Adobe ate Figma but that’s just the beginning.
Also, Figma CEO blocked me 🤣
--
Wow! What a Thursday! First, many crypto bros held their breath waiting for the Ethereum merge towards Proof of Stake. And when that horror ended without any bugs or glitches we got hit by another news.
Adobe is buying Figma.
Adobe expressed interest to purchase Figma for $20B thus having one less competitor in the UX/UI design space. I guess when you can’t innovate your way out you buy it.
To many that move may come as a surprise, but it was actually pretty transparent for a while now. There were some red-flags that may have hinted on that.
Before we get to them, I want to make one thing clear.
I believe Figma has done an amazing job bringing design to a lot of people, especially in emerging markets. These people were able to experience, learn and grow their skills in design which would otherwise be impossible. For just that positive impact, I aplaud them! 👏
They also innovated like crazy to stay ahead of the competition which led to groundbreaking new features for the industry. This is great!
However …
Closed off format
If you have enough investor money, you can offer a tool for free for many years but don’t forget to lock the format, so switching to another tool will be extra hard for the users.
Then, once they have a lot of projects in your tool and even mental costs of moving away would be to taxing, you can begin stage 2.
Raise prices, limit functionality and so on.
Sure, some will quit anyway, but the majority will accept the new reality and gladly pay.
Figma allows you to export a .FIG file to share it with someone outside of their cloud infrastructure. That file is a closed format that only Figma can…
