[Pure speculation; I don't work in the UI space at all, and at neither of these companies]
I wonder if Adobe is secretly happy about this. They were acquiring Figma at the peak of the market (for growth stock/startup valuations) because of the existential risks that Figma was threatening, due to their collaborative development UX.
But since then:
* Startup valuations have fallen. Ignoring regulatory concerns, a new acquisition deal today would be cheaper.
* Gen AI and Adobe Firefly are the new rage, and Adobe has probably captured back both mental and market share from Figma. And Adobe can now add collaborative features to Firefly, and it doesn't even have to be as good as Figma's to win.
So paying the 1B breakup fee is probably the cheapest and best option for Adobe at this time.
Meanwhile, Figma employees, expecting a big payout, are probably a bit demotivated at this point. And potentially, they might have been working on integrating into Adobe over the past year, so they might have even slowed down in their development pace.
(ex-Adobe, on a team highly related to an area where Figma out-executed XD, less knowledge about genAI stuff)
> Adobe has probably captured back both mental and market share from Figma
GenAI/Firefly's success is in a totally different domain to what Figma's doing. Figma's equivalent at Adobe is XD, which has never held a candle to Figma. The existential problem Adobe tried to buy their way out of still exists in the same form at, if anything, a greater severity. I was at Figma's config conf this year and they're finally shipping stuff I tried unsuccessfully to get from the XD team _years_ ago.
> potentially, they might have been working on integrating into Adobe over the past year
Highly, highly unlikely. I have no insider knowledge of Figma, but Adobe's a grown up company and _really_ does not fuck around on the legal stuff (which is part of the basis of Firefly's success – significantly cleaner legal provenance on their training data). Everyone I've spoken to at Adobe says they've been kept at a long arms length.
As a graphics designer of almost 20 years i have to heavily agree. Firefly is nice for drafting and dabbling with stuff that once would've been served by stock sites, but aside picking a few demo images or making some abstract pattern backgrounds here and there, this has close to zero overlap with the UI/UX into development & design system management process Figma serves. It's almost like saying the Bing bot eats away at Laravels user base.
As a personal aside:
I'd like to commend the initial push you guys did with XD. While Figma was still out of my scope back then, and XD played a major role for me in transitioning away from oldschool Photoshop or Indesign mockup processes into a modern workflow that integrates with my dev team and focuses on component & design token centric thinking.
Figma may have left XD thoroughly in the dust by now, and i honestly couldn't be happier that the merger won't happen, seeing how Adobe has been committed to absolutely dismantling the UX of Photoshop to the point of it only remaining installed on my workstation because Affinity Designer still lacks some core feature parity - but in its earlier days XD has been absolutely crucial to the development and modernization of my whole thinking and workflows!
Curious: what do you find missing in the affinity stuff? I see a bunch of people referring to it generally lacking 'stuff' but I'm curious about the sort of stuff it lacks. Maybe my use case won't be impacted much.
I'm grandfathered in with the introductory CC pricing but there aren't too many threads left in the rope anchoring me to that. I rarely do print design anymore so InDesign isn't the huge sell it used to be, and photoshop is just annoying me more each day. If it weren't for illustrator, I'd probably be gone already, and inkscape just doesn't cut the mustard for that stuff... the type tools alone in illustrator keep me there. Audition suits me way better than audacity but I don't do anything remotely intensive enough with sound to warrant a hundreds-of-dollars a year subscription.
Affinity has various workflow interrupting issues and missing features, from things Adobe figured out 20 years ago. And to be clear, I'd love Affinity to succeed at being a more serious competitor.
Just a handful from one notes file:
- No percentage document scaling drop-down option, despite featuring some uncommonly used units for design work. Instead it's hidden as a non-discoverable feature where you enter a percentage in the pixel field and it auto-converts to that absolute pixel value in-situ...
- Re-opening a document doesn't restore the state of opened/closed groups in the layer panel
- Lack of keyboard navigation for UI dialogs
- Lack of smart objects equivalent (only workaround is placing pre-existing documents).
- Can't paste clipboard contents directly as mask. In PS this is trivial using quick masks and the way they handle masks in general. Brought up in topics as old as 8 years. Agreed with sibling that masking needs love.
- Up until v2 (afaict) there was no way to disable layer auto select for the move tool
- Default zoom when opening documents can't be set to 100%
- Only has binary layer lock option, rather than separate move/edit/etc locking
- Lack of blend/interpolation of vector paths feature (another old and popular requested feature Adobe has had for decades)
- Have experienced random crashes for simple actions (opening menus, preferences, pressing warp transform, dragging layers).
- Vector node editing takes a dive in speed after just a dozen paths in a single layer. Only workaround is using multiple paths instead.
The list goes on. That said Affinity is usable if you don't mind dozens of little things that have been ironed out and included for a long time in PS. And to be fair, it's very fairly priced as such.
I really, really, really want to use the Affinity suite for more stuff, but just the other day when I was trying to knock up a basic drawing of something that exists in real life (a bicycle frame) I found that Designer couldn't draw a line of X length at N angle. It just... didn't have the option.
All I wanted to do was draw a few lines of given lengths and angles and join their ends. Then overlay another set of the same in different colors so I could see how the two groupings compared visually.
But... I couldn't.
That's such a fundamental part of Illustrator that I guess I'll be going back to it.
Quick note on Audition. It's not 100% the same, but Davinci Resolve comes with Fairlight included.
And Davinci Resolve is free.
It's an DAW that is definitely at a professional level and isn't too hard to learn as someone who was used to multitrack editing in Audition. All my VST3 plugins carry over and some of the builtin effects are just as good or better than those in Audition. It's not a light-weight program at all, but comparable to Audition.
I only find myself missing Audition when it comes to repairing original .wav files. But I haven't actually had to do that in many years at this point.
If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend giving it a try.
(I've heard good things about Reaper as a DAW and think I'll try it on my next project.)
Yeah, I love Davinci. Usually when I'm doing sound editing, it's for a pretty different focus, and I've been using Audition since it was Cool Edit Pro in the 90s. I've got a license for Ableton that I'll probably end up switching to.
The Affinity apps being slow to adopt improvements has nothing to do with “enshittification”. They’re not actively doing user-hostile stuff for the sake of their stock price, or anything in that ballpark.
The fact is that different things are “essential” to different users. Whenever they ship a new feature, some users are like “I wanted this!” while many are like “Still not shipping what we’re asking for!”
I do think Affinity should pick up the pace (and they maybe have, a tiny bit, since V2?) and address recurring forum topics more openly. But they’re not “enshittifying” their apps, they’re just not doing what some people wish.
There's also a tradeoff between implementing features and controlling stability that Adobe regularly gets wrong. Show me a professional-- supposedly their target demographic-- that would prefer to have the latest whiz bang sloppy neural network feature or some cockamamie 3D bolt-on before fixing their huge list of shitty bugs.
To be honest it took a long time in Photoshop to have something as good as it is now. Masking is the bane of my existence when I have to do it (but I'm only an amateur, so, not often).
Totally true, but that doesn't change the cost/benefit ratio of actually using the product for professional work. Masking is one of those fundamentally necessary tools for efficiently making professional looking photo composites and even more so for regular graphic design type work. Doing hobby work it would definitely be less of an issue.
> (which is part of the basis of Firefly's success – significantly cleaner legal provenance on their training data).
Yeah... I mean the pre-trained text encoder Firefly uses is filled with copyrighted, unlicensed-for-express-purpose training data.
Firefly is successful in the same sense that DocuSign is, in that it is selling a holistic social experience, but I think maybe don't opine on "legal provenance on their training data" until you have seen the whole pipeline with your own eyes. Sophisticated people sort of know Adobe's claims are bullshit, but what exactly do you expect the community to do, speculate on the exactly zero evidence Adobe has shown of how any of their stuff works?
Anyway, I am pretty sure Adobe is delighted they are not paying $20b for something that is worth way, way less. Like maybe $500m at most.
Meanwhile the people using Figma at many companies are getting laid off. Etsy, Bytedance, Unity Spotify, Salesforce all made massive UX designer cuts.
The real question is, is the thing people are using Figma for even worth $20b? No, no way. Figma users work in the Making Bugs department: they make new buggy things nobody asked for, that aren't lists or spreadsheets but should just be lists and spreadsheets, which makes everything worse. There is nowadays positive ROI to doing less Figmaing. In my opinion there has always been more ROI to doing less Figmaing, to straight up not having those people around and not gathering so many opinions on designing lists from so many stakeholders. That holistic experience is expensive in many ways, and while again you can be successful delivering that, it doesn't mean it makes sense.
Just look at the Spotify app. It's a hot abject mess of absolute garbage UI. They have been diehard Figma users for years. They are the prime example of Figmafication ruining something extremely simple. It's fucking lists! Lists are not worth $20b.
I think this shows that you don't fully understand UI/UX and its importance/role in modern software creation. Moreover, you're conflating your opinions about Spotify with an industry. This would explain what I consider to be an mis assessment of the situation.
As someone close to UX my entire life, Figma is a well positioned and useful app that has no decent substitute on the Adobe side. It has market share and potentially a huge data moat giving them a leg up on the "AI Designer" problem. Now more than ever, it is worth a lot.
That is a pretty cynical take on what UX designers do. The PMs should be dealing with lists and spreadsheets, often they don’t and just tell the designer to just design the product in a mock. It isn’t the way things should go, just like how having programmers decide the UX while they are programming the UI leads to disaster.
What's so bad about the Spotify app? For the most part, it looks like a bunch of lists (not so much spreadsheets) to me...
As someone that is only tangentially in the design space, why do you think collaborative design works so poorly? I have noticed that, in engineering reviews, complex backend designs get scrutiny, but rarely "I feel..", "I prefer..." types of comments, whereas frontend teams get all types of those comments. Is it a matter of too many cooks in the kitchen or something else?
It is a bunch of lists, but the UI is sometimes the lists are scrolling horizontally album covers, sometimes they are popping up from menu buttons, sometimes they go full screen and scroll normally, sometimes they are cut short to 5 elements and you cannot see more, sometimes they continue to 20 elements and you can press to see more, sometimes it's a list with headers that all contain more than a presentable number of elements and you have to tap the header to see more, sometimes it's a mix of horizontal and vertical scrolling sections, sometimes it's squares and sometimes it's rectangles, sometimes your whole list is shrunk because of a popup up top that is going through a list of items they want to notify you about but the popups are shown one session at a time, sometimes they have a full screen popup that is going through that list of items, sometimes you are driving your car or trying to find a song for a baby or trying to do your run and you are being shown many different kinds of lists when a simple, scrolling up and down list with a search box would be preferred, but instead there is so much stuff they want to show you in these lists in so many different shapes that you didn't ask for.
Do you know what the provenance of this morass is, at Spotify? There are many, many Figmas, each a UX designer hoping to reinvent the list in their own way, various product managers competing for attention from the user to introduce a Feature and Increase Engagement for their Key Performance Indicators. The user is better served without any of this stuff.
Man, have you seen the Google Maps and Gmail apps? Google doesn't use Figma either, but the ethos isn't unique to Spotify, it is absolutely toxic. The amount of crap I can accidentally tap on while driving using Google Maps, telling me information I absolutely do not care about, trying to get me to Do Something for Some Product Manager's Product: it's negative ROI.
> why do you think collaborative design works so poorly?
To me, using Figma is a symptom of the incompetent people outnumbering the opinionated and competent. It's not so much that collaborative design works poorly, I'm sure it works very well in Apple's design org. But that's not what the Figma product is. It's a holistic social experience of giving 10x as many people the ability to inscribe their opinions and get credit for participating in a project, as corporate people do, which is very valuable to 10 subscribers as opposed to the 1 person actually doing the work. It's a great business!
It’s always been wild to me how incongruous / inconsistent the experience of using Spotify’s web/ios/android apps have been. It points to an organizational mess rather than a Figma mess, but maybe it also shows that Figma doesn’t address the entire picture yet of addressing org level communication and syncing with prod assets
At least to the specific, valuable role of a UX designer, the biggest problem with Figma is it has no opinions or affordances for improving HCI. The best UX designers have strong HCI opinions and Figma does nothing for them. It is fundamentally a tool to (mis)-style lists. So it is unfortunate it is adopted as much as it is, UX designers should be spending their intellectual energy on more scientific stuff.
> It points to an organizational mess rather than a Figma mess
The two are related. It's like Conway's law.
Figma has some pretty generic opinions about how apps or shit should be made. (https://www.figma.com/blog/working-well/). Like it has this collaborative editing multiplayer thing going on, but you could just ignore that, many bosses effectively use it to tell subordinates exactly what to do without any feedback. Nonetheless they have countless public materials espousing the things it can do and how using those features to the max, especially collaboration, is the Right Way.
However if your way of doing things aligns with its unique value proposition, such as by requiring many people to collaboratively turn simple lists into confusing lists, that is bad.
If you lean into what Figma writes is "Working Well," you will create an app that looks and feels like Spotify. That is what I am saying. It's on Figma.
This isn't a fringe opinion by any means. SAP users get the most success from conforming their business to the way their SAP vertical solution says to do things. Git is also opinionated.
Jira had an opinionated way of working, Agile is a manifesto for how people should do stuff. One task, exactly one assignee is really radical! You can go and read about Jira and Asana saying "no" when people ask to allow multiple assignees. Trello got rid of that, assign as many people to a card or task as you'd like, it's less opinionated, and in my opinion, it's an inherent flaw. And woe be onto people who use Trello, that is telling me right away that they are going to be slower than Jira and Asana users.
> Figma doesn’t address the entire picture yet
The core dynamic they provide software for - and this is just as true of Google Docs and Sharepoint - is that BigCo employees need to touch things and get credit. Every BigCo I've worked with, without fail. There are like 10 people on meetings, and 9 people don't do anything but they use the stuff they touch and the calendar entries as collateral in their performance reviews.
None of the things you've highlighted have ever, as a user, registered with me. What I want from a music app UI is a good search function, playlists, and then it's really down to content, content, content.
For an app like that I just need the UX to be "good enough".
I don't like spotify's UX much either, but I don't blame my hammer for the lopsided chairs I built. Plenty of crappy UIs were designed in Adobe Photoshop before Sketch came around and introduced tooling better suited for UX mockups. It's not the tool it's poor product and experience development you're complaining about.
Wow, I hadn't thought about it through that lens exactly, but you are 100% right. Virtually everyone in large organizations (engineers, PMs, designers) are incentivized to launch things that align with their end-of-year performance goals. Those goals are sometimes at odds with the best overall customer outcome.
I hadn't thought about figma specifically as being a symptom. I'm sure some organizations use it effectively, but I can see how it might spiral out of control to result in an "I'm helping too" sort of ethos, with a poor net outcome.
As a UX writer, the ability of providing feedback or editing UI text before a disastrous piece of Loren Ipsum goes to production is very, very valuable. What's the feedback you think is silly here?
I believe that's what Cory Doctorow calls 'enshittification'. I don't blame UX designers and Figma for it though, and I think this comes from the corporate stakeholders rather than the PMs. Full disclosure, I'm a PM similarly annoyed by the enshittification of once excellent apps. Maybe too many large companies are stuck releasing features on a regular cadence without many interesting user problems to solve.
I never questioned that 20B was high. It's also important to keep in mind that Adobe has failed for years with xD - so the value to them is quite different than it would be to almost any other purchaser
The poster clearly has an axe to grind with Figma and anyone who is involved with UX decisions at most companies. Being mad at Spotify doesn't mean Figma is worth around 1 years of ARR (assuming they met their 2023 growth)
You might be confusing it with something else: Figma is merely for prototyping and designing, it's not the application that is shipped to end users (so it's like blaming the bugs of an app on its photoshop mockup).
Yeah usually the step kids aren't allowed to talk to each other until after the ceremony. In fact it might be illegal for the two companies to do anything regarding the merger until the transaction is concluded. That is when you'll see the HR, Marketing, Sales, and Legal teams have layoffs because typically post-merger those areas don't require duplicate teams.
Anecdotally, but at least three studio's and designers I work with switched to Figma because "it became Adobe". They made the switch because Adobe gave it some sort of "stamp of approval".
From two, I'm certain they'll never go back to XD and/or illustrator. One, I'm not too sure because all their onboarding, libraries and education is around "adobe products".
So, at least from N=3, I dare say that the attempted merger only made the existential problem for Adobe worse.
Curious: would you say that's reflective of Adobe's dev culture as a whole? I heard some similar comments coming out of a (claimed?) Lightroom developer about the motivations for that project...
Also ex-Adobe, worked directly with regulatory compliance in my role there. Adobe is a huge company with a diverse set of dev team cultures, but is a monoculture in regards to legal and regulatory compliance. They do not fuck around. (They're also very serious about security post-2013.)
How is/was Figma so superior to XD exactly? I used to work with XD and briefly also used Figma, but never really liked it (seemed like a crude version of XD in a way), so never understood all the Figma rage. Genuine question, not challenging the view at all. The only pluses I saw for Figma over XD were that it was perhaps easier to collaborate and didn't need installation (because it is web based).
In my view the fact that figma has been built for realtime collab just places it on totally different league. It's like office vs gdocs. It tool Microsoft years (a decade?) To catch-up and accept that most people collab online one way or the other
+1 this. Website design has become an increasingly iterative, collaborative process inside companies. You can't just launch a new website and surprise your team. People need to annotate comments, and constant iteration is the name of the game. Design, solicit feedback, integrate, iterate, repeat.
There's also a lot of work needed up-front on responsive design (as opposed to it being an also-ran or afterthought), and a move away from older typical WordPress-oriented static designs to modern dynamic JAMstack-oriented development methodologies.
Except people in a typical company who might provide quality feedback on the new website, do not want to "browse Figma". They want an actual website to view - dev site or the actual new live site.
> "You can't just launch a new website and surprise your team."
Yes you can. Nothing beats launching a new site to motivate quality feedback. If you expect feedback to arrive soon after launch, you can use this to your advantage.
If you like the sound of crickets, share a link to Figma and ask people for feedback. Designers and developers will respond, others like sales and non-technical staff often won't. Why? Because people prefer the security of their web browser's familiar reference point when assessing a website. As opposed to browsing an app that gives them a special window to a slippery canvas where an impression of the website is found.
That’s why you send them the link to the prototype, which opens in their browser, not the figma link.
That’s like half the point of prototyping software vs graphic design / illustration software!
Non-designers want to see “the site” open in their browser and be able to click through the pages, instead of use some design app—that’s like half the point of figma.
> Adobe has probably captured back both mental and market share from Figma
Unlikely. Based on the google trends [1], Figma sees around 10x more traffic than Firefly, but more importantly it experiences severe weekend drop-offs, meaning people are using it for work. Firefly on the other hand has a constant amount of attention, in line with people playing around with it but not committing to it for serious projects.
Anecdotally I work in UI/UX space as a contractor and I've been given every design in Figma, I hadn't even heard of Firefly until this comment.
Things happen quickly and AI will change things quickly. Figma is nearly 8 years old and Firefly isn't even a year old.
Of course a massive tool is going to be bigger than a very new tool and there is a lot of momentum at companies.
The future is going to be AI/prompt based because it's a 100x speed savings. Who wins that pie is up for debate but Figma as it stands right now is very disruptable.
That is a very silly way of viewing things. AI has already dramatically change logo creation and all sorts of image generation. The impact on design is already being felt and is going to rapidly increase.
Sadly this is how we look at art thanks to AI. "It's just like a real person thought about it and made it intentionally -- but it's nearly free!". No one paying cares if it's just copied from other works and nearly randomly put together at the expense of those who can barely make a living doing it. Why don't we focus more on automating C-suite jobs? That's where a lot of corporate costs come from. Automating a logo design saves you 20k or likey (much) less. Automating a corporate merger saves you millions of dollars and years of time.
I am incredibly happy about this. Otherwise it's like lamenting the invention of the car because it would eliminate all the jobs making buggies and whips.
> No one paying cares if it's just copied from other works
There are probably zero artists alive who didn't learn by copying other works or learning to make art in that style.
It's no different with an AI. An AI is something that learns from others and creates it's own art. There isn't anything illegal about it any more so than you learning to draw and making characters that are similar to Mickey Mouse.
You can trademark a specific thing but not a style.
So at the end of the day, how is it any different than a person doing it other than the fact now a person won't be getting paid?
>I am incredibly happy about this. Otherwise it's like lamenting the invention of the car because it would eliminate all the jobs making buggies and whips.
Between road accidents, air pollution, noise, horrendous cities and suburbs built around car use, and so on, I don't mind lamenting the invetion of the car either...
In general it's pretty naive to celebrate new technologies without considering drawbacks. Especially if they are just stuffed down everyone's throats, whether they want them or not, and even more so if the technology has the potential to eliminate human creativity and cheapen creative output. Even more so if the technology has so much potential for abuse (for government surveillance, automated spam, all the way to far worse cases, so much so that even its creators warn about the potential existential threat).
I guess what's the remove of creativity, or the existential threat, and countless of other negatives, compared to cheap logos, or (assuming it lives up to hype the way you say) killing off graphic design as a profession?
>So at the end of the day, how is it any different than a person doing it other than the fact now a person won't be getting paid?
In the removal of human creativity in the design, and its delegation to an algorithm.
> even more so if the technology has the potential to eliminate human creativity
This is completely overboard. People will always be creative. There is no way in which this stops anyone from being creative but actually allows not artists to be much more creative.
It also allows the same for artists as they can now create in styles they aren't skilled in.
> killing off graphic design as a profession?
It likely will dramatically kill it and free up those people for other types of jobs as they can now be more productive.
Humans will still continue to be creative and draw and paint. That won't change.
No reason to hold society back just to hold on to some jobs
>This is completely overboard. People will always be creative.
Just not in the fields where AI will replace them? Hardly a consolation that "people will always be creative" in e.g. interpretive dancing, if the music in our culture end ups being dominated by AI musak.
And I don't just care for my own music consumption, to be consoled that "some people will still be doing human music". I also care about the role of music in society in general.
I'd say the same for graphic design and illustration. Yeah, some people will be creative in those fields still. But I don't care for a world where 90% of the illustrations and graphic design we see are AI crap.
And I'm not saying it because AI does great illustrations, but because it does crap illustrations cheaper - which for the undiscerning manager will be "good enough", and for spam farms and the like will be a godsend.
>It likely will dramatically kill it and free up those people for other types of jobs as they can now be more productive.
>Humans will still continue to be creative and draw and paint. That won't change.
No, just the ability to make a living out of it, as opposed to getting a drab office or factory job will. That, and being confronted 24/7 by AI "art", would be the changes.
>No reason to hold society back just to hold on to some jobs
Who exactly did sign up for that, and who said this is "forward" and not following it's "holding back"?
Not every BS we invent is a possitive. Nor is "increased technology" == "better".
>> People will always be creative.
> Just not in the fields where AI will replace them? ... if the music in our culture end ups being dominated by AI musak.
Will AI dominate music? Probably. Is there anything that can be done to stop that? No. Even if you outlawed it in the US it won't stop it. It's coming and there is nothing that can be done. If that is a good or bad thing IDK. Most modern music is so awful that to me this doesn't matter anyway.
> but because it does crap illustrations cheaper
The work it outputs is astounding, if it was crap no one would want to use it.
>>Humans will still continue to be creative and draw and paint. That won't change.
>No, just the ability to make a living out of it, as opposed to getting a drab office or factory job will.
AI is coming for factor and office jobs too. But yes this will cut the ability to make money on it.
> Who exactly did sign up for that, and who said this is "forward" and not following it's "holding back"?
It doesn't matter what someone signs up for. That's not how the world works. More efficient processes take over less efficient ones. Paying someone 7k to work on something for 2 weeks is much less efficient than generating a similar image in 2 minutes for 25 cents.
Few people are going to be so enamored with the image that it would matter if it's not quite as good (though it may be better).
> Not every BS we invent is a possitive. Nor is "increased technology" == "better".
Anything that increases efficiency without hurting people is a good thing and it's why we enjoy the quality of living we do now.
I didn't say that all technology is beneficial. I think smart phones have been a disaster for society overall. They have brought a lot of productivity gains but has been a double edged sword.
Same for the internet too. Lots of benefits but now all the nut jobs can congregate and share conspiracy theories and the youth is exposed to a lot of insane stuff a much younger age.
I mean stuff that guys from the 50's never saw in all their life. So yeah technology can definitely be bad. But as far as productivity gains you can't stop it and the freight train is coming. It will bring a higher quality of life in practical terms but who knows what it does to society.
Adobe Firefly is cute but it wont get you any customers from Figma because it's different product for completely different purpose.
Figma has something that Adobe lacks and wanted probably more than Figmas customers. Huge database of essentially all web/ui design done in past 3 years. If Firefly is such a hit wait once FigmaAI will start generating their stuff.
Also it doesn't seem Figma as product was slowed too much - they have recently launched dev mode. One of the biggest features in a while. That put them more ahead of the competition.
>* Startup valuations have fallen. Ignoring regulatory concerns, a new acquisition deal today would be cheaper.
Figma reached $400M in 2022 and on its way to hit $600M this year 2023. For perspective they reached $200M in 2021, and $75M in 2020. That is pretty impressive growth rate.
Straightly on a revenue / market cap, Adobe makes $20B Revenue and values at $270B. That is 13.5x multiple. If we expect Figma to hit $1B mark by 2025, they could be worth $13.5B. i.e Even with today's market, I dont think it is hard to do an IPO with that $13.5B valuation.
And if Adobe were to acquire a listed company with 30% premium, that is $17.5B. Not that far off from $20B. Now that Figma has an extra $1B cash flow, I hope they spend it wisely and continue to do well. So while some may argue this is bad for employees and investors. I dont think it is that bad.
I do hope they consider IPO, as I am slightly worried the window of opportunity may be gone when market turns.
What does Gen AI and Adobe Firefly has to do with Figma? Not even the target group is similar - Figma didn't even try to touch raster/illustration. Building or acquiring a product is not a one-shot try at a popularity contest.
" Adobe can now add collaborative features to Firefly" - Except they won't. If you have been inside old big tech companies you'd know. Hard for me to articulate though. An open acknowledgment of this phenomenon is Satya staying out of OpenAI and still sucking the milk. They can never hope to move the same. Sathya's brilliance is that he decided and quietly said to himself and his board.. "And that's ok". Being humble brought MS back into the race. Adobe should have done the same with Figma.
I see where you're coming from, but there are a few critical points about the Adobe-Figma deal that you got wrong. (I am an ex-Adobe XD employee)
When Adobe announced its plan to acquire Figma in September 2022, the timing was actually at the valley of startup valuations. The market was really down then. Since that time, the market has actually warmed up, not cooled down. This means if Adobe were to negotiate a deal now, it would likely cost them even more than what they agreed upon last year. Contrary to what you said.
Speaking of the negotiation, I think Adobe dropped the ball. They agreed to a whopping 20 billion dollars, which in my view was four times too high given Figma's real valuation at that time, especially considering the low market (I wrote about how I calculate this 5B valuation in https://typogram.co/build/on-adobe-acquiring-figma/). Then, with the deal being halted by regulators, Adobe still had to pay the full breakup fee, within just three days! It's kind of laughable how poor their negotiation strategy was.
About Adobe's product strategy, there's a bit of confusion. Firefly, their new thing, isn't even about UX tooling; it's more focused on creative AI. The real product that is actually relevant here is Adobe XD, which Adobe has just put on maintenance mode (since at least September). a change I noticed on their help page as recently as this September (https://helpx.adobe.com/support/xd.html#troubleshooting). This move is a huge strategic mistake. It's a clear loss of momentum for Adobe in the UX tooling space, making them even less competitive against Figma. Meanwhile, Figma hasn’t missed a beat and continues to surge ahead.
As I've been involved in 3 successive acquisitions of the company I work for, I can tell you that no integration happens at all until the deal is signed. Some plans may have been draws at the top executive level, but that stops here. Everything is done under the legal department supervision and "mitigate risks" is the primary concern. The time before signing the deal is spent mostly dealing with writing the contract between the 2 parties, not integrating.
UX is going to get a shake up from AI. We're already seeing a bit of the new paradigm of on-demand UI/UX with Gemini (and the various me-too demos). Both Figma and Adobe are now vulnerable to disruption in this space. Adobe can use the time to ape Figma while flexing their rather good AI expertise.
I dunno. I work with a lot of designers and there's so much substantive back and forth in terms of clarifying goals, objectives, understanding design choices, and business priorities. I.e., there's a ton of nuance that is uncovered and deconstructed in those conversations. I'm skeptical that AI, at least in its current and foreseeable form, can fill those shoes in any meaningful way.
I liken it to engineers who respond to the threat of AI making them obsolete with "Half my job is clarifying requirements and/or changes in priorities...can Copilot do that?" I think it's the same for UX/UI/Design.
I say that as a very vocal supporter of this latest generation of AI. Both personally and professionally it's upped my game significantly.
Oh don’t get me wrong. You’re 100% right - but this provides a level of disruption that would make the Figma buy out not as competitive as originally imagined. Neither are, of course, in the on-demand UX space, but both will need to be.
Until then AI concept building is coming, this being the idea of freeing the designers from repetition and ground work, while speeding up concept development. (I.e pretty much what copilot is for coding.)
I wonder about the UX created by AI when we start delegating browsing to AI. The major search engines already are looking to lean on AI and we complain about ads enough that it's clear we see browsing as a chore. It's only a matter of time before the web is written in a new bytecode that is meant for AI only. Turtles all the way down...
I think this is what the "Digital Assistant" will become. At the moment we craft some kind of prompt then scour the results which are largely book-like representations of information.
Per your suggestion, it would be logical that alongside our usual text-driven sites we have digital information repositories for AIs to query information rather than trying to glean it from the text-driven webpage. Google Knowledge and Siri Knowledge are both implementations of this idea, but I assume it will grow to something that is more general purpose, so any AI could access it. Then extend that to all manner of services, such as bookings, tickets, shopping, etc. That's where the real turtles are.
I think they probably are. I follow Adobe closely and when the acquisition was announced I was pretty skeptical it would be net good for Adobe in the long-run. The problem wasn't the idea of buying Figma, it was the very rich price being paid. Adobe has a history of not doing a lot of big acquisitions (for it's size and massive cash position). When it does acquire big, Adobe is mostly strategic and a "value shopper", meaning they generally don't pay extremely high prices bid up by frothy auctions. This means Adobe must walk away from a lot of deals we never hear about over price. That's why the Figma deal struck me as so unusual.
In the >year since the deal was announced, it's started to look even less plausible to me. Despite being required to pay a large break-up fee, I suspect, Adobe's management is relieved.
Google was too expensive for Yahoo multiple times. You should look this from a bigger time scale. Sure they were paying a lot of goodwill on the deal. But if, down the road, Figma now starts their trajectory to become an equal to Adobe it sure would have been nice to capture that market all to yourself. Like Nvidia or TSMC.
For the record, I am happy this fell through since it's clear Adobe needs competition to stop it abusing its market position.
I don't know about Adobe's motives, but it sure looks like despite the "we ended the process by mutual agreement" talk, Adobe somehow walked away... otherwise they wouldn't let $1bn out of the window - unless they actually signed something along the lines "we will take responsibility if antitrust throws the deal away" but that would be quite unlikely in such a high profile transaction.
>unless they actually signed something along the lines "we will take responsibility if antitrust throws the deal away" but that would be quite unlikely in such a high profile transaction.
This is absolutely standard in M/A. Part of the risk of accepting an acquisition offer is that you're essentially putting your company's strategic future on hold, and if what you're doing that for falls through for any reason (including regulatory oversight) you want compensation for at least some of the lost time. Specifically, you won't even sign the acquisition contract without such a guarantee; the only real question is price.
Gen AI isn't going to solve a number of the problems a system like Figma are used for today - not in this generation or foreseeable next ones. It may be a shiny new ball to chase but it's not going to make Adobe's problem in the area go away (if they still care).
Having gone through one major acquisition, my experience was that legal put a huge block on any technical integrations and even meetings that might reveal ip until the ink was dried. I'm skeptical they started any kind of collaborative work other than pie-in-the-sky, "wouldn't it be cool if" type meetings with lawyers present.
Correct, till all legal things a cleared upon both companies must act as there were no acquisition. Only specific M&A teams can look deeper and plan for integration.
This leads to a complicated limbo for acquired companies as customers consider the acquisition (buy now before new owner raises the price or hold out as they will cancel the product line?), employees are uncertain (conflicting products on both sides, which will continue, with which direction? Will yesterday's priorities still count tomorrow?) while all are counting their shares and make plans.
Hmph, I was more under the assumption that this was more of a "We're going to get into Adobe's space" and become a competitor to drive up our valuation.
I wonder if Adobe is secretly happy about this. They were acquiring Figma at the peak of the market (for growth stock/startup valuations) because of the existential risks that Figma was threatening, due to their collaborative development UX.
But since then:
* Startup valuations have fallen. Ignoring regulatory concerns, a new acquisition deal today would be cheaper.
* Gen AI and Adobe Firefly are the new rage, and Adobe has probably captured back both mental and market share from Figma. And Adobe can now add collaborative features to Firefly, and it doesn't even have to be as good as Figma's to win.
So paying the 1B breakup fee is probably the cheapest and best option for Adobe at this time.
Meanwhile, Figma employees, expecting a big payout, are probably a bit demotivated at this point. And potentially, they might have been working on integrating into Adobe over the past year, so they might have even slowed down in their development pace.