Thread by @karrisaarinen

I’ve seen a lot of takes on the Figma Adobe deal in past week and think most VCs/finance folks misses the point since they don’t really understand the market or tools Adobe and Figma makes. Figma is not a Photoshop killer and Figma didn't put "Photoshop in the cloud".

First, Adobe business is making tools for specific creative fields like photographers, illustrators, magazine editors, videographers etc. The talk about some kind of “Adobe” bundle doesn’t make sense since most people only have a need and proficiency in 1-3 of the Adobe tools.

This is very different from the "MS Office bundle" where regular office worker might use all of most of the tools on their day job and the integrations. But what Adobe makes are tools for completely different creative fields and professionals.

This also means that when companies buy Adobe products, they specifically count how many of each licenses they need. Some companies buy the bundle but historically been quite expensive especially when majority of few users in company only need few of the tools.

Secondly, the talk about “photoshop in the cloud” is off. Photoshop is not a tool for designing digital products. It initially emerged from ILM as digital editing tool for stills and frames. Photoshop features are around editing pixel based assets like photos or scans.

Many did design apps and websites (me included) in Photoshop back in early 2000s because there wasn’t nothing much else on the market.

However somewhere in early 2000s UI industry started from pixels assets to rendered UIs. On web you would style the UI with CSS and on mobile you would use platform frameworks. The pixel assets, and most part pixel based tools no longer had a place in that world

The digital app industry took off (basically where all the VC funding has gone last 20years) but some reason Adobe completely missed it. Even worse, they acquired Macromedia Fireworks in 2005 and neglected it. In 2010 Sketch came along and finally took the product designers away

Sketch came vector based tool for designing digital products, like websites, mobile apps etc. It was really good, but it was a native Mac application that dealt with local .sketch files.

To work in a design team you would have email files or have these wacky Box/Dropbox folders that were synced (which someone always messed up). For engineers to see the designs they would have to have same version of Sketch installed and constantly find the latest file

The other disadvantage for Sketch was they were initially operating as a small team in the Netherlands and were kind of removed how Silicon Valley teams design and build products. They were still focused on building a tool for a designer vs building a tool for a teams

When Figma came along, they were behind of Sketch in terms performance and design features, but they had the cloud first architecture. Everyone in the company had and could access to all the files. No versions, you edit the latest file. Google Docs vs Word.

IMO the cloud first architecture was more important the multiplayer mode. Like with Google Docs, most of the time you design or write alone, but because there very little friction to share files and everyone has access, it's easy to get people jump in when needed

Figma caught up with Sketch performance and features fairly quickly and also listened what Silicon Valley and design & product teams actually needed. They were discovering the product for designing products rather than building an tool for a designer.

For example they came to the Airbnb design team to ask about what we would need for the design system and then they basically built that (I assume they also talked to other teams). It was way better what Sketch symbols where and obviously matched closely where the industry was at

They addressed the whole process, not just designing the UI. They built simple prototyping tools which then killed Invision. The web sharing and basic handoff tools kind of made handoff tools like Zeplin and Abstract obsolete.

Finally in 2016 Adobe caught on and announced Adobe XD and spent tons on marketing, paying design influencers and hosting dinners. But it was too late and the product was meh. And still felt like Adobe's "software in a box".

It didn’t help that Adobe brand is fairly tarnished by their use of dark patterns and predatory pricing. One of my happiest days was to uninstall the Creative Cloud app which only job seemed take 50% your computer resources and make you login each day to to verify your license

So in the end what Figma built was a design tool and platform that product designers and the product teams needed to design products. It had the cloud, collaboration and the features that work in a way that reflect the how things are designed and built today.

Figma's go to market and pricing is also geared around growth mindset vs the scarcity and haggling customers are used with Adobe. You likely have more Figma licenses than you have designers because you see there is a value in collaboration

Adobe still seems operate in the “software in a box” world where they sell these app binaries for specific types of users for but there is no understand how teams operate today. They sell the tools, but not solutions. Their creativity is spent on pricing, not on products.

Adobe to me seems the perfect example Steve Jobs comment on what happens sales people and marketers run the company. They lost their touch with the industry and customers to hit quarterly financials.

To summarize, Adobe missed the one of the largest transformations in the design industry and lost the product designers for over a decade. Spending $20B on Figma is their ticket back in and hopefully evolving their thinking from the "software in a box" model.

And I'm always happy when startups and best products win. Adobe had all the classic advantages but they still couldn't compete. Btw Adobe office also came to Airbnb office but there wasn't much interest from the design team to talk to them.

And to fair Adobe did evolve from “software in a box” to “software in a box in the cloud”. But just putting things in the cloud and turning on subscriptions doesn’t make a better product. That just changing the distribution

I’ve been thinking about this deal more is since Figma’s approach is similar to us at @linear. We are interested discovering what modern software teams need to build well. The individual features can often look very simple, but the magic happens when all of it comes together

Ben Thompson on @stratechery got some feedback on Photoshop vs Figma narrative.

Disagree on the design to code idea. Design is explorative, quick & dirty. Implementation needs to be solid & performant based on the app architecture. Mixing those two likely makes both worse

If you want to understand Figma better, I recommend reading @kevinakwok's excellent write up (2020) kwokchain.com/2020/06/19/why…