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Re:Show HN: How Sketch can win looking at there Qualitative ... by rglover on Wednesday October 05, 2022 @03:10PM (#33099979)
I have to ask, what features?

As a profitable company, assuming they have competent developers, they could get what they need to built. Figma's "secret sauce" is using WebAssembly [1] to do their rendering.

The reason I harp is that everybody is complaining about the demise of Figma while completely ignoring its demise was precipitated by massive venture capital investment.

[1] https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

Re:Show HN: How Sketch can win looking at there Qualitative ... by aiisahik on Wednesday October 05, 2022 @06:00PM (#33101735)
Why are you calling it "demise"? Having $200M of ARR and selling for $20B - it's a tremendous achievement that should be celebrated.

If all it took to build a figma was to plug in web assembly, I'm pretty sure Adobe would have pocketed the $20B and built it themselves. There's a reason they didn't. They tried and they couldn't do it.

Re:Show HN: How Sketch can win looking at there Qualitative ... by rglover on Wednesday October 05, 2022 @08:44PM (#33103016)
I'm not personally, but there was a near-universal meltdown as soon as the sale to Adobe was announced with people scrambling about to find alternatives. I agree that Figma was highly successful and achieved its goals.

> There's a reason they didn't. They tried and they couldn't do it.

Time, mindshare, and brand. They could absolutely do it (all of their apps are insanely complex), but it's far faster to cut a check and wipe out your primary competitor and eliminate the cash flow leak (which based on that number, they estimated would be greater than their purchase price for Figma).