How Figma, which bet on collaborative product design, and Canva, which focuses on helping non-designers excel in marketing design, are succeeding against Adobe
Kevin / kwokchain : Tweets: @gavinsbaker , @jalajboy , and @sachinrekhi Tweets: Gavin Baker / @gavinsbaker : Exceptional essay from @kevinakwok Would add that technical debt compounds all of the “entropy” created by rapid changes in customer needs & anytime the abstraction layer changes, the deck gets reshuffled. Also learned what “Kolmogorov Complexity” is. https://kwokchain.com/... Arvind Jha / @jalajboy : cut out, and Wall Street investors uncomfortable with turning a consistent business into a high risk venture" Its not that everyone was asleep at the wheel. Blockbuster didn't know how to protect the young initiatives from mature ones. https://kwokchain.com/... Sachin Rekhi / @sachinrekhi : Fantastic essay from @kevinakwok on the idea of atomic concepts and how differing atomic concepts enable you to compete effectively against incumbents like Adobe. A worthwhile thought exercise to figure out your startups own atomic concepts. https://kwokchain.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Kevin Kwok's essay lands between two earlier data points in this coverage: his own deep dive on Figma's browser-based collaboration and plugin ecosystem, and Forbes' [[a:948715|profile of Canva growing from a Perth yearbook-design business into a profitable $3.2B business]]. Both argued the same thing from different angles — Adobe's suite was being attacked not head-on but by tools built for workflows Adobe treated as adjacent.
The essay's thesis was validated two years later when Adobe moved to buy Figma outright at 50x its reported $400M ARR, after its own competing product XD managed just $15M in annual revenue over seven years — a build-versus-buy verdict that raised questions about Adobe's M&A whack-a-mole strategy against free alternatives.
First-order effects
- Adobe faces a two-front attack it cannot answer internally: Figma owns collaborative product design where XD stalled, and Canva owns marketing design for non-designers who never needed Creative Cloud in the first place.
- Figma and Canva each convert Adobe's scale from an advantage into a liability — the suite's breadth is exactly what makes it too heavy for their target users.
Second-order effects
- Adobe is pushed from competing on product to competing on acquisitions, paying 50x ARR for Figma because building a credible cloud-era rival in-house already failed once with XD.
- Pricing pressure flows down-market: Canva's profitable model shows the non-designer segment monetizes without Adobe's subscription economics, capping how far Creative Cloud pricing can stretch.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, creative software consolidates around workflow-native platforms rather than suites — Gavin Baker's point that every change in the abstraction layer reshuffles the deck means incumbents' technical debt compounds faster than their distribution advantages.
- Adobe's whack-a-mole M&A posture becomes structural: as long as new abstraction layers keep spawning focused challengers, the incumbent's growth depends on buying what it can no longer build.
The trend: Creative software is unbundling along workflow lines, forcing Adobe to buy the collaborators-and-non-designers markets it failed to defend with XD.