Comment by robenkleene
6 days ago
There are many types of work where large assets aren't important, e.g., illustration, 2D animation, CAD, 3D sculpting (I think? A lot of 3D work that doesn't need pre-rendered assets have really small file sizes), and as far as I know none of these have hugely popular web apps like Figma?
Also remote solutions like Jump Desktop (https://jumpdesktop.com) are pretty popular in the media editing world, so folks are choosing to edit remotely, they just aren't using web apps to do so.
So I still think the unique combination that Figma has is that unskilled folks are viewing, commenting, and editing on the document along with designers themselves, using the same tool. And that's facilitated by the tool itself being relatively simple. It's a common workflow that we see with the office suite software that I mentioned.
> There are many types of work where large assets aren't important, e.g., illustration, 2D animation, CAD, 3D sculpting (I think? A lot of 3D work that doesn't need pre-rendered assets have really small file sizes), and as far as I know none of these have hugely popular web apps like Figma?
Maybe just a matter of time? I'm not familiar with all these domains, but I'm sure there's vendor lock-in, proprietary file formats, integrations/automations, plugin ecosystems, and general popularity/momentum (plus maybe lack of full GPU and other hardware support?) for certain tools that make it hard to switch and slows down competition. It wasn't that long ago that spreadsheet and word processor software being local only was the norm either.
Most of those areas I listed already have web apps, they just aren't popular (I'd argue because there just isn't much need for them). I've written about how shockingly quickly adoption usually happens when market opportunity presents itself https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...
In this case, `asm.js`, which was the original the core technology that made any of this possible, was released in 2013, which is ancient in this day and age.
It's normally very fast from technology to creation of the initial product to wide-spread adoption (typically about five years from release of the first version, per my blog post). So more likely if this does happen, it will require another core technology breakthrough, e.g., `asm.js` (now WebAssembly) isn't enough to facilitate it on its own.