Yeah, kind of wonder what would have happened had Adobe instead pulled a pair of engineers aside and said, "Hey, we want you two to create a Figma rival. You'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't have to have Figma parity, just has to be something you're proud of. We'll put it out as beta ... it can stay beta for as long as you feel it needs to be. We're hoping you can get us to have a Figma-like presence, maybe Figma-parity within three years or so?"
I suspect Adobe are too behemoth these days. A scrappy start-up/skunk-works within Adobe might have been able to pull off some nice code and for a lot less than $20B.
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.
Good for Figma founders, they'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've seen what happened to Macromedia products after Adobe bought them.
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.
As much as I LOVE to shit on Adobe (they leaked my CC info) they surprised me recently with one new feature I've been begging for years - bullet points and ordered lists in text fields. Ever since Illustrator became an alternative to InDesign for smaller print jobs, it's been my core missing feature.
Although, in the grand scheme of things, Illustrator has been really left behind and apps like InDesign or XD have seen next to zero updates in years.
I like Figma a lot, but I'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.
Adobe consolidates. Where is the Blender equivalent for Photoshop? I don't think GIMP is the answer, but it seems like Photoshop is ripe for an open source competitor in the category. I just don't know of any realistic candidates.
“ In my work, there'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're pretty distracting to me.
Affinity products are decent, but they're not free, it's a one time purchase.
There'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've been using Photoshop for 25 years.
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 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.
Adobe has an excellent team of machine learning experts who are very well aware of what'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.
> 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
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.
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.
I used Photoshop for 20 years and really tried to switch to Affinity, but holy cow it's so extremely different. I tried finding a good "Affinity for Photoshop Users" resource and wasn't ever able to before giving up on it and using photopea (which is great).
> 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 / Figma / XD. Layout engine capabilities are the biggest missing feature in competitors.
Phew, I was worried for a second, because of [NEW OVERLORD]'s persistent track record of killing babies. So glad to hear that [STARTUP] CEO thinks it's going to be fine, in a public statement nonetheless! More than anyone, he must have done his due diligence.
Every time one of these "statements" happens I'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 "spend time with family"?
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't drop 20bn on something to let it sit at it's current level.
They'll be integrating creative cloud and making it part of the subscription. I dare say they'll close the loophole on the free plan as well that lets you have unlimited designs.
> 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's okay if he wants to make $20B, but don't spin it! A blog post like this makes me lose trust, it doesn't reassure me.
I'm a long time user of Trello. After the acquisition, Atlassian foisted their login system on Trello users, but otherwise didn'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?
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.
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.
Nah, they just have different rules for different huge tech companies.
FTC is blocking Meta’s acquisition of Within, the maker of a VR fitness app - an extremely niche product. Meanwhile Microsoft and Adobe seem confident that they can close on deals to buy Activision and Figma.
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]
Anyone here can lodge this simple form and I'd encourage you to do so. Especially if you think this merger will substantially lesson competition and stifle innovation lodge a complaint: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation
At a minimum, they will investigate this and make inquiries (typically within months) if they see a high volume of complaints.
2. It should include something similar the following (maybe a lawyer here, could help):
a. Adobe acquiring Figma may violate anti-trust laws.
b. These are the 2 dominate players in web design apps. There is very little competition elsewhere.
c. I am a user and once they merge there is no viable competitor.
Sent, thank you. I also made sure to mention the "consumer harm" (keyword) of forcing consumers to engage with Adobe's predatory pricing model ("annual subscription billed monthly" bs)
That said, knowing Apple, they probably have a great long term vision on graphical UI/UX design tooling that will either be great when it finally comes into being in 8 years, like M1, or we’ll never see it at all.
As a cto/admin/manager/hiring person: Sketch is worthless for me because I don't have a Mac. But because of that, my company does not use it: despite designers working on macOS, if I can't run it to look at their work and actively comment/collaborate with them, it'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?)
Because 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.
I'm betting they will leave it alone, at least for a while. I'm sure the C suite at adobe is not blind to their reputation and they know that if they start tacking on "Adobe" 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's case they paid $20B. I could see how Adobe is willing to throw away $3.4B to kill their competition but I'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.
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'm an Adobe employee, and I think that this is most likely what will happen. I think maybe the transition to web-first wasn't going as planned. I think that Adobe's going to move their features into Figma (integration with creative cloud assets, easy importing/exporting to other programs, collaboration workflows) and close out XD.
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.
The founders of Figma must be very happy: "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."
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.
Common things are so obtusely buried in these applications. It's extraordinary the decisions they make.
Maybe there should be a telematics tool for gtk that tracks when a user is clicking around looking for something and treats it like a bug report after a program crash.
Some Non-Obtrusive (very important) dialog says something like "looking for something? Tell us what and where you're expecting it so we can add it".
There's no reason at all things can't be in 2 or 3 places instead of like View / Interface Options / General / Advanced / ... or wherever the hell someone decided to place it.
I love Sketch but macOS is no longer the OS I spend the most times in, which is Linux and Windows. I'd love for Sketch to be cross-platform, I'd buy one license per year just to support them.
So my only option was Figma and now... Now what? Damn this sucks.
Check out Framer. It's actually a really nice UI/UX and prototyping tool, but is pretty opinionated in how you set up your file (IMO). I used it a lot when I was freelancing because it gave me a little more power than Sketch did, at the time, and was more mature than Figma. They are the one product I know of currently that has web, Windows and Mac clients.
This ^ is what's lead my small sample size of companies to move from Sketch to Figma. The focus on cross platform and ease of use that Figma had really helped drive adoption across a wide range of company sizes which is probably why this is such a logical acquisition for Adobe.
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.
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'd want to use. But Macromedia software was also great, and now it's mostly non-existent. I'd love for this to turn out different, but I have very low expectations.
Github gained actions, sponsors etc. and keeps getting more new features.
Whatsapp got E2E chats and group video calls and handles communications for a huge amount of people.
WhatsApp also got significantly worse over time: copycat features like stories which add bloat in an effort to boost "engagement", businesses using WhatsApp for the thing we all knew was eventually going to happen i.e. ads over WhatsApp, and the new privacy policy and deeper integration with facebook nobody asked for.
Stories is in a separate tab. I just ignore it most of the time and never post anything myself.
Accessing businesses on Whatsapp is kinda nice and convenient. I can enter a restaurant's phone number and see their menu easily. I also use Whatsapp to access bank statements which is super fast and easy compared to the bank's own app.
As for the privacy policy, it's like WinRAR. You just close the popup and forget about it. I've been closing the policy popup since months and don't even notice it much.
You're just lucky that business haven't started using WhatsApp to send you unsolicited ads. This is becoming more and more common in India - I received no less than three messages this month from businesses I've never used.
LOL I use WhatsApp daily and I completely forgot about Stories. I just checked, just one of my hundred contacts on there had a recent story update. What a load of nonsense.
Then Facebook tried to do the same with Instagram.
I disagree. GitLab is a lot better and has many more features, but GitHub has managed to close the gap significantly. Before MS bought them they weren't even close to being close and had stagnated for years, and now there's a bunch of major new features (mostly playing catch-up, the only differentiator they have is Copilot), at the expense of stability.
MS's acquisition of Github seems to be going okay, and has arguably increased user value. It's hard to say what MS is getting out of the deal, though; the mistrust of MS runs deeply given its history, so the biggest strikes in this deal are speculation about what MS is doing with the massive trove of Github developer and code-over-time data. IMHO the longer MS owns Github without hurting or exploiting its users, they are restoring lost trust with devs, but there are lots of devs who can/will never really trust MS or anything it touches (which TBH is a pretty safe bet).
Not many people can believe this (How many C&C gamers are on HN after all?) but I'm still pissed about it to this day. I could replace even the Google Reader, but not the fun I had playing the games from Westwood Studios.
I completely understand; C&C and Need for Speed were an important part of my youth and to see them treated so badly has left me with quite the poor opinion of EA. But for some reason, their shitty way of running the game business seems to work out, and they just keep going. I just hope they won't kill Battlefield as well, though with recent installments they certainly seem to be trying.
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/5G-connected) users that were a net negative on Skype'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's business model just couldn't generate.
I doubt any other company taking over Skype could've avoided ruining it.
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
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 "cloud ecosystem".
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.
but are you willing to walk away from your current job where your employer won'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't it more likely that the product will work as is and businesses won'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.
"Corner the market, and raise the price." In this case, outsource the former and in-house the latter.
I’m a freelancer so I have the luxury of choice here, but I agree there is likely not much that will change until Adobe cripples Figma enough for an alternative to surpass it significantly.
1,292 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 757 ms ] threadI suspect Adobe are too behemoth these days. A scrappy start-up/skunk-works within Adobe might have been able to pull off some nice code and for a lot less than $20B.
I've seen what happened to Macromedia products after Adobe bought them.
Although, in the grand scheme of things, Illustrator has been really left behind and apps like InDesign or XD have seen next to zero updates in years.
I like Figma a lot, but I'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.
Figma is already a “forever subscription”. It’s a SaaS subscription.
For drawing I would say Krita.
https://vimeo.com/100377108
To repost their comment:
“ In my work, there'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.”
Affinity products are decent, but they're not free, it's a one time purchase.
There'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've been using Photoshop for 25 years.
I’m perennially frustrated that I live in an era with nearly-dead antitrust.
smart objects and cloud libraries, just kill me now
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… https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2022/Adobe-to-Acqui...
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.
A comment in another thread mentioned Penpot https://penpot.app/
Never heard of it before, but I'll explore it.
I refuse to pay a monthly fee for something I use on a scattershot basis.
Citing him:
> 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 / Figma / XD. Layout engine capabilities are the biggest missing feature in competitors.
You won't believe what happens next.
After some years and the clauses have lapsed and Adobe have done what they always do, the criticism will come.
I'm sure he knows it as well, but hundreds of millions of dollars will shut anyone up for a period of time.
You don't drop 20bn on something to let it sit at it's current level.
They'll be integrating creative cloud and making it part of the subscription. I dare say they'll close the loophole on the free plan as well that lets you have unlimited designs.
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's okay if he wants to make $20B, but don't spin it! A blog post like this makes me lose trust, it doesn't reassure me.
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?
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.
FTC is blocking Meta’s acquisition of Within, the maker of a VR fitness app - an extremely niche product. Meanwhile Microsoft and Adobe seem confident that they can close on deals to buy Activision and Figma.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
At a minimum, they will investigate this and make inquiries (typically within months) if they see a high volume of complaints.
See https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui... For more info on the relevant law :)
antitrust@ftc.gov
2. It should include something similar the following (maybe a lawyer here, could help):
a. Adobe acquiring Figma may violate anti-trust laws. b. These are the 2 dominate players in web design apps. There is very little competition elsewhere. c. I am a user and once they merge there is no viable competitor.
That said, knowing Apple, they probably have a great long term vision on graphical UI/UX design tooling that will either be great when it finally comes into being in 8 years, like M1, or we’ll never see it at all.
Why, do they have an online editor yet?
As a cto/admin/manager/hiring person: Sketch is worthless for me because I don't have a Mac. But because of that, my company does not use it: despite designers working on macOS, if I can't run it to look at their work and actively comment/collaborate with them, it'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?)
Looks like viewing in a browser is already available?
Because 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.
But you can do that though:
https://www.sketch.com/docs/browsing-web-documents/
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's case they paid $20B. I could see how Adobe is willing to throw away $3.4B to kill their competition but I'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.
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 hope the deal fall through NGL
They were… That's why Adobe bought 'em.
Is there a blender of tools like this?
Maybe there should be a telematics tool for gtk that tracks when a user is clicking around looking for something and treats it like a bug report after a program crash.
Some Non-Obtrusive (very important) dialog says something like "looking for something? Tell us what and where you're expecting it so we can add it".
There's no reason at all things can't be in 2 or 3 places instead of like View / Interface Options / General / Advanced / ... or wherever the hell someone decided to place it.
Would be awesome if all software tools were gravitating towards the non-profit financed-by-big-stakeholders model like blender is.
So my only option was Figma and now... Now what? Damn this sucks.
Ok it is the multiple user editing that people liked so much about figma. Ok that makes sense. Ignore me.
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.
I just hope Adobe doesn't buy Affinity.
Accessing businesses on Whatsapp is kinda nice and convenient. I can enter a restaurant's phone number and see their menu easily. I also use Whatsapp to access bank statements which is super fast and easy compared to the bank's own app.
As for the privacy policy, it's like WinRAR. You just close the popup and forget about it. I've been closing the policy popup since months and don't even notice it much.
Then Facebook tried to do the same with Instagram.
edit: Hotmail can arguably be on that list. Revit should probably also qualify
Kane Lives!
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's business model just couldn't generate.
I doubt any other company taking over Skype could've avoided ruining it.
Why does software industry feel a heavy need to update the front-end when the back-end changes? That defeats the purpose of separating them!
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
Development
&
Operations
Became
End-of-life
AFAIK Corel has the same reputation. What is the problem with design software companies?
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.
"Corner the market, and raise the price." In this case, outsource the former and in-house the latter.