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How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours

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31–40 of 507 posts

Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours

#31

So once again the people getting the best deal will be the pirates :( I suppose that we are at JetBrains market saturation levels - everybody is using their IDEs, so they just don't sell as many new licences to fuel growth.

> everybody is using their IDEs

And I think that's a shame, because I prefer NetBeans over IntelliJ. I've used both, and IntelliJ's Maven integration is just terrible.

Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours

#32
post #17

It's my personal opinion that one only gets complaining rights if one doesn't use Gmail, one doesn't subscribe to NetFlix, one doesn't use Spotify, ad nauseum. JetBrains is making a business decision. That's what businesses do. Their current Community Edition is open-source. Anyone is free to pick up where they left off. That is an enormous contribution they've already made to the community. You make your consumer de…

This makes no sense whatsoever.

All of the things you listed are services that run on servers that cost money to run.

JetBrains' IDEs are downloadable software that we pay for and exists in perpetuity.

I also have no idea why you're referencing the community edition; the people complaining are customers that pay for JetBrains' non-OSS software.

Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours

#33
post #17

It's my personal opinion that one only gets complaining rights if one doesn't use Gmail, one doesn't subscribe to NetFlix, one doesn't use Spotify, ad nauseum. JetBrains is making a business decision. That's what businesses do. Their current Community Edition is open-source. Anyone is free to pick up where they left off. That is an enormous contribution they've already made to the community. You make your consumer de…

[deleted]

Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours

#35
post #29

It's hard to make an argument that loyal customers are lost. Don't they by definition renew the license every year anyway? If not, still no one is lost - existing licenses don't magically expire. This change affects only potential new customers who are not renewing every year for some reason.

Note that the title says 'customer loyalty'. I think IntelliJ et al. became popular through word of mouth of developers (that's how I started using IntelliJ and I recommended it to many others).

If those developers go from 'IntelliJ is great and the JetBrains people rock' to 'IntelliJ may be great, but JetBrains is scammy', it may be bad for growth.

Of course, one can assume that they calculated in some protests + losing customers.

Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours

#36
post #17

It's my personal opinion that one only gets complaining rights if one doesn't use Gmail, one doesn't subscribe to NetFlix, one doesn't use Spotify, ad nauseum. JetBrains is making a business decision. That's what businesses do. Their current Community Edition is open-source. Anyone is free to pick up where they left off. That is an enormous contribution they've already made to the community. You make your consumer de…

It's my personal opinion that one only gets complaining rights if one doesn't use Gmail, one doesn't subscribe to NetFlix, one doesn't use Spotify, ad nauseum. That does not make sense. Spotify et al. were like that from the beginning. You know what kind of deal you are getting. JetBrains is changing the rules of the game completely, with very little heads-up time, for people who might be deeply invested in their pro…

Not so sure about that. JetBrains has excellent products. So, sure, people can flock to other tools, but they aren't necessarily better tools.

I have gotten so used to using ReSharper, I'm probably 30% less productive without it.

Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours

#37
The author claims that indie developers will be hit who let their licenses lapse due to limited income as well as forgetful corporations who forget to renew. I always found the reasons for these issues was because everyone's licenses expire at different times and it was hard to track (even with budgeting as an indie developer). If it is moved to a monthly service model, I think these issues would actually improve.

Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours

#38
post #29

It's hard to make an argument that loyal customers are lost. Don't they by definition renew the license every year anyway? If not, still no one is lost - existing licenses don't magically expire. This change affects only potential new customers who are not renewing every year for some reason.

> If not, still no one is lost - existing licenses don't magically expire.

Converted and new ones do, so previously loyal customers who don't want to lose their perpetual license… can't upgrade their editor ever again.

Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours

#40
I think the critics are missing one huge benefit: Most of their licenses are bought by companies. A company that buys a perpetual license now has no reason to upgrade unless the developers complain and prod; a company that buys a SaaS subscription enables its devs to upgrade to the newest versions as quickly as they want.

For most of JetBrains actual corporate users, the upshot of this is that they'll never need to bug their managers to buy the new version, or suffer on years-old versions because of corporate inertia. That's a big win.

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