When I first heard the news that Adobe was purchasing online softwae Figma for no less than $20 billion, I thought this had to signal something new, kind of the end of an era, the era of on-premise (Adobe) software. And this was extremely bad news for other on-premise software companies.

But now that I have reviewed what Figma actually is, little more than a SVG scene editor, I have to wonder if some people out there are nuts. Indeed, web browsers have been supporting the rendering of SVG shapes for some time. And writing an online program that allows to add such shape in a canvas, and move its pixels, is just nothing to write much about. Besides the fact that SVG specs has a number of metrics, and Figma uses the worst metrics for such things, i.e. pixels, which means someone builds scenes that are not scalable across canvas sizes, i.e. target devices.

Wake me up when you can actually design user interfaces using an online tool. Figma (or Sketch) is none of that. Using a paper is both more comfortable and more productive, assuming that those sheets don't have to be shared with a lot of people. Figma (or Sketch) seems good at sharing those SVG scenes, at least better than sheet of papers, but let's call it what it is then. Not a UI design tool, just a sheet sharing tool. This is not worth $20 billion by any stretch of the imagination.