"Across waves of software cycles in every vertical we've seen dominant platforms that capture the vast majority of the value of a market over time. Workday, Salesforce, Hubspot, Adobe, Zoom, Google. The power law dictates that there will be one or a handful of winners as data, trust and recognition accrues. This has also so far been true of the design world. From professional print and graphic design in Adobe suite to interface design first in Sketch and then Figma."
"Those same tools are getting much better at design. Far from perfect, as any designer who's actually built on vibe coded apps will tell you. But much, much better. And the live prototypes add fidelity in a way static mocks can't As engineers speed up the bottleneck in any given product team is being felt further up the stack in the design team."
"Most companies designing interfaces at scale use Figma now, with a reported 90% market share (2023). Yet their stock is currently 81% down since IPO, and the market for new design tools is experiencing somewhat of a cambrian explosion. The whale is wounded and there's sharks in the water. But why? Figma has its own issues. Since the failed sale to Adobe the product strategy has felt rudderless, panicky."
Dominant software platforms tend to capture the majority of market value over time, and design tools followed that path with Figma attaining roughly 90% market share. Figma's stock has dropped sharply and product strategy weakened after the failed Adobe sale, creating uncertainty. Emerging AI coding and design tools enable engineers and technical designers to create interfaces with code and produce live prototypes that increase fidelity beyond static mocks. Faster engineering shifts bottlenecks into design teams, making long isolated design cycles unacceptable. Figma's legacy tech stack and large enterprise base create inertia, opening opportunities for new or distributed platforms.
Read at Jonnyburch
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