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?)
But you can do that though:
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.
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 :)
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.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
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.
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.
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.
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.