the next generation of design startups, and the circle of life will continue.
And both have been extremely successful as businesses for a very long time. They may not be on the list if “cool” companies but their track record speaks for themselves. Highly profitable and keep growing.
Philosophy, product and brand strategy all go towards informing how stuff is designed. Adobe, I imagine, bought Figma to kickstart a new Adobe.
Same. I wonder how many people have truly switched from Lightroom "Classic" to Lightroom ("Cloud). I still base my work in Classic, but I wonder how widespread that is.
Part of the mental brick wall I have is that I’ve always equated browsers with surfing/reading and other light stuff. Opening a desktop app puts me in work mode. And the UIs (seeing the browser chrome in context with the app itself) makes me feel like I’m running a less robust app. I imagine these are hurdles I’ll have to get over within the next couple of years as more apps move to the browser :(
I actually would prefer to just buy Lightroom but I can't.
I'm sure it's not their purpose, however they may end up doing it unwittingly anyway.
"Developers" may not have moved in much percentage-wise. However, I have noticed quite a few projects moved to GitLab.
Projects being on Gitlab forces developers to exist in both places which cracks the "default convenience" monopoly of Github.
Disclosure: I host a GitLab instance at home.