this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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No offense, but that's like pissing into the wind. As you know, business drives IT adoption. We have 50 engineers that can only use Windows because we depend on Autodesk software. We spend $50k per year on Office E5. I, as an individual, will never spend in my lifetime, what I spend in 1 year at work, with Microsoft. I'm not saying this to brag, but to give perspective. It's how you have to drive Linux adoption too.
It is my opinion that the iPhone became successful because it supplanted Blackberry as the preferred corporate phone. At the time, the iphone did not play nice with any IT management system (like Active Directory). IT staff hated it, but we couldn't say no because there was no equivalent alternative, Corporate adoption drove the iPhone's success. Linux needs to do something that no one else is doing well.
Linux ate Microsoft's lunch in the server space. Sometimes the winds shift.
What a problem to have when your engineering team's skill set are vendor locked. Not that I'm familiar with autodesk or why you absolutely have to use it, but your engineers could perhaps learn to use blender and use a Linux desktop environment and potentially save a lot of money in licenses and subscriptions.
If it's 3dsMax yes you can switch over, if Blender doesn't suffice there's Houdini and many many 3d graphics studios are in fact Linux shops -- Linux inherited that particular slice of the market from IRIX. Some seats will still be on windows or more likely Mac because ZBrush, AfterEffects and generally Adobe. If you're using Maya there's no issue in the first place as the thing runs on Linux.
If it's AutoCAD, though, tough fucking luck. Once upon a time there was Siemens NX but they pulled Linux support and free CAD/CAM is nowhere close to production ready.
And, no, retraining people generally is usually not cheaper than paying license fees, by a long shot. Maybe if you pay out of your nose for Houdini but actually only need Blender but who does that in the first place.
Are you speaking of just short-term, or long-term as well?
Long-term for the likes of Hollywood contract studios is "till the end of the production" so, yes. It's also insanity to switch software while a project is ongoing so you'd have to shut down the studio and then start it up again at which point they'd likely be bankrupt. They're not even upgrading software versions.
Now if you're the likes of Siemens or Airbus who more or less on a whim write their own CAD/CAM packages sure it pays off to re-train your engineers, using a software that was tailor-made for what they need to do was the objective in the first place, increasing their productivity. But you won't make a Maya artist more productive by sitting them in front of Blender. It's more like switching between vi and emacs: Both are very capable and have steep learning curves due to their sheer power and productivity focus (and one of each causes RSI. To wit, Maya doesn't have right-click select).
So if I'm to believe you then no one should ever retrain for any better products ever, because it's too cost prohibitive?
That we should use a static set in cement set of products until the end of time, even if a better ones come out that require training?
Nah there's definitely another option and that's to abolish capitalism.
Did you know that with the automation tech from 10 years ago the world could already have 70% unemployed and yet produce western middle-class living standards for absolutely everyone? The reason it's not done is not that investing in automation doesn't have a gigantic ROI, it's that it's too long-term for capital to care. Also we don't want that kind of power in the hands of capitalists anyway but that's another story. The Diamond Age it's called, I think.
Ah, here's something I can actually reply to...
No one said anything about automation. We were talking about a human being switching for one operating system to another and learning a new tool/program that will save them money in the long run, versus being short-sighted, or as they used to say, "penny-wise, and pound foolish".
Your position, as I understood it, was that it should never be done because it's not cost beneficial, it's cost prohibited. I was trying to get a qualifier from you of if you thought that was true for just short-term gains, or both short-term and long-term gains.
I explained why it's not done. I'm not saying that the system is good.
The existing short-term and long-term incentive structure is what it is. That's the material conditions we're dealing with. Don't like them? Become a revolutionary, but don't stand there and pretend they don't exist as if users are frictionless, spherical cows floating in platonic space.
They don't exist, not in the way you're trying to apply them to this situation and the question I asked. Your just strawmanning.
Ok I'll humour you. If the material conditions aren't as I described them to be, then what are they, in your opinion? What's the cause? Why aren't companies rushing to switch over their operations?