Photoshop has been the go-to app for editing images or colour correction, while Acrobat was the first tool most of us used to view and edit PDF files. To sum it up, Adobe has been the oldest name associated with digital designing and documentation. But with its latest acquisition of its main competitor Figma, the company has bolstered its position as the leading player in the digital creative tech ecosystem.
Adobe’s $20 billion deal for buying Figma comes along with its quarterly earnings which revealed that turnovers have gone past forecasts at $4.43 billion. But it has cut down forecasts for the next quarter, since it will be taking a loan to complete its acquisition of Figma.
Simpler alternative to Adobe
Figma had managed to bag a 31% market share in the collaborative design market thanks to its flexibility and simplified usage. For instance Figma’s files are always online and easy to share, while in case of Adobe the files need to be synced separately to the cloud, and any changes need to be synched and shared again. With Figma under its wing, Adobe has become the strongest player in the collaborative design space.
Will it hamper ease of usage?
The acquisition is the third major move by Adobe, after it picked up online management platform Workfront in 2020, before venturing further into the cloud video collaboration space with Frame.io. But stocks of Adobe still went down 13% after the acquisition, because of the debt it’ll add to the company’s books.
Users are also concerned about the simplicity, which makes Figma easy to operate, being affected by Adobe’s entry. Earlier this year, Adobe had announced the development of its own digital ecosystem with new developer tools and solution partners that experienced a 30 per cent growth.
