Europe says Adobe's $20B buy of Figma will kill competition

The European Commission says Adobe's proposed $20 billion purchase of web-first design collaboration startup Figma will harm competition in the region unless the pair devise remedies to resolve this. The transaction would represent the most expensive sale of a privately owned software company in history, and was flagged as a …

[AVR]

Enshittification ahoy!

$20 000 000 000 for 1 000 paying users; $20 million a head, really? Someone's expecting to convert a lot of free users into very much paid-up ones, probably in the near future.

[Nick Ryan]

Re: Enshittification ahoy!

Precisely, combine it with this sentence from the article:

Figma has four million users, including a little under 1,000 paying customers. The vector-based graphic editor and prototyping toolmaker was founded in 2016 and has taken in around $330 million funding to date.

and we have a service that so far has cost $330 million on 1,000 paying customers - or $330,000 per paying customer. That's an insanely poor ratio and while loss leading is a standard approach for finding VC funding, this really demonstrates the ridiculous extent of this practice. It's all about persuading the VCs that "there will be big money sometime in the future, and it's will definitely, absolutely, be much higher than the ~10% (whatever) you'd make elsewhere." Then Adobe come along and validate this approach by offering $20m per paying customer...

[Pascal Monett]

Hey, Adobe can waste its money any way it feels like it.

And I would like to see Adobe waste a prodigious sum of money and not get back anything meaningful.

Sounds like karma to me.

[tmTM]

Shocked

EU: This will harm competition and give you market monopoly

Adobe: Yes, that is why we're doing it

[trev101]

Remember Macromedia

Just look at Adobe history when it last bought out the competition. Macromedia with my favourites at the time Fireworks. Dreamweaver, Flash, Director, Freehand. Out of this list now only using Dreamweaver but we can no longer buy it outright. Adobe has the sole competition on subscription. The question is why is no one competing with Adobe? Because they get bought out.

[BOFH in Training]

Re: Remember Macromedia

Affinity has decent photoshop / illustrator / indesign competitors. And they are of the pay once / use forever (until your OS is not supported, presumably) style. And alot cheaper, compared to Adobe.

I only use 2 out of the 3 softwares Affinity provides, but I paid for all 3 (they are very very cheap comparatively) so that Affinity has just that bit more cash on hand to do the good fight against Adobe.

And yes, I was a fan of Macromedia's DW and FW those days.

[TVU]

Software duo must respond with remedies

The only remedy is for Figma to return to full independence from monopolistic Adobe Corporation whether they like it or not.

[Snowy]

Tools

So good very few want to pay money for them. I wonder how many of the 20million user only used it once?

[GeezaGaz]

So 0.03% of customers go from free to paying...

...and with those metrics surely they gotta ask how good their own product is?

As someone who has to use it, dire! A mammoth Javascript application that runs like a dog in a browser, quick and easy (the whole point of UX prototyping) it aint.