Does Figma Want to Take Over the World?

Figma made a very innovative move by offering not only an excellent tool for designing and prototyping interfaces but also an outstanding collaborative work tool like FigJam. Leveraging an easy-to-use system to allow non-designers to use it as a replacement for PowerPoint or Google Slides is a next-level move. They are entering new and unknown territory, and only the future will tell if it’s a good move or not.

For now, although I haven’t tried it yet, I can attest that designing a presentation in PowerPoint or Google Slides was a headache. It’s like designing in Microsoft Word, so from a user’s perspective, I must acknowledge that having a user-friendly tool like Figma for creating presentations (even though I admit I make few) would be an advantage and a time saver.

However, from a product and business perspective, I have more questions than certainties:
Will it be profitable to compete with a product that already has two major rivals, one of them being free?
Does it make sense when I can go to a marketplace to buy or download free PowerPoint, Google Slides, or Canva templates?
Does this automatically eliminate the need for a designer?
Are we looking at a tool that nobody asked for, nobody needs, and is just something novel or a blind bet?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. What I am clear about is that just showing that with AI, you could ask it to make a form or any type of screen was enough and impactful enough to create a stir.
Personally, the launch of Figma Slides, while having advantages over the competition, creates more noise and distracts from Figma’s main focus. What you can do with Figma Slides is what designers were already doing with Figma and FigJam.

I have created many competitor analyses, feature presentations, diagrams, task and user flows, functionality analyses, and I have presented them directly in FigJam. I have given my coworkers access to edit and change things. As a presentation tool, it’s fantastic. On its own, it could have been a better candidate to replace Google Slides and PowerPoint than Figma Slides.

In my opinion, as a product, it would have been much more disruptive and useful if they had turned FigJam into a more dynamic tool like Prezi. It would have been incredible to have that giant drawing board and elements to design whatever you want and navigate interactively between slides—a new, much more dynamic, agile, and practical way than the traditional PowerPoint presentation, of which Figma Slides is just an upgrade.

But this is just my opinion; I might be wrong, and they might rock it and dethrone the rivals. Time will tell.