"Faster in the cloud
With Figma, your files just live on the Web. No more version mixups. No more cloud syncing. No more transferring files between your work and personal computers."
In other words, your data doesn't belong to you. No service, no data.
And this is why Adobe is paying so much for Figma: they’ve built the kind of closed data garden that Adobe wants to own across its whole product range.
Every year it becomes a bit harder to find the “default to local file system” setting in Photoshop (it’s off on a fresh install). Every year the UI for Creative Cloud files becomes a bit bigger. Eventually access to local files is probably going to be locked behind an administrator password with scary warning dialogs.
You can't even disable it completely, at best in e.g. Lightroom you can pause the cloud sync and it may get re-enabled without your consent. You will only notice that your upload bandwidth is suddenly saturated and if you have a monitoring tool installed, are you able to determine who is the culprit. It once chewed through my meager monthly quota overnight when I installed it on a laptop prior to going to a friend's house who didn't have internet while tethered to my phone. I was very unhappy about that "feature" to say the least.
If you've ever tried collaborating on design files, the file only living on the web is a feature. No merge conflicts or other issues. No sending the same file back and forth with new revisions.
Abstract for Sketch is nice, but having to help a designer resolve merge conflicts is annoying.
So one way corporations try to solve that is using groupware/collaboration software such as MS Sharepoint. Users are then supposed to "check out" the xlsx file and then check it back into the "document library". But the process is so cumbersome that very few companies and users have 100% discipline to do that. This also doesn't let multiple users edit at the same time.
The new generation of cloud-first-collaboration-as-1st-class-UI services (like Figma) don't have the multiple conflicting docx/xlsx issue because sharing the work is the baseline normal usage. Figma doesn't try to bolt on the collaboration behavior to 30-year old software and file formats like MS Office.
You're thinking in terms of badly designed technologies you are familiar with.
I'm talking just about a solution to the problem at hand:
Instead of storing files on servers controlled by a 3rd party company (and calling it "the cloud"), you store the files on servers that you control (and don't call it the cloud).
I didn't say anything about share point or how the files are to be stored.
This can be a feature builtin to figma or any application that is "cloud native": all you need to configure is the server address.
>I'm talking just about a solution to the problem at hand:
>Instead of storing files on servers controlled by a 3rd party company (and calling it "the cloud"), you store the files on servers that you control (and don't call it the cloud).
I guess I can't tell if you're talking hypothetically or giving a realistic alternative that designers can use today.
Is there a "local corporate web collaboration" similar in features to Figma that designers can use today? The comment I replied to, you said "this _is_ solvable" (present tense) instead of "this _can potentially be_ solvable" (hypothetical future UI collab software installed on internal corporate server that doesn't exist yet).
That's why my interpretation of a present tense solution is something like Adobe XD files (".xd") saved on a shared corporate server... which reproduces the the chaos of multiple xlsx/docx files.
EDIT reply to: >I'm talking about a solution that the creators of Figma could have engineered.
I think you're losing track of your advice in this subthread because that statement about Figma really has nothing to do with the previous recommendation you made: >If you're a company, this is solvable by making the files live in a server the company controls.
While I somewhat agree, in my experience in practice the “just run it locally” approach results in software I need to use a clumsy and slow VPN to access, runs on servers that are either wildly over or underpowered, is constantly going down for maintenance, and never gets updated beyond essential security patches. The org I work for recently switched from on-prem Jira to cloud Jira, and the cloud version is a breath of fresh air by comparison.
I’m sure some IT departments are better at this than others, but in my experience most of them aren’t great at it.
Why not build a reverse cloud solution? Files are worked on right in the cloud, and then afterwards automatically synced to a local folder on one or more computers? This way if the cloud implodes, you at least have several (nearly) up to date copies of your work.
Axure, another design and prototyping tool, uses a Subversion-style model, where you have both a cloud and local copy. You pull down the initial file, save it locally, then check out individual pages or components to work on before pushing them back up.
It means you have to manually manage the commit state which is a bit of a pain, but it’s good because you still have the file and can work on it if you can’t access the cloud for whatever reason.
In other words, your data doesn't belong to you. No service, no data.
There is no cloud just other people's computer.