After the acquisition, Adobe starved Fireworks of resources and marketing. They broke things, left major bugs and performance regressions unfixed, and eventually discontinued it altogether. I'd argue this wasn't simply negligence, but a calculated decision to kill an innovative product because it threatened the profits of their cash cows.
As much as I hope otherwise, I believe the acquisition of Figma will go the same way. Once it's under the Adobe umbrella, the simple mathematics of profits from Photoshop and Illustrator vs. those from Figma will result in the latter being starved, stripped of functionality, and eventually left broken.
You can even fully automate it (well, at least the resize, you'll still need to pick where to crop) with both.
Riding on nostalgia fumes, I went searching for screenshots and in the process amusingly found: https://askubuntu.com/a/244128 - a Linux user still running Fireworks 8 in WINE. I'm almost tempted to try the same...
FYI, the download of version 8 was available to use as a 30-day trial, which seems legal enough today, if only for experimentation, and I actually have a license of MX someplace from my G4 Mac days.
Incredible stuff.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Of course, the subject of this is a user's comments, not a corporation. I suggest you read the rules a little more thoroughly before accusing others of breaking them.
As soon as Adbobe bought Macromedia, I knew they would shitcan it because of Photoshop and Illustrator. And I knew other nice Macromedia tools, like Dreamweaver, would have a similar fate. Such a shame, and buying a competitor just to kill it feels so wrong :(
I'm not totally sure if Figma will suffer a similar fate, but I do think it's going to get progressively more expensive, harder to use, buggier, and generally be more user-hostile.
I strongly suspect not. It's in a lot more use than Fireworks (which was cool -I used it- but was always a bit "niche").
If they play their cards right, they can use it to leverage their way back into many designers' good graces (who had been leaving the Adobesphere for the Figmasphere). They would probably add ways to leverage their cloud storage and other apps.
That said, it's pretty much a textbook "buy the competition" move, and the kind of thing that's getting a lot of scrutiny from regulators, these days.
But $20B is a lot of yachts. I don't blame the Figma people for selling out.
I still use it as my primary web/ui design tool and in fact am stuck on MacOS Mojave because I'd have to say goodbye to it forever if I upgraded.
Lest we only remember the roses smelling side, Macromedia also made the pile of crap called Flash.
And Both Fireworks and Dreamweaver had their fair share of bugs under Macromedia too.
That said Flash also supported a bunch of innovation for its time, and it too was obsoleted.
Maybe 9 slice graphic were already dead at Fireworks’ peak.
Figma is officially way more overrated than this stuff ever was.
Does anyone know a person who’s like, bonafide smart, using Figma? I feel like everyone I know who does “Figma” day to day is doing negative ROI shit. It’s like anti-R&D. It’s the ultimate bullshit job for non engineers.
So apparently spending your days in Figma can result in negative ROI shit like designing a billion dollar product.
But hey, I used to have the same gut feeling…that anyone who does something different to what I do all day is worthless. Then I got older and learned my model of the world, with me at the center of it, was naive and incorrect.
It’s the same story over and over again. Adobe acquires and then stifles innovation. 10 years later we realize what we were missing out on when a challenger eventually gets big enough—-until Adobe kills that company too.
I’d bet a nice chunk of money that Webflow is next.
The issue with Webflow is that GUI-based web design that exports static HTML files doesn't fit with how most large websites are coded and deployed. It would be one thing if Webflow CMS and Ecommerce was gaining market share vs Squarespace and Wix, but I don't know if that's really happening.
When I go on Twitter, I mostly see PR-type posts about Webflow. Lots of "Webflow experts" but few real companies that are willing to build large sites with it.
Fireworks was the first tool that allowed you to draw, but maintain the constraints (and portability) of HTML and CSS as it came in to prominence.
The closest thing I have had to that feeling again was when a friend of mine did some design for me and shared it in Figma. What I thought were bitmaps were vectors!! I had so much fun bringing that in to my site (which I ended up doing in Webflow, because apparently I haven't kept up with the times enough to hand code reasonably quickly).
I've used the latest and greatest Adobe products, they definitively do not have this feeling. There is really no delight to be found. I know they are incredibly powerful and near and dear to many people, but for the young and restless they are boring.
The parent comment is spot-on. Antitrust legislation needs to be invoked to prevent this acquisition from happening.
The funding environment for startups would be a lot worse if investors thought that the only way they could recoup their investments is through exits. Look how few of YC companies actually go public.
Even companies that do go public are often just surviving long enough to hopefully get acquired.
The founders at Figma chose to be acquired. It’s their product and their company.
In this Figma acquisition, Figma is the main prize. They're not just going to leave Figma to languish, no more than they left Flash to languish. Eventually Flash did die, yes, but that was more Apple crushing it than a direct decision of Adobe.
If Flash was in capable hands, it would have become a major player in the game development space, which is where most of its strengths were.
(This is like Microsoft acquiring Github due to GitHub network effect)
While I too loved Fireworks and Dreamweaver, neither one had the network effect that Figma does (granted, SaaS software in the late 90s / early 00s was rare).
Even if Fireworks were to have flourished while at Adobe, it's not entirely clear they would have successful made both the pivot to web AND also gained the network effect that Figma has created.
One could also make the argument that it's an acqui-hire.
If one wanted to build a real Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere, etc. for the web, you'd want the Figma team. Nobody else understands how to build desktop-like experiences using the latest web technologies (Wasm, etc.) better.
I honestly haven't observed this to be the case with subscription software. They will continue making cash because people want to continue to use it. Meanwhile, if it were individual sales, they would actually have to maintain and improve it to get people to buy new versions.
Bad news for Figma.
Figma is a multiplayer layout tool, which can be used for web, print, or anything else. The main use cases for enterprise are a) it's web-accessible, and b) the realtime collaboration/revision/commenting tools.
The smart thing would be to just sunset Adobe XD and replace it with Adobe Figma.
Later, I did the vast majority of the visuals I used throughout my PhD in Fireworks CS6, long after it had been abandoned by Adobe. It was fast, faster than Photoshop or Illustrator is today. The shape libraries meant that doing diagrams and illustrations was a breeze - these days I do most of that in Keynote/Powerpoint, with much poorer bitmap editing support. Photoshop and Illustrator are simply too big and slow for quick-and-dirty editing tasks.
The thing that ultimately killed Fireworks for me was that it crashed more frequently every time I updated macOS, to the point where it simply would no longer launch. For a couple of years I maintained a set of binary patches to Fireworks CS6 to work around startup crashes and such, but that ultimately got to be too time-consuming to keep up with.
I don't think I've ever been as productive in any other image editing software. Photopea gets surprisingly close for me - despite being a Photoshop clone, it's both faster (just a web app!) and has a few of the nice features I miss from Fireworks.
In recent years, Adobe's approach to mega-sized acquisitions has been to put the newly acquired company's management in charge of the relevant business unit, not the other way around. The users who should be worried by the news are those who love Adobe xD vs Figma (I assume there must be some). If the post-acquisition integration goes well, I'd estimate the chances at better than 50% that in a couple years former Figma management end up running Adobe's creative professional segment entirely (ie PS, AI, etc).
(note: none of this means you personally will prefer whatever the impact of that may be in any particular product.)
That and it being very fast and effective for Web design (miles ahead of Photoshop at the time).
Well, that product was also theirs at that point, so it wouldn't be threatening anything (profits of its sales would go to them anyway).
If you people people would stop buying Photoshop and Illustrator, then no, Fireworks was meant for other use case entirely (web mostly), and it had 1/10 the capabilities of Photoshop and Illustrator pertaining to their own domains (yes, many use just 10% of a program, but many must-have features included in that 10% differ from person to person, so Fireworks having that 10% wouldn't be enough).
I ask because Adobe have been sitting on their Substance aqusition without making part of the Creative Cloud Suite.
Hopefully they may leave it alone.
