What Figma plans to do inside Adobe

What a non-interview.<p>I’m not expecting Adobe to kill Figma or raise the price overnight. I’m not angry about any of that, I’m angry that I’ve now built team workflows around a product that means I have to pay money to a company that doesn’t spend it on making products better and relies on vendor lock-in to propagate.<p>Could have asked if they think selling to Adobe has limited the potential of what Figma could accomplish. Could have asked about how users who supported them as a solution against Adobe might feel betrayed.<p>But you didn’t. Great journalism guys.

How often have seen that speech of “we are going to stay autonomous!” , probably way too many times. As soon as hard time hits, or the current leadership changes, that goes right out the window.<p>I understand the lure of a big pile of money, surely. It probably creates a lot of opportunities for Figma in the short run, but long term I feel it will be Macromedia all over again.

Long-term we&#x27;re expecting to have to move away from Figma because, you know, Adobe. Whatever they say now isn&#x27;t worth the paper it&#x27;s printed on.

There doesn’t seem to be much new in here, but it’s good to hear Dylan’s perspective. I really hope Figma find a way of transforming Adobe from the inside.<p>I’m still pained by the Adobe&#x2F;Macromedia acquisition. Fireworks was the best UI, and arguably “screen” focused, graphic design tool of the time. So much better in every way than Photoshop (because thats not what it was trying to be!), but Adobe couldn’t see that, thought they were competing products, and killed it.<p>If Adobe had kept Fireworks, invested in it, and eventually added the UI focus and collaboration feature of newer products they would continue to own this market.<p>Fireworks is the true predecessor to products like Figma and Sketch.<p>I fear Adobe are not particularly good at seeing how a new product tailored to a new design pragmam doesn’t compete with the older products. Reinvention is good! Maybe this is the start of them approaching that differently.

If any Figma are interested in an alternative, try the free &amp; open source alternative Penpot (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;penpot.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;penpot.app&#x2F;</a>). I like it and the team behind it (Kaleidos) always does great work (I love their JIRA alternative Taiga to bits).

More content… so we can extract more money from existing customers… yay<p>Meanwhile the race is still on to merge real actual code components back into the design tools, and out again as workable screens. The first one to properly crack that nut is going to snatch so much market share. I thought it would be figma since they did auto layout but they don’t seem that interested in the code side

Transforming adobe from the inside is about as likely as Boba Fett transforming the Sarlacc from the inside. Instead of being slowly digested.

I see a lot of negative comments here, but is Adobe really that bad? Photoshop isn&#x27;t a perfect application and the creative cloud bulk it comes with can be a bit irritating, but it&#x27;s still an incredibly powerful market-leading application. The AI editing features they&#x27;ve added in recent years have been great and I&#x27;ve also found their iPad version of the application to be surprisingly good.<p>I guess what I&#x27;m saying is that while Figma might get some additional bulk I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair to assume the product will stagnate under Adobe? They&#x27;re paying a lot for Figma in an attempt to secure their market position, given that I doubt they plan to push people away from the product. I understand the apprehension, but it seems a little premature to me?

So are there Figma clones? If not, how many teams are starting on one right now? :)

Why are they allowing this acquisition? This is anticompetitive.

Isn’t it “what Adobe plans to do inside Figma”?

The fate of all acquisitions.