> Does it really matter if Figma was bought vs IPO? No of course not.
I think it matters. Look what happened when Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. The innovative product (Fireworks) that brought many (but not all) many of the innovations that would later come in Sketch and then Figma was left to slowly die because it competed with their flagship product (Photoshop). That delayed innovation in that market segment by around a decade.
Fireworks was great when I was a young teen and first learning the difference vector graphics could make.
Let’s not forget our beloved Flash, who knows how Macromedia would have handled it and maybe it wouldn’t have had to be removed from browsers under Adobe’s watch due to security issues.
I almost never see anyone mention Macromedia in relation to Flash these days, almost as if history has rewritten it to an Adobe thing.
> who knows how Macromedia would have handled it and maybe it wouldn’t have had to be removed from browsers under Adobe’s watch due to security issues.
Flash always was a dumpsterfire, and so were virtually all browser plugins using native code. There's a reason NPAPI was deprecated eventually.
The exception of course is ActiveX. There was no way to ever make that shitshow even reasonably safe, simply given how its execution model was.
It was kind of fun watching adult men say the word "ActiveX" out loud and in earnest though. DCOM with Apartment Threading just didn't have that same "Power Rangers Bad Guy" energy.
From a security perspective, ActiveX is a relic from days long past, when people could be reasonably trusted - an assumption that broke around the early '00s when "dialer" malware offered a first way to extract funds from victims.
From a developer perspective, I'm still sad that it went away. The old COM/OLE/ActiveX ecosystem was flexible to a degree nothing has never ever been since.