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.

They basically did exactly this with XD and it started with some good ideas and then basically just fizzled out.

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.

That money's not for the code...

Why improve your software when Apple can just release better hardware? \s