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Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

There's a great lesson here. People will want to use what they learned, and if they can't learn on your software, they won't be inclined to try it later. It doesn't really matter for the first five years or so of your company, and that's longer than most startups exist, but once you're #1, you need to start thinking about the pipeline of new people. There's not a lot of motivation for individual employees (even CEOs) to think this way because they probably won't be in the role by the time it matters, but it's important.

Would Blender have taken off as fast if Maya had a free tier? I doubt it.

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Whenever I encounter an interesting non-niche new technology with "contact us for a demo/pricing" language, I bounce.

When a new project comes along and we need to make a technology decision we will, as a matter of due diligence, reach out to all the relevant vendors. But there is an "existing experience in team" evaluation criteria for these technology decisions, and the "contact us" vendors fail miserably there - their tech needs to be extra impressive to overcome that hurdle.

This has always been my own mantra too, but then I never represented an enterprise buyer so maybe it is effective to screen out buyera like me, but I can imagine even as an "large enterprise level buyer" I would not want to deal with this. It just smacks of dishonesty when you will not provide ANY pricing indication whatsoever. I am surprised "contact us for pricing" still works in current year? I assume it does, because one still sees it sometimes. Maybe if almost everyone started shunning this (and I expect those in younger generations than me probably will!) this tactic will die out. I can sortoff understand it for cases where you want yo relicense your product/data to become part of someone elses product/service and these deals might be custom negotiated. But for normal use of a product or service? hell no!

Yes. I highly recommend watching this video [0] — "For-Profit (Creative) Software" by EndVertex — about how some essential programs price out regular people with their insane licensing models... In turn making people's skills nontransferable.

[0]: https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc

> People will want to use what they learned, and if they can't learn on your software, they won't be inclined to try it later.

This is why Microsoft never seriously pursued piracy of Windows and this is also why Windows was never a market leader on servers. This is why Postgres won databases even though it’s clearly an inferior product to Oracle, MSSQL and DB2. This is why CUDA is the defacto standard in GPGPU. This is why every saas business must have a free tier. Etc.

Well, not really. There is a multitude of factors in those, and I'd say some examples are just plain wrong.

Postgres won out because it was better than the others considering the money you pay and the features you (in the end) don't need or couldn't afford with the others. If it just were down to learning, MySQL/MariaDB would have won. Back in the days, everyone knew MySQL, nobody knew Postgres.

With CUDA, it also isn't what people know, it rather is the existing heap of software that only runs properly, quickly, efficiently in CUDA. People buying Nvidia cards and CUDA-based software don't care about CUDA and don't know any CUDA, they are usually higher level, but the availability of software is what drives the popularity there.

You're agreeing with me. MySQL vs postgres doesn't change the overall point at all - both were good enough free as in beer products that a generation of developers grew up on and had no reason to switch to paid offerings later.

With CUDA, you're even highlighting my point:

> the availability of software is what drives the popularity there

Like, there isn't anything more to it. That's all that matters. Again, a free, good enough product that evolved into a best in class software and hardware package together with a generation of GPGPU developers who don't know and don't really care about anything else.

Ah, sorry, yes. I misunderstood and we are in total agreement.

I've over-interpreted the quotation in your post about what people have learned to mean that it is only about the tools you know, nothing else. In hindsight, I should have read your post more carefully.

MySQL is a much better choice for sysadmins than Postgres. Postgres won because it was easier to migrate from Oracle.

Honest question: why is MySQL better for sysadmins?

It’s much easier to deploy and has a much older high availability story that has been battle tested for a decade or two. It also has a more linear regression. The query optimizer doesn’t try to be clever. It only works with the query and the schema. So if your query is bad, it will get worse with data size. Double the data in prod compared to your test instance? Double the bad query. Postgres tries to get clever with data size so it might switch to a different plan with more data resulting in your one customer with a lot of data all of a sudden getting really bad query times but nobody can reproduce it locally. So now you as the admin have to go into the database and pull a dump that for once actually trigger the same query plan as it did in production but your devs might not be allowed to see all the data or have it locally. This is one annoying thing at least you don’t have to do with MySQL.

Oh, also, MySQL just updates in place without bitching. Postgres wants you do install both versions side by side and migrate the data directory. That is annoying with docker.

Also, vacuuming.

Hah, it's a great answer, I did not even think that far, thinking of the ease of installation, updates and command line use, as well as configuration.

But indeed. MySQL's great weakness and great strength is that it's a somewhat limited SQL engine over a variety of storage backends. It can not be too smart, due to the sheer variety of what it supports.

The side effect is that it is quite predictable.

Postgres is worse from admin side, but it feels like the only one that cares about developer sanity and doing things right.

On topic, this excellent video essay (?) that’s been making the rounds recently[1]. Highly recommended.

1: ”For-Profit (Creative) Software” by EndVertex https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc

Ahh, sorry, didn't see you had also mentioned this excellent essay. D'oh.

I think this is a very weak essay. The author has zero ability to analyze, self-reflect, and think through her actions even one step ahead.

The video literally starts off by complaining about how expensive the software is while simultaneously talking about how heavily she invested in learning it in college (knowing how expensive it is). And then, for some reason, she says that her instrument was taken away from her (the conditions were transparent from the very beginning).

Furthermore, after graduating from college, when it became obvious that studying expensive software had been a huge mistake, what does she do? SHE STARTS TEACHING IT! Thus moving from the category of victim (doubtful, but okay) to the category of part of the problem.

Classic victim blaming this. She’s trying to enter an industry where certain tools are considered the professional choice. Her skills become tangled up in those tools, and then she’s priced out of using them. Using another tool probably wasn’t an option as an attempt to start a professional career. This is exactly the problem the video is all about, in so many ways.

I think this is also one of the reasons that KiCad is making such in-roads into the electronics industry. For 90% of companies it does all the stuff you need and hobbyist can afford it and learn it and experiment with it.

It's also starting to get features previously only super high end packages like atium would have. Why pay for the gimped eagle when you can just use kicad and get more

Autodesk tried that from time to time. AFAIK as a student you can still get a free Maya, and there also was a very cheap (but massively stripped down) version for indie game devs. But there was always one or another string attached.

IMHO what really killed Maya wasn't necessarily Blender itself, but Autodesk's strategy of first becoming a defacto monopolist in the area of commercial 3D software and then tightening the subscription screws on their existing users. Of course that strategy doesn't work when there's a free alternative to migrate to.

From what I recall, the strings were substantial. The student version of Maya had a bunch of features disabled, to the point where you couldn't follow tutorials with it.

They might as well not have bothered.

This was years ago, so I may have misremembered.

Both the education and indie versions are full versions. The educational version can only be licensed for a year and can only be relicensed a set number of times. The indie version is restricted solely based on income. If the licensee (studio or individual) makes <= 100000 USD per year, then they can use the indie version. There may be slightly different file formats for each.

I remember that at one point there was a Maya LT version which only allowed polygon modelling and some limited animation features, and which didn't allow loading plugins (except a small number of whitelisted plugins). Maybe I confused that with the indie/student license.

That's why a lot of companies like this offer big education discounts, so that university students get to use it for free and get hooked.

Also why the change on making .NET and Swift open source, universities adoption has been exactly one of the adoption pain points, and VSCode being the entry point into Microsoft technologies as well.

> Would Blender have taken off as fast if Maya had a free tier? I doubt it.

Maya's own success was heavily based around a cheap license for students. IIRC it was only about $100, as opposed to nearly a grand for the professional license.

Maya had to unseat 3d studio. Both were bought by Autodesk (1997 for 3ds and 2005 for maya iirc) who have that habit of exploiting market dominance and not innovating but then buying the up and coming product (similarly they bought revit when it outperformed their own autocad)

Unless you're Adobe, in which case you just keep making your software worse every year and everyone still has to learn it.

That is mainly because older designers can be quite inflexible and didnt want to learn new things.

That's not really the reason. The print industry still runs exclusively on Adobe.

> on Adobe

I will add: and Mac.

You've told me what happens, you haven't disagreed with why.

I feel like tools like Sketch and Figma ate a big chunk of Adobe's lunch, though.

20 years ago every designer I knew were using Photoshop, Flash, Fireworks. Those were taught in universities. Some designers I work with started there. Today I know exactly zero designers using those.

Sure there is XD but Adobe is merely playing catch up here. I have worked with a single person who uses it, and it was right before they were transitioning to Figma.

It is also funny seeing some co-workers (including designers!) using Photopea instead of Photoshop.

Still working on the print design side... I work with lots of designers who use other tools for photo editing and illustration. As do I. For vector art and for finalizing work for pre-press, though, everyone is really still stuck with Adobe. Their closed standards dominate the industry. If you don't deliver work in PDF or AI format... then what? You don't deliver 8 meter wide billboards as PNG files. And trying to edit PDFs saved from other software is really difficult. Trying to import AI files to other software often loses layers, path groups, blendings and effects. The truth is, for anyone art directing print work, your designers and illustrators may be allowed to use whatever suits them, but at the end of the day everything that goes out has to go in Adobe's formats.

Sketch is only relevant in US, and a few other places on the planet where devs use Macs.

Figma is the champion to look out for, hence why Adobe tried to acquire them.

I feel sketch fell out of favor as well. 12 years ago it was everywhere. I have seen it replaced by figma and very rarely mentioned nowadays. And I say it as a frontend dev who worked with different designers over the years.

Yep. Sketch was the first real competitor Adobe had, but Figma was a different ball game.

I never worked in the US, but Sketch was huge in the two places I worked (Europe and Latin America), to the point companies that worked together with Microsoft (a couple shops I worked for) were purchasing Macs just to run it.

Figma pretty much replaced it overnight.

I bet those two places were swimming in money then, as Southern Europe and Latin America are not regions where most developers are swimming in money, US style.

To put this in perspective, in Portugal that would be about two months salary, assuming running expenses, where minimum wage is about 800 euros, and top jobs in IT pay around 1 500 euros after taxes.

Everyone that owns a Mac tends to buy them in on credit, or with bundles with their mobile/cable operator, which are anyway credits in disguise.

Never worked in Southern Europe. In Germany, everyone had Macs in the companies I worked.

In Latin America... The last Mac I bought there was about half of my IT salary there, but that was 2012, a couple years before I left. So it was ok for companies to purchase them. Today? Probably not... I don't even know anyone who's still there and working for local companies.

I've liked Icons8's Lunacy as a free alternative to Sketch and Figma. It works with Sketch files and Figma projects, and isn't Mac-exclusive or a website like Figma.

Photopea has implemented surprisingly large fraction of photoshops features, and having it implemented in a way familiar to photoshop users makes it very useful tool already. And that without installing, just as a web app? Or PWA if you want? Very nice.

Not anymore. I was a Photoshop user from around 2000, I knew every corner of it from version 5.5 until CS-2 or something. You are quite right about Adobe making it worse and worse with every version. Today, although i still pay for subscription, I'll do anything more quickly with PhotoPea, Affinty Photo or Pixelmator, regardless my much more limited exposure to these. Its a shame. Adobe deserves to be forgotten, and it is getting there. As others pointed out, Figma, Canva and the tools I mentioned are gradually replacing it. Today its absolutely fine for a designer having no experience with Photoshop. Even Illustrator is slowly fading away as even inkscape is getting more and more usable with every new version.

See also Microsoft's struggle to maintain mindshare in the early 00's/10's, when the only way to develop on Windows was to pay thousands of dollars for VS licenses and platform documentation.

From 2004, which some might argue should count as the early 2000-2010s:

> But they really want to give away the development tools. Through their Empower ISV program you can get five complete sets of MSDN Universal (otherwise known as “basically every Microsoft product except Flight Simulator“) for about $375. Command line compilers for the .NET languages are included with the free .NET runtime… also free. The C++ compiler is now free.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

And eventually they open sourced .NET, VC++ standard library, adopted clang, Go, Java (ironically), started contributing to Rust.

DevDiv nowadays is much more than .NET and C++, and not always takes decisions into .NET favour, see Typescript rewrite decision.

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