I think this is net-negative for consumers, in a pretty significant way. If the most incentivised lifecycle is to seek VC investment to make a non-susitainable product in the hope of being acquired and swallowed into The Borg and shut down, we still end up with less good products.

- Product life-cycles become short, consumers are weary of anything new. How many times have you seen product launches here on HN where the top comments are worrying about sustainability? That either there will be a rug-pull for consumers in the future, or they just plan to be acquired and shut down.

- Larger companies continue to have no incentive to actually improve their product and compete with others if they just purchase everything in the market.

I think it's fine if no one starts vampiric companies that dump free services on the public destroying the perceived value of software for the purpose of a fast unicorn exit. Of course, these companies always look to advertising for funding so they are obtrusive.

Unless you are thinking of real companies that would be affected by this ban? Retail stores don't care about this ban. Companies that sell real products wouldn't care. If they sell real software services and plan to turn a positive profit rather than exit this wouldn't impact anyone other than unicorn chasers, which are bad for everyone.

This is so far from outlawing. And we are soooooo far from having a shortage of tech startups.

Yeah, I get it, some founders start their startup motivated by a potential MA. And this is great for them.

However, as a customer, I absolutely hate this. Instead of finding a way to actually make the product/service self-sustainable, they just increase the number of (usually) free users. But once they sell, normally the new owner either shuts the service down or turns it into crap.

This isn't that though. This is a company with a clear monopoly trying to hoover up smaller competition to reduce competition. We shouldn't incentivise this behaviour, on either end.

If this is the liquidity event that Figma were betting on from day 1 that's their mistake for not foreseeing regulators being unhappy about it.

I'm fine with some other company buying-up Figma, just not Adobe. Microsoft could buy them (and hopefully not repeat what happened to Expression Blend) - or maybe Alludo could resurrect the Corel brand and launch Figma under that title?

I doubt that is true.

Let's say you're pitching your startup to a potential investor. Would you pitch it as "the next Adobe" or "something Adobe might want to buy"? Which one would you be more likely to invest in?

Just like when there WERE no megacorps to buy smaller companies and we were left with none at all.

I think it's the opposite. Because many companies start with the dream of an exit with a high price tag, and what they end up developing is a missing feature from a bigger software suite, which is already enshittified by a big software house to the core.

Instead, smaller companies can start and slowly get bigger while getting bigger. Affinity suite is a great example. While their photo tool is not my cup of tea, designer is great, IMHO.

Tech acquisitions haven't been outlawed. And this particular situation is applicable to perhaps 2 or 3 a year (all of which are multi-billion dollar values).

I doubt very much if this will stop funding of new companies except perhaps at the level of Uber/WeWork.

"Oh no!, this hampers my ability to harm industry competition and hurt society, this isn't fair!"

How about you go and fling yourself in front of a bus

Acquisitions also reduce competition. If competition only exists to be acquired you are only funding an ever-growing oligopoly, the more acquisitions into the oligopoly the more power they have, diminishing the number of available markets to compete in (since one of the oligopolistic companies will certainly have more capital than a newcomer).

Anti-trust is not a new thing, it's even considered a foundational aspect of competitive capitalism by some thinkers...

If your only goal in founding a company is to get acquired, you haven't made a company; you've made a product, and probably not a profitable one.

We should be encouraging way more medium-sized companies, that operate sustainable business models, make money for their founders and employees, and aren't subsidized by cheap money. I think if startups actually had to sustain themselves we'd see a lot less grift and waste in VC.

It’s great to see the FTC is looking into this. Every time I’ve had to deal with Adobe subscriptions it always feels like they put you through some maze which usually ends in being forced to pay a cancellation fee or losing in some other way. I recently lost 160 asset tokens I had saved up in Adobe Stock after canceling my subscription. I’m sure it mentions this in the fine print somewhere but the only reason I had saved that many tokens up was because I couldn’t cancel without paying the fee. So they trapped me, took my money and then took back the tokens I only paid for because they locked me in with a cancellation fee in the first place. At the very least I should be able to keep the asset tokens. The whole thing seemed absolutely ridiculous to me.

Unless you have clear proof of that (saved emails...) and own the company, or you were acting as third party (consultant,...) I would advise not making those accusation in a public place without consulting with their legal representative. It is simply not in your personal interest, and if someone starts an inquiry into this and said company doesn't want to help much you might find yourself in the middle of two legal giants in need of a scapegoat.

Most effective thing to do relative to your time is probably participating in relevant FTC requests for public comments: https://www.ftc.gov/policy/public-comments

I looked around, and I can't find any names to pin to the investigation. There's a very low-tech way to find public staff contact information, but you need a name. I don't even have a telephone number for what is probably the correct group (Division of Financial Practices), just their DC mailing address. Regardless, I can tell you that right now that Washington offices are empty. Skeleton crews only. Check back in after the first of the year.

> Adobe tried to bribe me personally to not fight their subscription cancellation policies for the company I was representing.

Is that even legal?

Looking at your profile, it says you work for Google, so I assume this is in the context of google? You guys probably have the internal legal resources to advice you. If it was not in that context, ChatGPT at least suggest that this is first of all a federal fucking crime (Domestic Bribery Act seems to apply here) and you can contact the Department of Justice, the FBI or report it to the SEC which offers a whistleblower program.

Please consider your next steps carefully though and contact legal counsel basically immediately since you just publicly accused adobe representatives of a federal crime! Frankly, I would ask Dan to remove your comment ASAP.

Fun Fact: The SEC offers financial incentives to people who report those violations!

>Photoshop's generative AI is substantially worse than what I can get from models on Tensorart/CivitAI + an upscaler.

But with Photoshops, I can generate things to be seamlessly placed into my existing scene, with it understanding things like placing the wheels of the car it just inserted on the ground, with a shadow underneath and such, again seamlessly integrated with my existing image.

It's very much not just about generating an entirely new AI image.

Can I do that with Tensorart/CivitAI?

Worse or not, a meaningful majority of users will never even understand the alternate workflow you just described.

Maybe they are hampered by "doing the right thing" and only training on Adobe Stock content?

Firefly (Adobe's generative AI) works well if you're already stuck in a Photoshop-heavy workflow, for quick successive generations right in the canvas if you're editing or extending an existing image. Better than Stable Diffusion Photoshop plugins I've tried.

I think what you mean to say is Stable Diffusion. CivitAI is primarily a host for SD models to download and run locally.

I couldn't care less about AI in Photoshop but I'd love AI in Illustrator to generate vector stuff.

Adobe's vision is fully supporting the content lifecycle, not only the creative aspect. In this sense, Figma made far more sense for Experience Cloud rather than what it gives to Creative Cloud.

Also that their cancellation window has limits on both sides - I told them more than six months I advance to cancel my renewal and the refused and toll me to call up again in a particular 30 day period close to the expiry date...

Is not paying an option? Ran into this issue with a large software provider once but they had some actual account management negligence / weren't responsive so we used that to hang our hat on not paying and eventually they let it go.

Many states are cracking down on these practices and no longer consider “sorry you forgot to cancel” as a legal agreement binding you to a renewal. Common sense says you should have to consciously renew vs accidentally doing so via some bogus contract clause.

Of course if you’re relying on such gotchas to keep subscription numbers up you’ve already failed and are just on a slow march to irrelevance while leaving pain and destruction in your wake.

One of the key functions of procurement: Checking for automatic renewal clauses in contracts and removing them when found. This is a red flag in many companies.

Have you tried not paying?

This genuinely made me laugh thank you. But no, they're not refreshingly "willing to part ways", just that their extensive legal teams assessed every possible angle to force this through and the big chairs made a call that proceeding in the face of such harsh opposition was going to be too costly.

They themselves said they spent 15 months trying to manipulate the system and are only doing this because they failed, let's not be naive about them doing this out of the goodness of their hearts lol

Maybe they failed to find a way round the rules? That seems more likely than a spontaneous desire to "do the right thing".

It is refreshing that they weren't able to get away with it, anyway.

They were trying to manipulate the system, just failed at that

Once upon a time, digital product design happened in Photoshop and Illustrator. Then competitors like Sketch and Figma came out with a better product. This made Adobe create XD to compete, but it was unable to make a good product so instead they tried to purcahse their competition instead of making something better.

9 months after Adobe announced it was to purchase Figma (and 3 months before it hoped the deal would close), Adobe discontinued XD.

Yes, XD directly competes with Figma.

I'd bet they're hoping to just have an AI alternative by 2025

I recommend using virtual credit cards for subscriptions. I just cancel the card if the account cancellation process is hostile in anyway.

>hitting you with the cancellation fee is against local law. (It's called de wet van Dam for the curious.)

I doubt this. The early termination fee is 50% what you were obligated to pay. If Adobe got rid of this than consumers would have to pay 100% of this. De wet van Dam is about the about not being able to cancel the subscription itself and not about being able to pay to get out of what you were suppsoed to pay for a subscription period.

Keep in mind there is a normal monthly subscription and when buying the product the three choices of monthly, annual billed monthly, and yearly billed up front are equally displayed.

If Adobe’s a buyer at $20b, they’re a buyer at $20b. I don’t see how selling stock to the public along the way increases fragmentation or prevents monopoly.

If you like what the FTC has been doing lately, be sure to vote in 11 months...