👉 Background: Microsoft is the behemoth tech company that started back in 1975 and has grown to a $3.3 trillion USD valuation — the second largest company in globally based on market value.

👉 What happened: Now, Microsoft has announced a new AI-powered app available to users on Windows as well as iOS and Android called Designer. It can provide “prompt templates” to help kickstart the creative process.

👉 What else: This might sound awfully similar to Canva, except Microsoft has one little leg-up -  its partnership with OpenAI. That means, there’s a LOT of AI in this tool. And all of a sudden, Canva may have a major competitor in the design market.

What's the key learning?

💡The hunter has become the hunted. 11 years ago Canva identified a major gap in the design industry, and since then hunted the design software market from Microsoft and Adobe’s Photoshop. Now, the tables have turned.

💡When a tech leader like Microsoft rolls out a new product into existing offerings, it has the strategic advantage of distribution. In fact, Microsoft already has more than 1.5 billion Office suite users around the world versus Canva’s 170 million users.

💡This isn't the first time we’ve seen a global tech giant with massive distribution dupe another company’s product and turn it into a feature:

• Garmin and TomTom were the leaders in GPS mapping until Google and Apple turned them into apps.
• Adobe was the leader in the PDF format until Microsoft created their own PDF viewer in the Office Suite.

So only time will tell if Canva can maintain its market dominance.