It’s nuts to think Adobe could clone Figma for $1M. That’s a headcount of 2-4, working on it for a single year. That’s off by several orders of magnitude.
Because what if it wasn’t as good, and nobody bought it? Then they are where they are today minus 1B spent. This seems to be what happened with their XD product.
> This seems to be what happened with their XD product
Hmm I don't know.
I mean, yeah XD absolutely failed, but when Adobe released it in 2016 Figma wasn't nearly as popular as it is today.
My guess is when Adobe decided to build XD (a couple of years before 2016) they were trying to compete with Sketch. So they probably missed the collaborative web-based aspect that made Figma popular.
And maybe XD was just an underbudgeted experiment to test the waters, not a serious product like Photoshop.
Edit:
I just realized Figma was released in 2016. I was probably thinking of InVision.
because they literally can't. ignoring the $1B budgeted cost, they are also facing massive execution risk. adobe is signaling their confidence in their ability to innovate/execute with the acquisition price - zero confidence.
even in the very unlikely event they were able to build a product with feature parity, with little operational blunder, on budget/on time, they still need to market it and get enough paying users to match the $400 million in revenue per year which Figma currently makes.
While I agree with the headcount and budget, I do think a behemoth company like Adobe would be well-positioned to take on such a task, simply because they already have things like:
- infrastructure
- talent
- tech
- capital
at hand, compared to a startup.
I haven't used Figma, but I'd be amazed if Adobe doesn't already have a ton of the same features and tools somewhere in the codebase. They're not exactly starting from scratch.
You would be surprised, honestly. A small dev studio from Eastern Europe would do miracles with that 1M. It wouldn't be a full-featured Figma, and of course there's quality issues and blah blah blah but ...
The point I wanted to convey is that Adobe could've developed that for way less money. So what else is there in the 20B?
