4 ms·

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 doe

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.

tobr 2y ago
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 https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc
- rolandog 2y ago
  Ahh, sorry, didn't see you had also mentioned this excellent essay. D'oh.
- Ray20 2y ago
  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.
  - tobr 2y ago
    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.
_fizz_buzz_ 2y ago
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.
- paradox460 2y ago
  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
baq 2y ago
> 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.
- thyristan 2y ago
  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.
  - baq 2y ago
    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.
    - thyristan 2y ago
      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.
stevage 2y ago
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.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  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.
rolandog 2y ago
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 https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc
omcnoe 2y ago
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.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  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-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    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.
noduerme 2y ago
Unless you're Adobe, in which case you just keep making your software worse every year and everyone still has to learn it.
- worthless-trash 2y ago
  That is mainly because older designers can be quite inflexible and didnt want to learn new things.
  - noduerme 2y ago
    That's not really the reason. The print industry still runs exclusively on Adobe.
    - HenryBemis 2y ago
      > on Adobe I will add: and Mac.
    - worthless-trash 2y ago
      You've told me what happens, you haven't disagreed with why.
- whstl 2y ago
  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.
  - noduerme 2y ago
    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.
ryanjshaw 2y ago
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.
- andriesm 2y ago
  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!
swiftcoder 2y ago
> 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.
- twelvechairs 2y ago
  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)
flohofwoe 2y ago
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.
- terribleperson 2y ago
  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.
- sbuk 2y ago
  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.
  - flohofwoe 2y ago
    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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

tobr 2y ago

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 https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc

rolandog 2y ago
Ahh, sorry, didn't see you had also mentioned this excellent essay. D'oh.
Ray20 2y ago
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.
- tobr 2y ago
  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.

_fizz_buzz_ 2y ago

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.

paradox460 2y ago
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

baq 2y ago

> 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.

thyristan 2y ago
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.
- baq 2y ago
  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.
  - thyristan 2y ago
    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.

stevage 2y ago

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.

pjmlp 2y ago
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.

rolandog 2y ago

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 https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc

omcnoe 2y ago

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.

thaumasiotes 2y ago
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-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
- pjmlp 2y ago
  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.

noduerme 2y ago

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

worthless-trash 2y ago
That is mainly because older designers can be quite inflexible and didnt want to learn new things.
- noduerme 2y ago
  That's not really the reason. The print industry still runs exclusively on Adobe.
  - HenryBemis 2y ago
    > on Adobe I will add: and Mac.
  - worthless-trash 2y ago
    You've told me what happens, you haven't disagreed with why.
whstl 2y ago
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.
- noduerme 2y ago
  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.

ryanjshaw 2y ago

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.

andriesm 2y ago
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!

swiftcoder 2y ago

> 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.

twelvechairs 2y ago
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)

flohofwoe 2y ago

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.

terribleperson 2y ago
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.
sbuk 2y ago
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.
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]