Figma threatens companies using "Dev Mode"

Summary

In this video, Theo discusses Figma's legal actions to protect their 'Dev Mode' trademark, which has sparked controversy and frustration within the tech community. He criticizes Figma's approach as overprotective and unnecessary, comparing it to historical trademark disputes. Theo delves into the implications of such actions on Figma's future, particularly in light of their upcoming IPO and the evolving AI-driven design landscape.

Highlights

• Figma's general counsel demands companies stop using 'Dev Mode'. ⚠️
• Theo reacts strongly to Figma's trademark actions, calling them absurd. 😤
• Discussion on Figma's struggle to expand beyond design into development. 🔄
• Theo explains the impact of AI tools on the design and development process. 🚀
• Comparison of Figma's situation to historical trademark battles, like that of Microsoft. 🏛️

Key Takeaways

• Figma is aggressively protecting its 'Dev Mode' trademark, causing backlash. ⚖️
• Theo criticizes Figma for acting irrationally and threatening smaller companies. 🥊
• AI tools are changing the design landscape, reducing reliance on traditional tools like Figma. 🤖
• Figma's actions could impact their public image and IPO success. 📉

Overview

Theo begins by highlighting a letter from Figma's general counsel, demanding that companies cease using the 'Dev Mode' trademark. He expresses his astonishment and disapproval, referring to this as one of the most ridiculous things he's witnessed in the tech industry. Theo shares his insights into the implications of such protective actions for Figma's brand image and its place in the market.

In the middle section, Theo goes on to discuss Figma's attempts to expand beyond its design roots into the development sector, mentioning tools like 'Dev Mode'. Despite these efforts, Theo believes Figma is failing to capture the developer market as intended. He explores the impact of AI on the design process, noting that AI tools have substantially altered the need for traditional design software.

Towards the end, Theo delves into the significance of trademark protection and how it relates to Figma's aggressive stance. He draws parallels to past trademark disputes, such as those involving Microsoft and Oracle. Theo considers Figma's current legal approach as desperate and suggests it may backfire, especially with an IPO on the horizon and a rapidly changing industry.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Background The chapter provides a formal request from Figma Incorporated's general counsel to cease the use of the 'Dev Mode' trademark by another party. The intent is to protect Figma's intellectual property rights, asserting that 'Dev Mode' is widely recognized and utilized globally in connection with their software. While the counsel appreciates the acknowledgment of the trademark's suitability for design and development tools, they emphasize the necessity for the other party to discontinue its use, rename their tool, and eliminate all references from their digital platforms.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Reaction to Figma's Trademark Enforcement The chapter discusses a backlash against Figma's trademark enforcement actions. There is disbelief and disapproval expressed about Figma's attempts to resolve trademark issues, particularly in relation to public-facing content and marketing materials. The reaction includes incredulity and a sense of absurdity regarding Figma's behavior, with mentions of strange practices allegedly carried out by Figma behind the scenes. The overall tone suggests a sense of frustration and skepticism towards Figma's trademark enforcement strategy.
• 01:30 - 02:00: The Issue with Figma's Trademark on 'Dev Mode' The chapter discusses the controversy surrounding Figma's trademark on the term 'Dev Mode'. It highlights the complexities and drama associated with trademark issues, and the potential legal implications for those who might infringe on them. The speaker humorously mentions needing financial protection in case of a lawsuit from Figma and introduces a sponsor segment, suggesting the video reaches a large audience of motivated engineers interested in technology and solutions.
• 02:00 - 02:30: Figma's Market Position and Challenges In this chapter, the discussion begins with a promotional note about sponsoring content related to engineering and AI, emphasizing the affordability and wide reach of such sponsorship. The speaker highlights positive feedback from viewers and other sponsors, encouraging brands to participate by showcasing past successes. The chapter likely transitions from this commercial note into the topic of Figma's market position, although the provided transcript does not cover details of Figma-specific content.
• 02:30 - 03:30: Figma's Attempts to Expand The chapter titled 'Figma's Attempts to Expand' discusses frustrations with Figma and clarifies any potential bias. The speaker assures that the coverage is not sponsored or influenced by previous collaborations. They express anger towards Figma's actions, emphasizing that their response would be the same for any company. The chapter also mentions feedback from someone named Cara about various trademarks, including 'schema'.
• 03:30 - 04:30: Impact of AI Development Tools on Design This chapter discusses the impact of AI development tools, particularly focusing on platforms like Config, Summit, and Forge. The narrative hints at some underlying issues or drama associated with these tools, particularly with a conference named Config. It mentions that unusual notices are being sent to some companies, indicating potential controversies or announcements to be revealed soon.
• 04:30 - 05:30: Comparison of Frontend Tools and their Use Cases This chapter discusses the registration of a trademark by Figma for 'dev mode'. The chapter begins by expressing surprise and curiosity about the use of trademarks by Figma. It highlights that while many trademarks mention 'dev mode', most are not active, unlike Figma's 'dev mode', which is officially registered and live. The registration process started in June and was completed by November of the previous year.
• 05:30 - 06:30: Figma's Response to AI Tools and their Strategic Position The chapter discusses Figma's trademark approval for 'dev mode' by the USPTO towards the end of last year, pointing out the peculiar situation given the prevalence of similar terms in the industry. The chapter suggests the need to clarify what Figma's 'dev mode' actually is, as opposed to generic development modes in other products, emphasizing the unique branding Figma aims to achieve.
• 06:30 - 07:30: Legal and Strategic Considerations for Trademarks This chapter discusses the evolution of design tools, focusing on Figma, a tool designed for building applications and web design. The speaker compares it to Excaladraw, a tool they are using. They mention the historical context of using software like Photoshop and Illustrator for creating application mocks, highlighting a shift in design practices.
• 07:30 - 09:00: Figma's Current Market Strategy and Challenges The chapter discusses the differences between editing images and app mockups, highlighting the challenges designers face when trying to fit their work into unsuitable software like Photoshop. The author reminisces about older software like Dreamweaver that was often used before more suitable options became available. They suggest that while Figma could address these challenges, there are still areas for improvement in its current market strategy.
• 09:00 - 10:00: Conclusion and Final Thoughts In the conclusion and final thoughts, the transcript recalls the earlier days of Macromedia Dreamweaver, before Adobe's expansion. The discussion reflects on Dreamweaver's position between Photoshop and heavy integrated development environments (IDEs) like Visual Studio. It was not as visually oriented as designers might prefer, leading to an increasing shift away from such tools.

Figma threatens companies using "Dev Mode" Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 dear lovable I am the general counsel at Figma Incorporated figma is the owner of the Dev Mode trademark which has been used extensively around the world in connection with our software platform we're flattered that you agree Dev Mode is the ideal name for a software tool that helps bridge the gap between design and development but as inventors and entrepreneurs we're sure you can understand that we need to protect our intellectual property we ask that you please cease all use of dev mode in connection with your products and services rename your tool and remove all references to our mark from your website
• 00:30 - 01:00 marketing materials and other public-f facing content we'd like to resolve this amicably so we can each get back to building great products for our customers please write back as soon as possible let me know you've agreed to this request i don't know how to start this one other than to say Figma what the are you joking this is one of the most absurd things I've ever seen i have heard weird stories of Figma doing strange things behind the scenes but this takes the cake there's a lot of
• 01:00 - 01:30 layers to this a lot of drama adjacent to this a lot of trademarks that are kind of that they currently have but I'm going to talk about this i need a little bit of cushion because if they sue me I need the money to protect myself so since Fig was not paying me we're going to do a quick word from today's sponsor and then dive right in wouldn't it be cool to see your brand in a video like this one being shown to hundreds of thousands of motivated engineers that want to learn more about cool technologies and solutions and maybe even buy them and pay for them at their company well I have some good news for you we are a little low on inventory
• 01:30 - 02:00 for the year but we do have a couple slots left you might be surprised how cheap it is to sponsor a video like this if you want to learn more and put your brand in front of thousands of experienced engineers especially those who are in the AI space you can take my word for it or you can read all these comments of people saying how great the ads are or you can read the commentary from our other sponsors about how useful these ads have been for them if you want to join the set of awesome brands that have been helping us make this content happen email us today at youtube3.gg and you can learn more at t3.gg/sponsorme i'm gonna be honest guys when I first saw this I assumed it was
• 02:00 - 02:30 fake quick bias check just because I think it's important lovable has sponsored videos before they are not sponsoring this i have not reached out or talked to them at all about this i think one employee is in my chat but this video has no relation to Lovable whatsoever i'm covering this cuz I'm pissed at Figma you can say I'm biased or whatever but if this was any other company I swear I would be just as angry this was my immediate public response that it seems like people enjoyed and we also see here from Cara some other fun trademarks they have including schema
• 02:30 - 03:00 and my personal favorite config as well as summit and forge the reason they have config for those who are wondering is because they have a conference named config and I happen to know some drama about this conference right now that I have not I'm not in a position to share yet but I have a feeling it will be public in the near future let's just say Lovable is not the only company that's getting some really weird notices from our friends
• 03:00 - 03:30 over at Figma this is absurd we need to talk a bit about what's going on here why they're doing this and why trademark works this way at all what the Figma let's get started so I was hunting through for trademarks funny enough there's a lot that mention dev mode or something like it somewhere most of these are nonsense and almost all of them are dead but dev mode it's live and registered from Figma if we look here we can see this trademark was registered in November last year it was originally applied for in June but only officially
• 03:30 - 04:00 became a trademark as approved by the USPTO end of last year which means that there are probably a lot of other companies calling things dev that is particularly strange because I am near certain that there's a lot of prior art here so first off we should probably ask WTF is dev mode and to be clear that we're not talking about dev mode from other products we're going to add the TM we want people to think we mean dev mode the generic when we actually mean dev mode the product if you're somehow
• 04:00 - 04:30 not familiar with Figma it is a design tool similar to what I'm doing over here with Excaladraw by the way I just said the name Excaladraw so if all the comments are what's the tool he's using to draw I'm going to go insane figma's originally focused almost entirely on helping designers with a canvas built for making applications back in my day when I was learning how to code and build websites you would mock up your websites in Photoshop a lot of tools like Photoshop Illustrator and other graphic software were being used to make mocks for apps and it was realized by a
• 04:30 - 05:00 handful of people that that's not ideal the strange differences between what editing an image looks like and what editing an app mockup looks like meant that there was a pretty rough spot there where you would either try and force design work into Photoshop or you'd give up and go to my old favorite software Dreamweaver i know the demographics for this channel a lot of you guys are old enough that you absolutely used the OG Dreamweaver so don't pretend you haven't i know you have don't lie pre-ea Adobe
• 05:00 - 05:30 Macromedia Dreamweaver before Adobe was so big they weren't allowed to acquire other companies the good old days oh Dreamweaver yeah so it kind of felt like there was a spectrum where on one side you had Photoshop and on the other side you had Visual Studio or other like really heavy idees we had a little spot here that was Dreamweaver but it still wasn't like anywhere near as visual as the average like designer would probably be looking for and as such more and more
• 05:30 - 06:00 people started to try and figure out what it looks like to build something in this range that is more apply and developer focused than Photoshop but more designheavy and not codeheavy unlike Dreamweaver and VSC this in between area started to get random products thrown into it we had Sketch we had Adobe XD i don't know which came out when and I'm too lazy to look it up i'm pretty sure Sketch was first but I could be wrong but eventually we had Figma figma's biggest differentiator at the
• 06:00 - 06:30 time is that it was browser based it also had a desktop app but it was browser based the desktop app was an Electron app but the real innovation of Figma was the crazy stuff they were doing to make it perform well in the browser so you could do a canvas-like experience like we're doing here but with app mockups that combined with how generous the free tier was meant Figma very quickly took over and by the time I joined Twitch in like 2017 Figma had fully taken over the company it was very clear sketch was a one-time purchase license but the commercial side of it
• 06:30 - 07:00 was a bit of a mess adobe XD was an Adobe product so nobody liked it anyways figma very quickly established itself as the winner of this app focused design tool it was a weird in between but it turns out that weird in between is worth a lot of money enough so that Adobe killed XD and tried to buy Figma got really far inked the deal and everything and then they got blocked by enough courts because of monopolistic practice that it didn't go through and now Figma since they literally can't be acquired
• 07:00 - 07:30 they're too big to be acquired effectively after that decision they now have to win in order for all of the value the company has to ever be realized if Figma's ever going to IPO so that its stock could become real money they have to win hard now previously they could have had a nice exit with an acquisition that's been ruled out by the courts so their only option is to make something so big so dominant such a strong force in the market that when they eventually go to sell stock it will
• 07:30 - 08:00 be worth a ton of money and they can make their money finally fun thing that just happened after I finished filming the video my editor will stuff this wherever it fits figma just filed for a US IPO last year they were valued at 12.5 billion after it closed a deal to allow employees and early investors to sell some of their stake to new and existing investors they are now filing for the IPO makes a lot of sense they need their brand to be perceived as as valuable as possible right now more than ever so they're going to be fighting tooth and nail to make sure any potential external risk to Figma's
• 08:00 - 08:30 visible path to success is destroyed because if anything even looks like it might get in their way of success the IPO goes much much worse we're talking about like a 5 to 10% difference being billions of dollars they're going to fight hard now more than ever and that's why we're going to start seeing this type of behavior more than we've ever seen it before so Figma's had just absurd levels of success but it needs to keep going if it's going to eventually turn that stock into money figma's original threats were Sketch and
• 08:30 - 09:00 Adobe XD but if we look at Figma's market share you'll understand that these things were not actual threats do you understand this is 2022 it's gotten worse since Sketch was doing well and Figma just comes in and wins the entire market entire market it's not close it's not like they have 30% or something figma won so the risk is no longer can Figma win the design world that's already over figma already won design that's not a
• 09:00 - 09:30 conversation we need to have anymore the numbers prove it figma's the winner of the design world so what's left i'll argue there are two things Figma has to do now thing one find other markets to maintain growth and two protect the design industry at all costs this is Figma's mission now figure out how we can grow by branching to adjacent places and protect the design industry so that we never lose that thing that we have a
• 09:30 - 10:00 huge percentage of so what does part one here look like ever heard of Fig Jam fig Jam was an attempt to do something similar to what I'm doing over there in Excal the goal of Fig Jam was a collaborative workspace whiteboard thing so that you could talk with your team about stuff this was a really interesting idea for a handful of reasons first off the people who run these types of things at companies tend to lean product not engineering if you're trying to talk about different things in your product and the direction
• 10:00 - 10:30 you want your team to be moving in that's probably going to be led by a product person and if you were to spectrum out like what different roles exist at a company I'd say product it's all the way here maybe if we go a bit further we'd say support it's all the way to the left there then you have product then you have design then you have front end dev then backend roughly this is meant to give a a rough idea of like how things relate back and forth and you could argue that each layer here the person in the middle is the bridge between the other two so when support
• 10:30 - 11:00 notices a bunch of customers having a problem they'll probably talk to product the product manager product team whoever product will figure out what issues exist on the support side and then talk with design about how to make the product clearer so these mistakes don't keep happening design will then work with product and edge in order to make sure those designs can actually be implemented and get them started in the implementation then front end will yell at backend to make sure their stuff actually works so they can actually ship it this is a real rough idea of how companies work what this means is that product is the place where a lot of the
• 11:00 - 11:30 conversations really start and because of that product tends to be the group that leads the meetings where we do big product planning quarterly management all the things that you would use a fancy whiteboard with a team for so if your product exclusively lives here and your goal is to expand like this it makes a lot of sense you would go left first because that's kind of your bread and butter and product tools are garbage product teams are the reason Jira still exists because they're tolerant of terrible things and Figma really wanted
• 11:30 - 12:00 to fix that with Fig Jam and they failed i think Fig Jam's actually dead if not it's close to it i think they formally announced that i might be wrong though what was was it not Fig Jam what's the Figma thing they shut down oh Google Jam Board that was Google's okay I misremembered google Jam Board is the one that is dead figma is still alive and well i don't know anybody using it but it does still exist thank you chat anyways Fig Jam was very clearly an attempt to expand Figma's presence
• 12:00 - 12:30 further towards product but that's not the only thing they did soon after not that soon after but relatively soon after they started expanding the other way and that's what dev mode is dev mode was an attempt by Figma to make it easier to take a mock in the Figma app and export code from it be it CSS HTML even theoretically React code and ideally if they get everything right you'd be able to throw it into your editor directly or use the Figma plugin inside of VS Code i have a whole video about this that I dropped right when it
• 12:30 - 13:00 was originally announced i tried playing with it didn't have a good time with it and moved on and honestly speaking I've been using Figma less and less i barely touch it nowadays there's a combination of reasons why tailwind's made a lot easier to mock things up fast more importantly AI tools have made it comically easier to make a decent enough looking thing and also I don't have a designer that's working with me full-time right now so there's less incentive and usually when I hire designers I'm hiring engineing ones and they're just going to start by going into the code anyways so they went left
• 13:00 - 13:30 with Fig Jam and they went right with dev mode these were their attempts to expand the potential market for Figma products and I'd go as far as to say they weren't very successful we'll do a quick poll because this is an audience of devs have you used Figma's dev mode yes often yes not often yes stopped using no never used i use it but only because it has a ruler oof yeah the dev mode experience sucks ass this is what
• 13:30 - 14:00 I've heard mostly i'm very familiar with Framework it's a cool product so my dev heavy audience here you go the numbers kind of speak for themselves there aren't a lot of people who are using Figma's dev mode especially when we again compare to those insane numbers here where they have like well over 80% of the market like way way over it's higher than that now i saw numbers as high as 95 in the past so they won design they can't even make a splash in dev they're
• 14:00 - 14:30 struggling a lot so I I hope that we've established here Figma is struggling a lot to break into these other spaces especially the dev world but something else happened that's important this is where we need to talk about point two ai dev tools got really good important to realize how much this has changed the trajectory of Figma figo's bet was effectively that these designs were so valuable and developers needed these designs so badly that building a tool for the designers to provide mocks that are usable and useful to the developers
• 14:30 - 15:00 could be a many many multi-billion dollar industry and they weren't wrong certainly not at the time but some of these AI dev tools have meaningfully reduced the amount of help you need from designers they're far from perfect i'm not going to sit here and pretend otherwise but they are so much better than devs previously would have needed to rely on there's a spectrum I drew a while back i want to see if I can find it there's going to be a weird comparison so hear me out it's a diagram I drew when I was talking about HTMX versus Nex.js and the reason I drew this
• 15:00 - 15:30 diagram is to try and frame the like back end and front end and when different parts are necessary if you're building an app that is just a couple of forms with a really complex backend that has to scale well and process tons of data and the website is just a basic form and a page that shows the current state of the infra you don't need much on the front end side so if we were to like show how far and how much any given piece needs the back end would be a majority of the complexity and the front
• 15:30 - 16:00 end here would be really small the back end could be this big complex thing the front end doesn't have to be but there is a spectrum here where the server is more complex versus the client being more complex if the back end is where the complexity lives building that backend with front-end tools probably isn't the best bet even using Node might not be the best bet depending on what you're building here but if you're building a Twitter clone the back end is a hell of a lot less complex and the front end is a hell of a lot more complex at which point the tools you pick should be able to handle that level of complexity well building a good
• 16:00 - 16:30 Twitter clone that feels nice to use with HTMX would suck the same way building a complex infrastructure with Nex.js would suck the interesting thing about HTMX is it meaningfully moved the line for where do you need to adopt a front-end framework previously in order to have a front-end framework that was like could go further left than here let's say you would need to adopt something like React you'd have to go all in on single page apps and let the client own its state as soon as you have a certain level of interactivity in your page you
• 16:30 - 17:00 effectively need a clientside framework htmx said "Wait do you though?" And they moved this line pretty far down so there are lots of levels of complexity your front end apps can have where you don't need to adopt a tool like React htmx is much more backend focused it lets you update the state of the page from the server without having to reload the entire content of the page which makes more interactivity possible without having to write clientside code before HTMX and honestly before intercooler and
• 17:00 - 17:30 things like it if you had a comment section on your blog and somebody left a comment the whole page would have to reload to see that or they'd have to load some JavaScript single page app style so when they leave the comment it would update the DOM using React Angular even jQuery a lot of clientside code would be necessary in order to do that type of good experience htmx challenged the notion and said "Wait for basic page updates that are serverdriven what if we just update the HTML in place instead which is really nice and powerful." And there's a reason why people love HTMX
• 17:30 - 18:00 it's because they don't need all the things React can do they're not building a heavily interactive app like T3 chat they're trying to build something that just shows what the backend's current state is with a little bit more interactivity so why am I talking about all of this well I'm going to copy paste this guy into our new diagram and hopefully you'll see why if we change this from server to client to design and develop and we change this to front-end code and designs or mocks I'll even say
• 18:00 - 18:30 Figma mocks specifically kill all that there would be a point where a front-end dev isn't good enough to design the thing if you look at like my homepage you don't need a designer to design this page if somebody was to take the time to mock this up in Figma I would probably make fun of them and I hope you would too because it does not it's not a complex design this does not need a whole lot of effort to make but if you're trying to do something like T3 chat you'd benefit a lot more for making proper mocks in something so it's important to think for any given project
• 18:30 - 19:00 how complex is this design such that we want to take the time to mock it and how competent are your devs to get by without having those mocks so for some projects the bar might be here cuz oh we don't really care we just needed to show the data quick we don't care how nice it looks some projects might be all the way down here where it's like "Oh mocks are the only thing that make this product viable without them we're not going to get anything done." Previously I would argue there was very little you could do with just front-end code you effectively needed to have a designer doing things
• 19:00 - 19:30 in Figma if what you were building was more complex than like a basic form or a dashboard and by dashboard I mean just a table effectively and even then having design help would be nice the crazy thing that has happened due to AI tools is very similar to HTMX where these AI focused developer tools have effectively made it so you can go way further without needing a designer to help if we were to say that further left is a beautiful design and further right is a I don't know T3.gg design my design
• 19:30 - 20:00 capabilities pre these AI tools were like here and I needed a designer to save me but now that we have Vzero Lovable Bolt and all these other tools especially Vzero because it's really good at like UI this has shifted quite a bit for me and I've been amazed at how far it has i never thought I would see the day where I could just go to a chatbot and say "Hey make this." And it will make something that looks good enough and since the output is code not a design in a mock software I can dive
• 20:00 - 20:30 into the code and play with it the way I normally do so it allows for me as a dev to go way further in design without needing a designer without needing Figma without needing mocks and it comes out in the language I want which is code ideally react if you're a React developer and now I can take this design that I previously would have had to pay a designer for then spend all the time making a first version go back to the designer get more feedback and like iterate back and forth now it's I prompt an AI bot it gives me a starting point with code if there are things I don't like about it I ask it to try again if I
• 20:30 - 21:00 just don't like it entirely I will hit the reroll button it's so much easier to get way further without needing to go hire a designer when I first started Ping my first hire was a designer because it was so hard to find good designers and I was not competent enough to do it the original versions of Ping were so disgustingly hilariously ugly but I don't have a designer I employ right now i have a design engineer working with us part-time shout out to Dom he's been killing it but we don't have a full-time designer anymore
• 21:00 - 21:30 because we haven't needed it for a while we originally moved away from having designers we were focused on dev tools now we're not and we still haven't found the need for it you can go so much further without a designer now and this puts 2 here for Figma at risk the design industry is legitimately at risk of getting smaller now previously every company shipping software probably needed a designer at least part-time now a significant portion of them probably don't that's a huge risk for Figma
• 21:30 - 22:00 especially because the output of these tools isn't something you can use in Figma the output of these tools is on the other side it's something you can use in your editor if these AI tools were spitting out Figma mock so you need a designer to go in and tidy up they'd be in a great place and I'm sure they'd be hyped instead they're throwing really really weird pot shots and going out of their way to damage these AI code building tools because they are putting Figma's entire place in the industry at risk and again I can't say the details but I will say confidently Lovable is not the only company dealing with
• 22:00 - 22:30 like this right now and it makes sense why Figma's in a weird spot figma can't be acquired and again at a company of this size acquisition is usually your exit plan so they can't be acquired figma struggles to win devs figma's industry is at risk so what happens when you can't sell to make your money you can't expand the marketplace to make more money and the thing you're currently making money from is at risk this leads to what I call the Netscape
• 22:30 - 23:00 effect microsoft realized that the internet was going to risk the entire model they had for how software was going to work long term microsoft realized that people wouldn't be going to stores to buy discs with licensing fees anymore they saw Netscape and its success in the browser space and realized "Oh we need to win here." And that's why they made a free browser to compete with the paid Netscape app and also built functionality into Windows to make it really really good for Internet
• 23:00 - 23:30 Explorer and kind of hostile for other browsers and that led to Microsoft getting sued so hard that they ended up having government people full-time employed at Microsoft just looking for more antitrust practice going on in order to prevent this in the future it's one of like the biggest antitrust lawsuits in history and by the time it wrapped up Netscape had already shut down because they were higma's the new Microsoft which is crazy when you think about it but that's the position they're in they're losing their base their base is getting smaller they're struggling to
• 23:30 - 24:00 grow into other spaces and the whole industry category they're in looks like it is starting to shrink shitless right now and when you're a billiondoll company that is scared that fear tends to come out like this with what I would consider to be an absolutely trademark suit i do want to try and steal manand them quick because there are real reasons you would do something like this why would you ever do this obviously the optics of
• 24:00 - 24:30 this are terrible if Figma's goal was to make devs like them they just made that 10x harder for themselves for no good reason they probably assumed Lovable was a safe thing to sue because Lovable isn't as popular in the dev world as some of the other tools are they're wrong though because that went really viral and the optics of this are terrible but again to try and steel man it the only reason your company would have a real vested interest in doing this other than screwing with your competition is if you don't enforce your trademark you lose it so if I was to
• 24:30 - 25:00 trademark Vibe Code for example use it in my product had a trademark through USPTO where I own the word mark of Vibe Code and then everyone started using the term and I didn't enforce it i didn't go after them and say "Hey that's not actually Vibe Code because that's my trademark a petition could be made to strip that trademark from its owner." This is going on right now with JavaScript believe it or not Oracle owns the JavaScript trademark because they acquired Sun Micro Systemystems who owned the trademark originally
• 25:00 - 25:30 javascript isn't Java but it was similar enough and the goal was to feel like it and more importantly be as portable as Java which is why it got named JavaScript neither Sun nor Oracle have ever done anything meaningful with it oracle in particular has never done anything with JavaScript they don't have a JS engine they don't have JS materials they have one tiny little SDK for web apps that doesn't even work hasn't maintained for a very long time that they have used as their justification for maintaining the trademark they've
• 25:30 - 26:00 also done some sketchy stuff like sue a random dev who made a Rust for JavaScript devs book suing him and threatening him because he doesn't have the right to use the word JavaScript in the title of the book absolute absurdity they're currently being sued by our friends over at Dino i have a whole video about this too if you're curious dino is going through the process to argue to USPTO that JavaScript is a generic term and it cannot be restricted in the way it is right now because they're not using the trademark they are keeping what they consider to be an
• 26:00 - 26:30 invalid trademark and personally I do as well i don't think Oracle is using this trademark in a meaningful way they are holding it so they can sue people for using it not because they're using it themselves the only good faith why I think they might be doing it that is even slightly defensible is if they give up the JavaScript trademark it might risk the Java trademark which they are absolutely using and enforcing that line is blurry enough I can sympathize a bit but that's about as far as it can go another really common one that you guys have probably seen a bit about is Nintendo's trademark chaos and I'm going to do a fun contrast here between
• 26:30 - 27:00 Nintendo and Sega's trademark vagueness nintendo is known for being very ligious with their trademarks if you put something that even vaguely looks like a Pokemon or Mario in something that isn't officially Nintendo there's a good chance they're going to come after you for it they've even sued for things as absurd as the trademark of a ball being thrown at a monster it's kind of absurd but the reason they do that is because in Japan especially the rules around
• 27:00 - 27:30 losing a trademark if it becomes a generic are much more open and it's very easy to lose your trademark if you're not careful so Nintendo very strictly enforces their trademark because their whole business is built on their exclusive right to things like Mario if anyone could make a Mario game and anyone could make a Pokemon game Nintendo would lose a huge portion of their value because let's be real they're not making money because of their hardware they're not making money because of their network code they're not making money because of much certainly not the quality of the store the store is the Switch store is one of
• 27:30 - 28:00 the most pathetic piece of software I've ever used in my life their trademarks and their IPs are what make them valuable so they strictly enforce them who knows what makes Sega valuable i want to see if this one where does Sega make their money right now i love that it's 50/50 but half of you got it right gambling slot machines if you didn't know this a while back Sega got acquired sega Sammy was a merger that happened way back because Sammy Holdings Company
• 28:00 - 28:30 was making a lot of money selling pachinko machines and other gambling things in Japan and they had a really really bad reputation they were starting to look very bad to the public sega was failing because the Dreamcast just lost compared to the other consoles and Sammy saw the opportunity to buy Sega mostly for the sentiment win they could use the name Sega as their public name which has a positive reputation to hide the fact
• 28:30 - 29:00 that they were doing other things with their business and this went very well for them this basically allowed them to flip sediment and get away with continuing to do terrible things but because of that the value of Sega's trademarks are not that they have the exclusive rights to them to be frank Sega doesn't really care what you do with Sonic the goal of Sonic isn't to make them a lot of money directly the goal of the whole Sega brand is to have enough positive sentiment that they're less likely to have a big flip that causes them to lose their gambling business so Sega's goal with their
• 29:00 - 29:30 trademarks is not to use them to make money it's to have positive sentiment with the community so they kind of let you do whatever nintendo needs to sell the things that they make with those trademarks so they can't do that sega doesn't give a hopefully this helps contrast the difference between these two here so what the is Figma doing i think Figma's in a weird spot here because in my opinion dev mode is a BS trademark that's a term we've used for things for so long dev is a generic mode is a generic the combination of the
• 29:30 - 30:00 words is very generic and there have been a lot of tools and I'm positive there is good prior art to dev mode being used in other places because it is such a trademark and because it just got approved very recently as we saw here November of last year in order for them to not lose it they have to be strict as hell with it and I think that's what we're seeing now we're seeing Figma protecting this trademark at all costs because it is a trademark and they are scared of losing it but as we saw earlier
• 30:00 - 30:30 trademarks are kind of their thing as they have config trademarked they have schema trademarked they have factory trademarked seems like they've gotten away with this for a while and they want to make sure they can continue to i also don't think they've gotten a proper blowback for it because I don't think they've went after a prominent enough figure in a public space like this before so the combination of Dev mode being a trademark the necessary nature of protecting your trademark to keep it and the weird position Figma is in where their market is shrinking and they're failing to grow it they're
• 30:30 - 31:00 acting irrationally and it's kind of pathetic to see a multi-billion dollar company act like this but this is kind of the the end of the friendly nice guys Figma that we have liked to pretend they were for a while i have felt that going away for a bit now but this is a real like oh it's over now isn't it one other important detail because people might not know this tools like Lovable actually let you import from Figma so I can import a design from Figma and generate code i can do it here i can do it in bolt import from Figma i even do
• 31:00 - 31:30 it from VZ import from Figma figma is now a button you click in other people's tools they don't want that they want the opposite they don't want VZero or Lovable or Bolt to be the thing people export their Figas to they want Figma to be the tool they do the exporting with and the more that these tools allow you to import from Figma the more companies that are using Figma are going to start trying them and the more likely they are to cancel their Figma subscriptions in favor of just using Vzero in the first place the more that that happens the less money Figma can make the less
• 31:30 - 32:00 likely they are to have a successful IPO and make all their investors and their founders and everybody else a whole bunch of money they are scared they're acting scared and this is an absolute trademark that I hope they lose in court yeah what a ride i got nothing else thank you guys as always and hopefully my use of the word dev mode throughout this doesn't get me sued until next time peace nerds i just went the whole video without making a Ligma joke you guys proud