Adobe Tried to Buy Figma for $20B. Regulators Said No. Design Won.

Adobe Tried to Buy Figma for $20B. Regulators Said No.

The blocked acquisition that preserved competition in design software, and what it means for the industry

In September 2022, Adobe announced it would acquire Figma for $20 billion, the largest acquisition in the history of design software. It was a deal that would have brought together the dominant force in creative software with the tool that had become the default for product and interface design. For many in the industry, it felt like the end of an era.

Eighteen months later, in December 2023, the deal was dead.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority and the European Commission had raised concerns that the acquisition would eliminate competition across product design, image editing, and illustration software markets. Adobe refused to offer the remedies regulators required. The companies walked away. Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion termination fee. The cost of trying.

Why Regulators Said No

The regulatory logic was straightforward, even if the outcome was unusual. Adobe already dominated the creative software market with Photoshop, Illustrator, and the broader Creative Cloud suite. Figma had emerged as the primary competitor in the product design space, the tool that teams at Uber, Coinbase, Zoom, and thousands of other companies used to design their products.

Allowing Adobe to acquire Figma would have eliminated that competition. Regulators worried it would lead to higher prices, reduced innovation, and less choice for designers. Adobe's refusal to divest either Figma Design or its own competing products, Photoshop or Illustrator, left regulators with no path to approval.

The decision was significant not just for design software but as a signal about how regulators were thinking about Big Tech acquisitions more broadly. The era of "acquire your way to dominance" was facing genuine pushback.

What Happened to Figma

After the deal collapsed, Figma reset its internal valuation to $10 billion, half the acquisition price. Approximately 52 employees, roughly 4% of the company, accepted severance packages and left. The employees who had expected substantial windfalls from the acquisition were disappointed.

But Figma itself emerged from the experience with something valuable: independence. The company continued developing its product, expanding into software development tools, and building out its AI-powered features. The acquisition attempt had, in a strange way, validated Figma's strategic importance. It was important enough that Adobe had been willing to pay $20 billion for it.

The Design Industry's Response

For designers, the blocked acquisition was largely good news. Figma's independence meant continued competition, continued innovation, and continued pricing pressure on Adobe. The concern had always been that an Adobe-owned Figma would be absorbed into Creative Cloud, potentially bundled in ways that reduced its accessibility or had its development priorities shifted toward Adobe's existing roadmap.

Instead, Figma remains a standalone product with its own strategic direction. And Adobe, having failed to acquire its primary competitor, has been forced to compete. It's now investing in its own collaborative design tools and accelerating the development of Adobe Firefly, its generative AI platform.

The Figma Effect on Design Culture

Beyond the business story, the Figma saga illuminated something important about how design tools shape design culture. Figma had done something remarkable: it had made design collaborative in a way that previous tools hadn't. The ability to work in real-time with multiple contributors, to share designs as URLs, to build component libraries that entire teams could access: these weren't just features, they were a different philosophy about how design should work.

That philosophy survived the acquisition attempt. And the design industry is better for it.

Spotify Wrapped Is 10. It's Still the Best Marketing Campaign Alive.

A decade of personalised year-in-review, and why it keeps working

Every December, something unusual happens. Millions of people voluntarily open an app to receive a data report about their own listening habits and then share that report with their friends, family, and followers. They post it. They compare it. They argue about it. They make memes about it.

This is Spotify Wrapped. And in 2024, it turned 10.

The Anatomy of a Cultural Moment

Wrapped works because it solves a problem that most marketing campaigns don't even try to address: it gives people something genuinely useful and personally meaningful, and then makes sharing that thing feel natural rather than promotional.

The personalisation is the foundation. Every Wrapped is different because every listener is different. Your top artist isn't my top artist. Your listening personality type isn't mine. The data is real, and the insight it provides, however trivial, is genuinely yours.

But personalisation alone doesn't explain the sharing behaviour. Lots of apps give you personalised data. Most of it stays private. Wrapped gets shared because it's also social. It creates a common reference point, everyone getting their Wrapped at the same time, while delivering individual results. The combination of shared experience and personal revelation is what drives the conversation.

The 2024 Campaign

For the 10th anniversary, Spotify leaned into fandom rather than just listening data. The 2024 Wrapped celebrated the devoted fans: the people who had been listening to Charli XCX before "Brat Summer" made her unavoidable, the Swifties who had been there from the beginning.

Taylor Swift was the most-streamed artist globally with 26.6 billion streams. Charli XCX's cultural dominance was reflected in the data. The campaign acknowledged these moments not just as listening statistics but as cultural participation. You weren't just a listener, you were part of something.

This is the evolution of Wrapped over a decade: from a data visualisation to a cultural identity marker. Your Wrapped says something about who you are. That's a remarkable thing for a marketing campaign to achieve.

What Brands Can Learn From It

The lesson of Wrapped isn't "do personalised year-in-review campaigns." Most brands don't have the data infrastructure or the cultural relevance to pull that off. The lesson is more fundamental.

Wrapped works because it's genuinely useful to the people who receive it. It's not primarily a marketing tool. It's a product feature that happens to generate enormous marketing value. The marketing is a byproduct of the value, not the point.

Most brand marketing works the other way around: it starts with what the brand wants to say and tries to make that interesting to the audience. Wrapped starts with what the audience wants to know and makes the brand part of that discovery.

The question every brand should be asking is: what do we know about our customers that they'd actually want to know about themselves? The answer to that question is the foundation of marketing that people choose to engage with rather than endure.