Microsoft Employees Love Figma, and It's Testing the Company's Cozy Relationship With Adobe

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft and Adobe have been friendly bedfellows for decades. Microsoft's dominant PC operating system has been the gateway for Adobe to reach millions of business users with its design software. The companies' CEOs even attended the same high school in India, and both moved to the U.S. in the 1980s for graduate school in computer science. They share a common bond over the successful transition from desktop software to the cloud. But inside Microsoft, an emerging challenge to Adobe is catching fire and raising questions about the future of one of the tech industry's most intimate relationships.

Figma, a San Francisco-based startup that celebrated its 10th anniversary in August, is being used by tens of thousands of employees inside Microsoft and, for many, is at the heart of their daily work. The number of users has steadily increased in recent years, though neither company will say how many of them are editors with paid accounts. The cloud-based design software came in the door in 2016, when Microsoft acquired mobile app development platform Xamarin and brought in a 350-person team that, months after the deal closed, would become Figma power users. The product has since become so central to how Microsoft's designers do their jobs that Jon Friedman, corporate vice president of design and research, said Figma is "like air and water for us." It's also used by engineers, marketers and data scientists across Microsoft.

For Figma, getting traction inside big companies, particularly within Microsoft, has required going head-to-head with Adobe's competing XD program, and winning its fair share of deals. That doesn't mean the market has completely flipped, or that Adobe is being fully supplanted. "We're still heavy on Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and XD," Friedman said. Adobe and Microsoft have worked together for more than two decades. In addition to Adobe gaining ubiquity by distributing across Windows machines, the two companies have been syncing their products in desktop, cloud and mobile computing, with over 50 integrations listed on Microsoft's website. Penetrating that alliance has not always been smooth for Figma.

In 2016, Microsoft acquired Sunrise, a startup with a popular calendar app. The Sunrise team relied on Figma and continued to use it after the deal closed. Sunrise co-founder Jeremy Le Van said his employees were among the lucky ones at Microsoft. He said some Microsoft staffers weren't able to use Figma because of the business relationship with Adobe and were stuck using products such as Photoshop and XD. Despite executive resistance in certain departments, some designers snuck out of the Adobe ecosystem to use Figma anyway, said Le Van, who stayed on as a design director at Microsoft until 2018.

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