Adobe announced a plan to buy Figma for $20 billion in September 2022. Almost every designer I knew used Figma, so the strategic reason looked obvious: Figma made collaboration feel native while much of Adobe’s software still felt like a file handed between people. TechCrunch covered the proposed deal.
The price looked like a defensive premium. I wanted to know whether Adobe would let Figma keep the workflow that made it valuable, rather than fold it into another subscription bundle. The deal later collapsed under regulatory pressure. That outcome doesn’t make the product threat Adobe saw in 2022 any smaller.