You should let Figma buy Adobe, with Adobe’s Money

So the latest headline Adobe purchasing Figma for $20 billion, half cash, half stock, double their valuation, 50 times they're reported 400 million in annual revenue, expensive, even few value their employees at millions and millions of dollars. I'm going to share my thoughts. This is somebody who works at Adobe who has no insight into the deal, no insight as to why Adobe would make purchase Figma, no idea this was happening before the news was announced. But at the same time, a UX designer who would never use Adobe XD on a daily basis, who's kind of my thoughts. If you think about Figma versus Adobe's products, Adobe builds a lot of native software runs across platforms, but they're maintaining this suite of native software, which is dominated pretty much every vertical since the 1990s. I'm going to talk about raster graphics with Photoshop, photo editing, in light room. For a long time, UX design happened in Illustrator and Photoshop before that. These were never good tools for UX designers. And so, fireworks came along and UX designers loved that, so after Adobe acquired Macromedia, they killed that off. And most UX designers went back to Photoshop or Illustrator . And when I said UX designers, nobody was calling themselves a UX designer back then. Everybody was calling themselves. There was a lot of blurring the lines between what we would call a UI designer and a UX designer today, or a product designer. It was kind of a more holistic thing. And we had a lot of scumorific design happening. And up until the mid 2000s, late 2000s. No, mid 2010s, really. So, having a tool like Photoshop or Illustrator with the power to create highly detailed interface designs, also be the tool that you use to create UX designs. This was not a horrible idea, but there was always a desire for something faster, nimble, and lower fidelity than Photoshop in Illustrator. And Sketch was a revival of that tool, followed by Figma, which became, you know, the cross platform. More collaborative version of that, right? And Adobe's never called that segment of the market back. Whereas Figma basically dominates it right now. So, if you look at any Wall Street analysts, I've read half a dozen takes, and they're all exactly the same. If you look at the numbers, there is no way $20 billion makes sense. Adobe overpaid by at least 100%. But think about why they 've overpaid, because if you wait a couple years and let this become a generic late start-up life cycle market acquisition, somebody like Microsoft, or Google by Figma, right? And this becomes a generic tool. The team, you know, they make a nice home for the team to continue working on their tool and make surface level integ rations into other Microsoft products, and they guarantee that, you know, there's a Windows-based design tool that competes against max dominance in the design industry. Like , there's a path for that, it's just not very exciting. There's a more exciting path for Adobe to reinvent itself and to rebrand itself away from kind of the negative image it's developed through its predatory subscription model. And that's not an opinion. Like, that's not... I'm sure, you know, it's not a popular thing to say as an employee, but charging early termination fee on a two-year contract for a piece of software is just predatory. There's no other word for it. And if you talk to designers, you never hear them complaining about any aspect of Photoshop or Lightroom or Illustrator that they don't like in the software, right? They very rarely complain. There's a lot to complain about, but that's not the complaint you hear that makes them not want to use Adobe products. It's the pricing model. But anyway, back to the more interesting path that Adobe could take. Surface level, people might see this as an acquisition where Adobe just acquires Figma and now they dominate every vertical of design software across all platforms, and they've, you know, restored themselves to where the company was in the mid-2000s. And that alone makes it worth $20 billion, especially considering what is Adobe going to spend the additional money on anyway, stock buybacks, developing new products like they're not cash strapped. There are more in a situation like Apple is today, or they don't know what to spend the money on. No, more interesting is one thing that's been under- reported, I think, is the release of Photoshop Web and Adobe Express. This is a trend that I'm kind of seeing from inside the company, but it's un-official. I mean, you see the trend from outside the company too. It's, there's no secret around this. But if you think about a company that wants to shift from multi-platform desktop software gradually into web-based collaborative versions of that software, think about the impact of hiring the team that built the most successful cross-platform web-based design tool in the industry. And then filtering some of those people into the teams working on a web version of Photoshop and Illustrator and Adobe Express and filtering them throughout the company and letting that culture intermingle with Adobe's culture and reinvigorate the company. I'm not saying this is what's going to happen. I don't even know if management teams intend to do this, but you could really rebirth Adobe as a totally new company out of the Figma acquisition if you did it right. But then again, it would be a little bit like an inverse of the Lockheed Martin acquisition by Boeing, where people joked Lockheed Martin bought Boeing with Boeing's money. If you let Figma buy Adobe with Adobe's money, the resulting company, if you get the culture right, adds more than 20 billion of value to Adobe.