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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

i remember back when Avid decided they were no longer going to offer a Mac version of their NLEs because Apple's new machines were only going to have 3 expansion slots. while admittedly, there were probably a much smaller number of affected users than the Unity decision, it did cause a huge amount of turmoil. urban legend has people dumping their Avid stations on the doorstep of the Avid offices.

Avid survived. Unity will too

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Avid is still around, but it's not looking very healthy. They've fired whole dev teams - one of whom was largely hired by a competitor, who have now developed a competing project that is eating Avid alive in that (fiarly niche) space.

Are you talking about Sibelius? That was over a decade ago and AVID had a killer run financially afterwards.

Avid also just did a deal to go private under a private equity group; I wouldn't say the prognosis is looking good.

I was wondering why the name Avid was familiar but also had a negative connotation in my head, then I remembered it was from a YouTube video [1] about how horrible its interface is.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI

Where can we read more about this? I'm at least curious to know who that competitor is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorico

man, i was hoping this was going to be a serious discussion on NLEs. instead, we get some niche product of a niche field. i'm not really sure this counts. that's like the team that works for lighting within Unity left to build a new tool that exports settings to JSON.

You're being overly dismissive. There are thousands of people working in such software every day - from serious composers, professional music engravers, orchestra libraians, down to church choirmasters and the like.

It's a several hundred dollar product that supports a dev team in the low double digits. It's niche, but it's not THAT niche.

Unity will survive but this could be the start of a steady decline of users, which isn't good for any game engine. Leads to a loss of knowledge which makes the engine even less popular.

Ghe whole situation is somewhat similar to when GameMaker Studio switched to subscription model.

what would be better for the community would be not just a decline in devs using the engine, but also the devs working on the engine. working for Unity should now be a stain just like working for FB/socials/ad-tech. there will be tons of people willing to do it, but hopefully the great minds leave the rot

That’s the opposite of what would be better. We need more engineer solidarity not more divisiveness. Give me a list of your past employers and I can guarantee I can find some sketchball business practice you indirectly contributed to and make some tenuous argument for you to be blackballed.

95% of shitty tech industry practices can be root caused to people identify more strongly with their employer than with their profession. We desperately need a professional organization / union with teeth and the main thing that should be shunned is rhetoric that divides rather than unites it .

Engineers can hang together or hang separately.

You must subscribe to the idea that the employees can change the culture of a company from bottom up. I strongly disagree. Company culture is dictated from top down, and only rarely does the bottom get to make substantive changes. However, I'm willing to have my mind change with examples of companies changing their culture based on employees changing the minds of the execs.

We can't, but many of us are forced by circumstances we can't control to stay on board even if we don't like where the company is heading. The most recent and probably most nastiest story I'm aware of is post-Musk Twitter - Musk ordered that everyone put in effort like hell, people slept in conference rooms... so, naturally, many people left but one group had to stay because their literal legal existence in the US was tied to that job: H1B employees.

Other cases include if you've got a house that's not paid off, a child on the way... that's where common sense says to not change anything major due to the consequences of shit going down very very VERY hard.

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