🗓 20 April 2024
Did Adobe dodge a $20 billion toll road to nowhere?
When Adobe agreed to acquire Figma for a staggering $20 billion in 2022, it seemed like an obvious move to stay on top of the design tools market. Figma has been lauded as the pinnacle of modern UI/UX design, allowing teams to seamlessly collaborate on sleek user interfaces.
Just over a year later, the deal was scrapped, amidst regulatory concerns over competition. While Adobe and Figma may both feel like it was an opportunity lost, Adobe especially may actually have inadvertently avoided taking on a tool that is destined to lose its edge in the coming years.
While Figma represents the current apex of GUI design tools, the entire software industry is rapidly shifting away from purely graphical user experiences. With the rise of AI agents, voice interfaces, and complex API-driven systems, the value proposition of precise pixel-perfect UI builders like Figma will inevitably diminish1.
In the near future, software development will be less about meticulously crafting static user flows, and more about designing intelligent systems that can dynamically adapt experiences leveraging AI, natural language, and robust backend services. Rigid GUI canvases will make way for fluid experiences powered by machine learning models and interconnected APIs.
Figma was built to master the graphic design world we’re leaving behind, not the AI-driven system design world we’re entering. While it would have solidified Adobe’s dominance for now, $20 billion may have been an overly expensive lifeboat for a temporarily booming but fundamentally waning product space.
Since introducing the groundbreaking Photoshop software and acquiring Macromedia, Adobe has consistently facilitated the learning process, enabling builders of digital experiences to push boundaries and bring their visions to life throgh its comprehensive suite of tools and educational resources.
By having its hand forced out of the deal, Adobe may have unintentionally avoided saddling itself with the modern incarnation of Photoshop - incredibly polished, but not nearly as important to leanrning how to design and build in the new era of experience design.
Sometimes regulators save you from yourself.
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What won’t dimish is the need for cross-functional teams – of Product Managers, Designers, Engineers etc – to collaborate effectively. Figma can continue to win if it keeps this front-and-center. ↩
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© Jonathan Roberts 2024
I occasionally update articles to fix typos, improve readability or modify content when new information is available to me: view revisions for this article