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Comment by chipperyman573 | Hacker News Reader

I never understood when important people force deals with companies they used to work at. He doesn't work for Autodesk any more, why would he care how well they're doing? Is he being paid by autodesk? I mean I know he might be friends with people from those companies still, but he's actively hurting his own company by making these calls.

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Here seems to be the opposite, no? He made a move against his old company.

The existence of GIMP doesn't really make less people use Photoshop. The same is true of Blender and Maya.

Because it kind of sucks in comparison. Epic is trying to make Blender better.

As a free open source project blender is always going to be playing catch-up with Maya selling 1K+ licences unless the development is severely mismanaged.

Depends by what you mean by catchup? Complete feature parity hardly is the goal of Blender project so I’m not sure how to figure out what exactly constitutes the feature disparity that should be caught up by blender.

One view to look at it is that polygon based modeling, animation and material authoring can be done using a finite feature set, and once that feature set is complete, further enhancements are nice to have, but not critical.

> One view to look at it is that polygon based modeling, animation and material authoring can be done using a finite feature set, and once that feature set is complete, further enhancements are nice to have, but not critical.

This is definitely true, if the interface is refined. In this respect, blender doesn't just not hit the bullseye, it's as if someone held the arrow and shot the bow straight in the air.

Because GIMP falls short as a Photoshop replacement, but there are plenty of people using Krita instead of Photoshop.

I very much doubt that, given that Krita is an Illustrator competitor.

Not really. Krita and Gimp are raster authoring tools that compete with Photoshop, though all 3 support vectors. Illustrator is a vector authoring tool that Inkscape competes with.

Hmm, I'm going to have to check it out again. I was under the impression that it's mostly for vector authoring, thanks.

Krita used to be a jack-of-all-trades painting program for the first few years of its existence. At some point, the devs figured out that they can get people to fund development more effectively when they focus on one usecase (digital painting w/ tablet) and make that really solid.

Ah, that's why I thought it was a competitor to Illustrator. What I use Photoshop for is photography, which sounds like it's not Krita's main use case.

The most popular Illustrator alternative is Inkscape.

The person is probably most familiar with their former products and can both advocate on merit (i.e., they happen to know about obscure features that no-one knows about for other options) and is more comfortable for them. Knowing people (and being their former boss) probably helps them out, too, which makes it easier to pull things towards their former projects).

But yeah - it doesn't seem like this should happen as often as it does.

Just to be clear, I was making the point that Marc is making a move against his former employer Autodesk by funding Blender like this.

they playing at a different game, the value they bring is their network of connections that can leverage in all sort of deals, fair or otherwise. this is transitive, of course, so as they move the deal go both ways keeping the game net positive. it only works at that level because there's a limited pool of highly valuable connections to leverage, at lower levels the people either don't handle a budget directly, so their leverage is irrelevant, or their relative network value is average, making it not an asset during job negotiation.

People say it's impossible to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it. People don't do this conciously. Instead, I think people's worldview naturally changes to be one that benefits their employer.

People tend to preferentially value things that they understand. If you understand your employer's business platform, you'll naturally prefer it. I don't think you need such a cynical explanation to get the same end result...

> I never understood when bigshots force deals with companies they used to work at

It's the devil they know. It's not likely malicious or anything conniving, and just something they feel comfortable talking about when making the pitch for their integration.

Still owns private stock or something analogous?

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