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It's "really great at helping us collaborate at scale, and at global scale. 1 common tool we use to collaborate across all of the design community in the community and beyond," said Friedman, who's worked at Microsoft for over 18 years. "Figma's become, I would say, sort of the No. The product has since become so central to how Microsoft's designers do their jobs that Jon Friedman, corporate vice president of design and research, said Figma is "like air and water for us." It's also used by engineers, marketers and data scientists across Microsoft. The cloud-based design software came in the door in 2016, when Microsoft acquired mobile app development platform Xamarin and brought in a 350-person team that, months after the deal closed, would become Figma power users. The number of users has steadily increased in recent years, though neither company will say how many of them are editors with paid accounts. But inside Microsoft, an emerging challenge to Adobe is catching fire and raising questions about the future of one of the tech industry's most intimate relationships.įigma, a San Francisco-based startup that celebrated its 10th anniversary in August, is being used by tens of thousands of employees inside Microsoft and, for many, is at the heart of their daily work.
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