They will almost certainly experience a mass exodus of their top engineering, design, and leadership talent. They'll never come back from that. So it isn't that figma will turn to crap overnight, but over years it is guaranteed to rot, terrible features will start adding up, and adobe will start doing everything they can to pull you into and trap you in their expensive and crappy ecosystem.

So yeah it's sort of like climate change. Probably ok for now, but you should definitely start making moves to live somewhere else in the next few years.

It's the principle, this was the first time in 17 years anything threatened Adobe and honestly Figma could have destroyed Adobe within 3 years with the right focus.

Figma threw every single artist and designer in the world that does 2D work under the bus when they could have saved us all and built better tools.

Actually I'd go beyond saying it's the principle, actually now it's personal all the money I spent on Figma, all the hours I spent pushing Figma in organizations and building our workflows around it has just gone to strengthen Adobe's grip on my livelihood.

This might sound dramatic but imagine for a moment how you'd feel if you could only work within your industry if you used VSCode, it was closed source and it cost $60 a month and the only chance of fighting against that had sided with the enemy.

But this is the thing, it’s not healthy to see Adobe as the permanent enemy. They are a reflection of their people and leadership and this is arguably a sign they are a changing company.

Your analogy once was true with Microsoft and Visual Studio in the 90s. It was the main IDE for Windows development (there was no Linux, not really). And it was expensive. There wasn’t much competition until Java took off.

These days Microsoft isn’t seen as the enemy as often. Github is doing fine for example. Companies can change.

> But this is the thing, it’s not healthy to see Adobe as the permanent enemy

- I used Fireworks every day in my job, they killed it.

- After Effects was a top 3 digital creative tool ever made, they let it rot till it's a janky shadow of its former self, it can't even the timeline without audio glitches making ANY audio work to animation impossible, same can be said for Photoshop, can't even save an image without it trying to force you onto their dropbox competitor.

- They had the perfect entry point tool for multimedia creation with Flash that a whole generation of teens learnt how to express themselves online with and they let parts of it rot because they saw it as nothing more than a videoplayer and enterprise app Java competitor.

How are they not my enemy, we're talking decades of attacks on my workflow at this point.

Because Adobe is just a shifting group of people over time. It’s not a fixed entity with consistent motives. They bought Figma, you can assume the worst (that’s fair) but it’s equally likely they’re not spending $20b to kill it.

No one is expecting them to kill it.

didn't Apple kill flash by never supporting it on iOS? maybe there is more to the story.

>Apple kill flash by never supporting it on iOS

Apple tried very hard to support Flash on the iPhone. Apple flew out Adobe engineers to help them get it work on mobile. It was a tire fire and that's why Apple killed it. The dysfunction with Flash started before the iPhone, and arguably started with the acquisition of Macromedia.

It was already dying. Every web dev in the world hated it, and so did most of the users. But the worst offense was having proprietary closed source binary that couldn't be audited, running untrusted code on end devices. For instance, if you're on any OS other than Mac or Windows, you'd have a bad time, and often have no option to use flash sites (at the time, it was common to build flash sites even for simple document-style web pages). It was a security nightmare, but it was also a stability nightmare. When I saw Steve Jobs announcement I was so relieved. It was a bold move at the time, iPhone was nowhere near as dominant as it is today.

Microsoft actually cared about the developers. They also cared about the right things from business point of view. Their backwards compatibility is and was always insane.

The irony is that Microsoft gave us freedom, Apple gave us lockdowns.

I disagree pretty strongly with that last statement. Microsoft was the enemy of many developers through the 90s, every startup was in mortal fear that Microsoft would put you out of business by “embrace, extend, extinguish”. They were far worse than Apple in their practices. And Apple products were always far more user friendly.

Maybe the difference between Adobe and Microsoft is that the latter has kind of proven itself now. In the meantime is Adobe very busy trying to separate the Open Source version of Magento from the paid version, called Adobe Commerce now. There is only one mention of Magento left on the homepage, about the name change. And is a link to the free version now where to be found.

Enemies are permanent until they die, not until you get tired.

Just about any time a competitive product is swallowed up by a large company that product is left to wither for a year or so before riding off into the sunset.

That’s just not true. Slack is doing fine. Github is doing fine. Red Hat is also doing fine. Etc.

It’s mostly independent designers that feel they can’t afford Adobe level subscriptions.

Or "Don't want to pay for", which includes me. The feature set that I use in my daily driver - Illustrator - has pretty much remained constant since CS2 or thereabouts, but I have to maintain a subscription solely to ensure that I can load files from clients without any concern about incompatability or breakage.

It's quite annoying paying good money for old rope for years and years on end.

You'll hate to admit it but I know for a fact that a lot of the tools introduced after CS2 have become indispensable and allow you to get work done faster and more efficiently than back in the day.

"For a fact"? Only if you presume to know what I do and how I work, I suppose.

I'd not be so bold, personally.

- ed: I wondered perhaps if Smart Guides were newer than I remembered, but nup, having checked - they were there in CS2.

Like what?

From western world perspective, $85/month for a whole suite of powerful apps is absolute peanuts if they are used in a professional setting. An average carpenter probably spends more on tool upgrades each year.

It's just "1 man hour" for a random experienced freelance dude. It's crazy when you think you wouldn't hire this guy for just an hour but 70 hours for just an epic feature. That's already $5950.

$85 / (30 * 24 = 720) hours. Wow so cheap! Now we have some sense of how business is working.