The reports of Figma's Death are Exaggerated.

The hand-wringing and wild speculation around Adobe’s acquisition of Figma struck me as being just a bit hysterical. As the guy who does a lot of XD and UX Prototyping training over on LinkedIn Learning, I have to admit my first reaction was,” Well, there goes my job.” Then I stepped back and reflected on the acquisition. My key conclusion is, “Yep, I am eventually going to be out of a job.”?

The crazy thing about this realization is I have been through this before thanks to my being the Fireworks author at LIL. Even so, there needs to be a bit of clarity here because, to paraphrase the words of Mark Twain the reports of Figma’s imminent death are an “exaggeration.”

Let’s start with a bit of history to deal with Adobe’s perceived motive to kill Figma.

Back in 2000 I was in the audience at FlashForward 2000 in San Francisco. The first presentation, by Macromedia CEO, Rob Burgess, and CTO, Kevin Lynch, showed off a lot of features about to be released in Flash. Needless to say, the audience went crazy. Right behind them Adobe demonstrated their Flash competitor- LiveMotion.?There were some pretty neat features demonstrated and at the end, the presentation was greeted with silence and a smattering of polite applause. For all intents and purposes, LiveMotion was dead from that moment on.?

Shortly thereafter, Macromedia was acquired by Adobe and the reason was pretty obvious- Flash. There was no way LiveMotion was going to gain ground when Flash was out there. From Macromedia’s point of view, the speculation was Adobe gave them the resources they simply didn’t have to move Flash to the next level (Put this point in your back pocket because I'll be getting to it later.). For example, video. Adobe introduced the FLV format in Flash and kicked off the wild adoption of video on the web. In fact, Flash Video was the format behind YouTube’s growth. It was only after this that HTML 5 included the video property which essentially killed the FLV format and put the focus squarely on the mp4 video format.

There was also a rather interesting result from the Macromedia acquisition. Adobe’s culture radically changed and, for me, I always thought Macomedia took over Adobe rather than the other way around. That culture is still in place to this day.

There is also a misconception that Adobe killed Flash. Wrong. Steve Jobs killed it. Adobe was finding it difficult , if not impossible, to get the Flash Player to take hold in the mobile space. One look at Device Central was enough to turn a developer into a ball of quivering flesh. It was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened and Steve Jobs delivered the death blow. The reaction of the Flash community to Steve's “fatwa” is remarkably similar to the Figma community’s recent reaction: Lots of venom directed at Apple and iPhones turned in.

Let’s now deal with the unfounded fear that Adobe will kill Figma. Nope. All you have to do is to read the statements from Adobe and Figma and then scroll through the Figma townhall on Twitter to understand this, simply, is not the case. Figma is going to stay put and Adobe is going to pour a ton of its resources and knowledge into Figma. My spidey-sense is telling me that it won’t be long before Figma picks up the Repeat Grid from XD. Based on both Adobe’s and Figma’s statements, it looks like Figma is going to be an autonomous business unit of Adobe and ,if Figma, is added to the Creative Cloud, it will most likely be nothing more than a link to Figma.

There was a lot of venom hurled around regarding the fact Figma will no longer be free. It never was was. It was only free to single users and Education and that won’t change. Take a look at Figma’s pricing schedule for Enterprise. That single seat price looks pretty good until you realize a Figma project involves a lot of highly skilled people. Do the math. Now ask where the imaging, vectors and snazzy fonts in a Figma project come from? The answer is mostly Photoshop and Illustrator which just happen to be part of the Creative Cloud. Do I agree that the CreativeCloud monthly subscription price is steep? Absolutely. The only solace I have, as a Canadian, is thank god I am not Australian.

Let’s now deal with the misconception that Adobe has a bad habit of killing off competitors. The poster boy for that is Fireworks. Yes, Adobe killed off Fireworks but what you may not know is that a lot of the talent behind Fireworks wound up at Figma.?

What is not mentioned is the fact that Macromedia Freehand got deep-sixed shortly after the acquisition. This was not vindictiveness on Adobe’s part. It was a rational business decision because Freehand was a direct competitor to Illustrator. It simply didn’t make sense to have two applications that did essentially the same thing in the product stable when one of them (Illustrator) was, for all intents and purposes, the industry standard. Director’s death was long and painful not because Adobe ignored it, which they sort of did, but because Interactive CD’s were going the way of the Sony Beta format.

The death of Fireworks was primarily due to a fundamental change in the market from web design to UX design and the rise of the prototype. Fireworks was an astounding UI Design tool but it was unable to adapt to Responsive Design or Interactivity and Motion. Even so it is still around. Create a GIF or PNG image in Photoshop or Illustrator and that sweet Fireworks interface appears. There was also a quiet market shift away from Fireworks to Photoshop when it came to creating static artboards or screens. Couple that with the market adoption of Sketch as the de facto standard, and the writing was on the wall for Fireworks.

You also might want to consider Adobe has a history of killing its own products. LiveMotion didn’t survive the Macromedia acquisition but Flash suddenly sported the LiveMotion timeline found in the current version of Animate. That timeline, I might add, is suspiciously close to the After Effects timeline. Muse is gone, Reflow is gone and Edge Animate actually morphed into XD before it, too, winked out of existence. With the Figma acquisition, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see XD disappear in a couple of years or morph into something else.

Having been involved in this silly business for almost 40 years, I have seen products come and go. In a few years, you can bet there is going to be a product regarded as the "Figma Killer". It is the nature of the business and I can pretty well guarantee many of those presently crying havoc will take a look at that Figma Killer if and when it appears.

Let's now look at that "eye watering" price Adobe paid to acquire Figma. I agree that $20 billion is a rather steep price. For those claiming that Figma’s founders sold out, you might want to ask who benefited. I saw a post that outlined that very point. Turns out the guys who made out like bandits were not the founders. It was the collection of VC’s who fronted the capital to get Figma going. The founders did “very well, thank you” but accusing them of selling out is a stretch. The only real change is Figma’s CEO got a new boss. He and his team are still going to be calling the shots but they now have access to the resources and expertise of Adobe to grow the product into an even stronger powerhouse than at present. You can also bet Adobe is going to be laser-focused on protecting its rather massive investment in Figma. So who really benefits?

That question has already been answered: You will benefit.