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Comment by rick888 | Hacker News Reader

"Your making a chicken and egg argument. The reason the industry doesn't use Gimp is because no one in the industry uses Gimp. If a whole graduating class of students skipped Photoshop and used Gimp for price reasons then the picture could and likely would change."

no. I'm saying since the industry doesn't use gimp, it's not in the best interest for the students to use it either.

How Photoshop actually became the industry standard is another topic.

If a whole graduating class used Gimp, the whole graduating class would be disappointed when they went to find a job and couldn't find one due to lack of experience.

Students don't set the industry standard. They follow it.

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> Students don't set the industry standard. They follow it.

I don't think this is entirely true, which is one reason companies have student-discount programs, often pretty aggressive ones, sometimes going all the way to basically giving the software away for free to students (Microsoft does the latter fairly often).

If nothing else, what students are familiar with affects the cost/benefit analyses of companies making decisions. If a lot more graduating students are familiar with technology X than Y, then a company will find it harder to hire for Y, and will pay more for the employees when they do, which pushes some companies to choose X. Obviously how much effect this has depends on a lot of factors, like how big and how persistent the imbalance is, how entrenched the industry standard is, etc.

The reason no one uses Gimp is because the user interface is terrible. Photoshop kills gimp.

I can't use Photoshop because it lacks Gimp's right-click-to-do-anything menu. Less mouse movement = faster work. If Gimp just sorted the tool palette into categories, it would quickly become ten times easier for novices, but once you learn the keyboard shortcuts (or reconfigure Gimp with Photoshop shortcuts), Gimp is as easy as Photoshop.

Usability is a separate issue from deep color support, Pantone, etc. Any traditionally "religious" discussion (Gimp vs Photoshop, Vim vs Emacs, Win vs Lin, etc.) tends to be unproductive because both sides will make broad, sweeping, inaccurate, or unprovable statements, and when one side wins a point, the other side changes the subject, instead of people honestly comparing and contrasting.

...and to avoid further derailing the conversation, I'll stop here.

> Students don't set the industry standard. They follow it.

There are exceptions to most rules, including this one. Consider for example what has taken place with Blender. I know a lot of people who would have been learning 3DS Max (or Maya, etc.), but now know and use Blender instead because that's what they can afford.

And these students don't have to venture forth into The Industry. They can create their own that will topple the existing one. There are plenty of growing startups who would be more than happy to hire someone with "3D Skillz", and many of them don't care what tools they use, so long as the work gets done.

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