Don't forget the incredible lock in Figma has in the design space.
Figma just has to jack up the price in order to appease Wall Street quarterly.
Business wise it's got a great margin, but the avaricious nature of Wall St. will force them to enshittify the entire product, the engineering doesn't matter unless Wall St. is satisfied.
I’m in a monthly meetup with designers (not randos, these are typically people who are known in the industry), and half the time is spent shitting on Figma. It’s not necessarily the quality of their design product, it’s the business model and their general focus as a company.
There are several things designers need that Figma has dragged their feet on for years, and when they do release them, they’re usually behind the enterprise paywall. Or they don’t release them at all, instead opting to build some horizontal product like Slides because their investors want a bigger TAM.
Figma has the power of the network effect at present, but you can only charge people to use variables for so long before they look for an alternative.
I'm curious what the missing features are in Figma from a designers perspective. You've mentioned the paywalled variables, what else? (I haven't been a product engineer in years, and have barely touched Figma in the last ~5 years)
- Clunky component and variable system; inadequate for more complex stuff with lots of parameters.
- Can't set connectors on Design files (used for documenting the navigation flow between different pages of an app).
- You can set connectors on FigJam files, but if you want to bring your components from Design files then you can't keep the instances synchronised to the component definition. And you can't attach the connector endpoint to some element inside the Design component. It's essentially just an image export of the Design component.
- Prototyping is very clunky and trying to build a flow that has elements reacting to interactions on other distinct elements is either variable hell or downright impossible.
Those are just off the top of my mind. I'm always finding threads from 5 years ago on their community forums with loads of people on the same boat and no activity from Figma side.
So now that Figma will be owned by Wall Street, it will only get considerably worse from here. It is now time consider and find and fund open source alternatives.
I know of excalidraw and perhaps penpot are there anymore?
And how would that happen? They already have the product, which can be sold in huge numbers without really needing to scale operations. Are you suggesting they need cash to rewrite or improve the product?
At my company we use Miro a ton. It doesn't have the design tools, just the white boarding and diagramming, so its Figma counterpart is FigJam. But the realtime collaboration features are just as good, and sometimes better. They have a decent desktop Electron app that wraps it, too.
Yeah, if you want to pump oil, you better also build your own railways to distribute it, because you won't like what Standard Oil will charge you for their trains.
>Yeah, if you want to pump oil, you better also build your own railways to distribute it
You're being facetious, but OP is right. For software platforms, this has been a constant. It happened with Twitter, Facebook, Google (Search/Ads, Maps, Chat), Reddit, LinkedIn - basically ever major software platform started off with relatively open APIs that were then closed-off as it gained critical mass and focused on monetization.
I'm not being facetious, I'm pointing out a real problem - the market fraction accessible to a new business, that isn't reliant on the good will of some giant incumbent, is shrinking. This time it's Discord, another time it's Google ads/search blacklist, or Microsoft flagging your website or program as malicious, or Facebook shadowbanning you (or charging to show your posts even to people who explicitly followed you [1]), or Walmart extorting you for shelf space access, VISA and PayPal rejecting you..
If your move is to simply retreat, and give up all this ground, what market is left for you? People who get their news and ads by paper mail, shop only at tiny independent stores, paying in cash? How many businesses can survive with ~5% (a generous estimate of the described market's relative size) of their current traffic?
And it's bigger than software. This is just vertical integration; both your suppliers and your customers will ask if they can replace you. As they should. If your only value is as a middleman that your upstream supplier can easily replace... well, that's not a lot of value.
Unless you're prepared for the business to last an unknown limited amount of time.
Pretty much every business is built on shaky foundations. If you never built business on shaky foundations, you'd never do anything at all. You needed an IBM-compatible PC to use Windows! You need a web browser to use Hacker News. Y Combinator is only meaningful as long as dollars are worth something.
If you make a business that runs on IBM PCs, make a few billion dollars, then 10 years later IBM rugpulls the PC line and sues everyone who copied it... was there really a "lesson" that needed "learning" or did you simply succeed at business and make a few billion dollars?
>I’m sure Uber and DoorDash and Lyft and Tinder and Instagram and WhatsApp are regretting the billions and billions they made doing this.
I'm not sure which platforms those companies built their businesses on .. are you equating build an app on iOS or Android with building an app that relies on, say, Facebook APIs and only works on Facebook?
They're distributed through the stores, but not built on top of them, as is evidenced by the fact that you can distribute the same app on both platforms.
Android also supports third party stores/standalone installers and iOS is fighting an ongoing legal battle due to its lack of a permanent equivalent.
These companies charge money for their services and have competitors. AWS’ entire business models is providing developer services, and if I don’t like their offerings I can go elsewhere.
Discord, Twitter, Reddit, etc. that have become hostile to third parties have free APIs to reel in developers to make their platform more attractive to users, and once they’ve reached critical mass, they turn around and fuck over those developers. This is because their primary business model is serving their users, and developers eventually “get in the way”.
So the person you’re replying to should add an addendum: never build your app/business on top of third parties IF their primary business models aren’t providing services to developers.
The problem with building everything without dependencies on other peoples' platforms is that it's a lot of work to build your own chip fabrication machines when you just wanted to sell chat bots.
Chat bots on your own hosted platform which has no users isn't something people will want to buy. I mean, some people will want to buy it for click to chat on their websites or something. But if there's a market for chat bots in general spaces, you have to address that market where people are chatting, which is Discord, apparently.
I would love to tell people about linux for their desktops, but the main issue I have with it is the fact that people who are interested in it ask me one question regarding Linux distributions:
“Which one?”
This is pretty much the cause of a 90% drop off of interest in Linux on the desktop.
I could say use Ubuntu (and I do) to some of the people who I’m close with that are interested in Linux, but they discover Lubuntu, or Linux Mint and Debian, then they get easily confused and give up.
And that is not even getting into the updates and the packaging and heaven forbid anything breaks.
There aren't that many to ponder over the idea of recommending someone for a daily use. For beginners, Fedora is the perfect choice. For people with programming background, Arch. Ubuntu was sane sometime ago, not anymore because of the bloat it ships by default
Last time I tried another round of "let's install the most recent versions of popular distros on random laptops I have", Fedora was the most finicky about hardware. As in literally wouldn't even boot into live CD on one of said laptops, and had troubles with graphics on others.
The thing that worked every time? For the past decade or so, it had consistently been Linux Mint for me.
I think the safest way is to stay on a LTS as long as possible. Then, when the time comes to upgrade, get a new drive, install new LTS and then transfer data.
I hear Data Annotation is hiring, and man there are great jobs over at the stop n shop , the ai self checkouts need humans to help fix them , and woah woah woah don't forget we can always become an OF performer, or an Influencer .
There are no jobs, and AI will be slashing the white collar jobs we already have (70% of the economy). That puts the lower caste unable to feed themselves which always results in national instability usually accompanied by the weakness being revealed both domestic and abroad. Its the same with all empires.
Quote from Max Tegmark book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: “In his 2007 book Farewell to Alms, the Scottish-
American economist Gregory Clark points out that we can learn a thing or two
about our future job prospects by comparing notes with our equine friends.
Imagine two horses looking at an early automobile in the year 1900 and
pondering their future.
“I’m worried about technological unemployment.”
“Neigh, neigh, don’t be a Luddite: our ancestors said the same thing when steam engines took our industry jobs and trains took our jobs pulling stage coaches. But we have more jobs than ever today, and they’re better too: I’d much rather pull a light carriage through town than spend all day walking in circles to power a stupid mine-shaft pump.”
“But what if this internal combustion engine thing really takes off?”
“I’m sure there’ll be new new jobs for horses that we haven’t yet imagined. That’s what’s always happened before, like with the invention of the wheel and the plow.”
Alas, those not-yet-imagined new jobs for horses never arrived. No-longer-
needed horses were slaughtered and not replaced, causing the U.S. equine
population to collapse from about 26 million in 1915 to about 3 million in
1960. As mechanical muscles made horses redundant, will mechanical minds
do the same to humans?"...
Why not? When we all started our careers, whenever that may be, we looked at the world, chose a path, and learned the skills to walk it. Changing paths is the same process. Look at the world, then choose, learn, and walk. Hope is completely appropriate because it embraces that freedom to adapt to whatever changes may come.
>Changing paths is the same process. Look at the world, then choose, learn, and walk
Oh good so after spending $40k on my education to be a valuable software engineer and build things I get to spend another $40k on some sort of retraining to be one of the ever shrinking professionals who make any money in the US.
What a great outlook that is. I guess I'll put off owning anything for another 20 years? Maybe by the time I'm 50 the world will stop throwing "Once in a generation" events at me and I can have a hope of actually building a life with my family.
A lot of us are going to end up driving ubers and delivering takeout to the 5% of the US that makes all the money. They only have so many needs to serve so plenty will just starve.
AI gets the investment it does explicitly because their intention is to not pay humans anything ever again. There's not going to be new jobs to go to.
Sounds like a problem to be fixed, not a reality to feel hopelessly stuck in. Change is challenging in the current environment, to be sure, but that is all the more reason to find a way to take actions that will invoke change.
The problem is it will take years for the jobs to come back and a lot of people don't have years of liquidity.
If every developer is now 10x more productive, most businesses will be able to downsize until they start to be outcompeted by competitors who decided to build 10x better products rather than downsizing. The current norm is to keep the same productivity and shrink the workforce outside of small startups.
Well some companies decide to produce more as well, this happens in every industry, once they can get more efficient for the same price, they see it as an opportunity to produce more.
Where's the scarcity mindset in the OP's question? If it's as you say and some jobs disappear but others grow, the OP's question is even more relevant than ever.
Figma just has to jack up the price in order to appease Wall Street quarterly.
Business wise it's got a great margin, but the avaricious nature of Wall St. will force them to enshittify the entire product, the engineering doesn't matter unless Wall St. is satisfied.
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