Nah, I think this is truly a case of regulatory agencies shutting the deal down. Adobe knows Figma is best-in-class in their category, and even in the current market downturn, $20b still feels like a good bet to own the winner in and up and coming category for the next 5-10 years

I dunno, seems like there are massive risks to Figma as a business at this point with the developments in generative AI. I'm not that confident spending $17bn is justified if its going to take 10-20 years to make it back. Some generative AI startup could easily leapfrog figma.

And Adobe already has its own massive trove of copyright images that it can use for much better generative AI.

I think the last year has put adobe in a much stronger position and figma in a much worse position.

Generative AI isn’t useful without a good editor for humans to manually tweak and integrate the AI’s output, and Figma is essentially the only name in the game for that.

Who gets a better deal on compute costs, Figma or Adobe? If prices skyrocket, who is better prepared to pivot?

Sketch still exists and is not only very good, but in many ways better.

In what ways is it better? I've found Figma to be vastly superior, especially since they treat design like development, automating tedious processes like manually tweaking the layout and instead having a version of flexbox literally built into the design ("auto constraints"). They're bringing web dev and mobile dev ideas into design software.

My information might be out-of-date, because I gave up on Figma years ago, and I recalled Sketch being significantly more powerful as an actual design tool. But now I'm looking up differences and it seems Figma has improved in areas it was weak in previously, like not having color profiles. From their feature lists they seem about identical.