Adobe can’t Photoshop out the fact its $20bn Figma deal is a naked land grab

theguardian.com:

The big tech news in a slow week was that the software giant Adobe is planning to pay the unconscionable sum of $20bn (£18bn)to acquire a small company called Figma. Why is this news? Well, first of all, there’s the price – way above any rational valuation of Figma. Second, there’s the question that we have finally learned to ask about tech mergers and acquisitions: is there a competition or antitrust issue here somewhere?

We’ll come to the price later, but at first sight, the answer to the second question would seem to be no: the two companies are not direct competitors. Adobe dominates the market in software for creating and publishing digital and printed material – graphics, photography, illustration, animation, multimedia/video, motion pictures and print. If you’ve ever used Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Reader or opened a pdf (portable document format), then you’ve used an Adobe product.

Figma, in contrast, is a smallish company that produces nifty web-based tools to enable teams working on user interface and user experience design projects to collaborate online. None of these tools is a serious competitor for the heavy-duty ones that Adobe markets and indeed the Figma designers have always been ecumenical about what people choose to use in their design work. If a customer uses Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, well, that’s fine by Figma. Its focus is on enabling teams of designers to create workflows – using brainstorms, whiteboards, sticky notes, etc – that suit them and their collective projects.

So why would Adobe want to lay out such a mountain of cash to acquire this minnow? The answer is that its leaders are thinking ahead and they see a strategic threat in the making. In the networked world, more and more work