Adobe's proposed $20 billion Figma acquisition became a landmark example of strategic urgency, peak software valuation, regulatory risk, and the cost of a transaction that never reached closing.
Adobe’s $3.4 billion Macromedia acquisition combined PDF, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and web-development tools into a broader creative-software platform.
Adobe refused an early $5 million acquisition offer, took a $2.5 million Apple investment plus a royalty advance, and used PostScript licensing to create the desktop-publishing software layer.