Even though there are already a couple of other threads about this Schweinerei, there wasn’t a good place to insert this into the discussion, and for those unfamiliar, this video’s a good starting point.

  • Brand loyalty and also dependency of the tools due to existing projects and files. People invested into a system with huge money and efforts won’t switch easily to something new and unknown, starting from scratch.

    •  M500   ( @M500@lemmy.ml ) 
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      157 months ago

      Linus tech tips did a video about this where he had his team use other tools. Essentially he was like, it would end up costing him more or the same as it would take his team longer to do the same stuff and relearn.

      It might have been a shortsighted video, but you can look it up if you want to.

        • Short sighted LTT video?

          Checks out

          Seriously though transitioning your team to a new software suite will suck at first but it’s worth it in the long run. Long term gains vs short term gains and all that.

          • Is Adobe suite a major cost for LTT though? It’s the cost of a few licenses, and if it means just one less video goes out per year due to the inefficiencies of learning a new software package, it would not be worth the switch. I’m assuming each video they put out brings in revenue well into the 5 figures.

              • Exactly, that would be chicken feed compared to the overall cash flow for LTT alone. He’s got plenty of other YouTube channels and other means of making money.

                YouTube ad revenue OF LTT in 2022 was $4.6 million, and sponsors would have paid the channel more than ad revenue was bringing in.

                • To add, let’s do some math!

                  Let s be the total annual salary of every employee using Adobe. Our goal is to find the productivity ratio r such that changing to Gimp and open source more generally is a net positive from the standpoint of productivity and labor.

                  s/r will be the total annual salary after changing over, because (for instance) if r = 0.8 then LTT will need to either hire or work his existing hires 1/0.8 times longer, giving (at best, ignoring overtime and so on) s/r as the new labor cost.

                  We then subtract the current labor cost to get the switching cost s/r - s, and if this is greater than $10,000 then the switch is not worth it.

                  For instance, let’s say LTT employs 1 person at $50k/year. He’s a bit of a skinflint. We solve for r and arrive at a ratio of 5/6 or 83.33%.

                  If we have a different world where LTT hires 10 people and pays each of them $100k, we solve for r and get about 99%.

                  In other words, the switch is worth it only if the labor cost is small, so the extra labor is not very expensive, or the difference between the two software is negligible.