Figma

Look, I've been covering Silicon Valley's bullshit parade long enough to know when a company is trying to be everything to everyone, and Figma's homepage reads like a startup's fever dream of world domination. "Make anything possible, all in Figma"? Really? Can it make my mortgage payments? Can it make Elon Musk less insufferable? This is the kind of grandiose marketing speak that makes me want to throw my laptop out the window of whatever overpriced San Francisco coffee shop I'm working in today. The fact that Adobe tried to buy these guys for $20 billion tells you everything you need to know about how seriously the design industrial complex takes itself.

The actual product underneath all this chest-beating is admittedly solid—collaborative design tools that don't make you want to commit ritual suicide are rarer than ethical tech billionaires. But then they had to go and add AI everything, because apparently no website in 2024 is complete without promising that artificial intelligence will solve all your creative problems. "Drop a design file into Figma Make and chat with AI to quickly create a live, functional app"—sure, and I'm the Queen of England. I've seen what happens when designers think they can code and when AI thinks it can design, and it's usually a beautiful disaster that makes GeoCities look sophisticated.

The "Dev Mode" feature with its "specs, annotations, and code snippets" is actually useful for the eternal designer-developer handoff clusterfuck that has plagued teams since the dawn of web development. I'll give them credit where credit is due—this addresses a real problem that has caused more workplace arguments than who ate whose lunch from the office fridge. But wrapping it in corporate speak about "dedicated spaces" makes it sound like they're selling luxury condos instead of fixing a basic workflow issue. Just say "we made it easier for designers and developers to not hate each other."

What really grinds my gears is this whole "paint the north star for the whole company" testimonial bullshit. Nothing says "we focus-grouped our marketing copy to death" like invoking nautical metaphors for design software. And don't get me started on "shape our world"—it's a design tool, not the Manhattan Project. The template sharing and component system stuff is genuinely valuable for organizations that want visual consistency, but why dress it up like you're changing humanity's trajectory? Sometimes a rectangle with rounded corners is just a rectangle with rounded corners.

The Figma Sites addition feels like classic feature creep—now they want to be Webflow, Squarespace, and GitHub all rolled into one. I get the business logic of expanding your total addressable market, but there's something to be said for doing one thing exceptionally well instead of doing twelve things adequately. The collaborative design editor was their killer app, and everything else feels like they're afraid of being perceived as "just" a design tool. Newsflash: being the best at one essential thing is actually pretty fucking valuable, as their near-acquisition price demonstrated.