Yet another reason for me to stick with Eclipse. When will people realise that true & complete OSS is the only answer.
I get burned by proprietary software way more often than I do by Free Software.
How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
71–80 of 507 posts
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#72I 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 b…
I think it depends on the company.
For a larger corporation where the act of managing pools of licenses is a significant expense and literally everything the business does is managed in terms of contracts that must be maintained via regular payments, this makes a whole lot of sense. Even if the licensing model costs a bit more on paper, it's probably still cheaper to them because of saving the cost of having someone spend time physically managing all those individual licenses every time someone switches projects or enters or leaves the company.
For a smaller company or indie shop I'm not sure it's the same story. The calculus above depends on economies of scale to work out.
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#73I think JetBrains miscalculated just how much people like the current licensing model. I liked their first model - I paid for it and just used it. The current model, with the yearly upgrade premium, I tolerated. I felt it was a scam (are they going to publish an update in the next year so I get my money's worth? Probably not) but I could deal with it. This new model doesn't work for me at all. As someone who bought h…
> * I felt it was a scam (are they going to publish an update in the next year so I get my money's worth? Probably not) but I could deal with it.*
Surely under the current model you can just not pay for another year until they release an update you want access to?
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#74It seems likely that JetBrains moved to this model because their current revenue model doesn't allow for enough runway to allow them to make updates as needed or grow the business. So from that perspective changing to a model where they continually get money helps them stay in business. Where they 'went wrong', if you could call it that, is that they forced developers down this new path without allowing us to 'dip ou…
Where JetBrains went wrong is in spreading themselves too thin on too many development fronts, letting products like IntelliJ languish with few significant features added and far too many bugs unfixed, and then deciding the solution to a lack of effort on these products was to switch to a subscription model so that all of their customers would pay for the updates whether or not they're worth paying for.
It seems to me that where JetBrains went wrong was building every language supported as a separate application. According to their announcement post the stated goal of was to deal with the customer ask to get easier discounts on multiple language products or to move from one language to another more easily. To JetBrains the solution was apparently to switch to SaaS, which kind of makes sense, but from my perspective maybe they should have just consolidated some of their product efforts?
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#75Meh, the only real issue there is the phoning home. The other issues he points out seem pretty contrived.
JetBrains rep here.
"Phoning home" is actually not new. We've introduced JetBrains Account as a way of authorizing a product instance (as an alternative to license keys) for a couple of years now.
Current student licenses work exactly the same way, as well as a part of classroom and OS licenses AFAIK. A lot of current personal and some commercial licenses are managed through a JetBrains Account as well.
With the new scheme, JetBrains Account will simply gain more usage than now, hard-coded license keys will eventually go away, but a license server option for environments that have restricted Internet connection will be provided the same as it is now.
Now, there might be certain additional steps we might need to take to ensure license delivery in certain scenarios but we'll be handling this as we receive specific problem reports.
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#76I 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 b…
As an owner of a company, business continuity-destroying dependencies on SaaS is the opposite of a big win.
Nope, we just had to shut down our corporate evaluation of phpstorm because our org does not allow us to purchase locked in products with shut off mechanisms.
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#77It'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…
I pay for Spotify. I don't like JetBrains' decision. Walk me through why this removes my right to complain. I don't get it. I don't like JetBrains' decision because using their software represents a large investment in time and effort to learn it and get set up to use it. That investment could then be destroyed at any time if they go out of business, or if they decide in a few years that their prices need to be 500x…
1. If they "go out of business" you will save money with the new model, because instead of paying for a year of the license in advance, you are paying by month.
2. Nothing in their old model prevented them from raising prices. Not sure how you think switching to a monthly subscription model changes that.
i.e. your entire premise, that this is an investment of time and money, really has nothing to do with JetBrains' switch to a subscription model. In fact, they would probably be more likely to go out of business if they stuck with the old model, so this protects your investment.
Complaining because you don't think you can afford it is an understandable position. Your points, however, are entirely irrelevant.
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#78Will there still be a Community Edition? (Free, with reduced capabilities.)
Yes, our free products (IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm Community Editions, dotPeek) are not affected by these changes. They'll be available as before.
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#79It'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…
>> the IDE landscape is a bit more healthy, so I expect that a subset of their customers will flee to other IDEs.
Agreed.
I dropped most of Adobe's products after they went to a subscription based model. The only product I still use is Photoshop and I'm planning on dropping that later this year so I can move 100% to Linux.
For the record, over 95% of the front-end devs I know use Sublime Text for their IDE.
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#80I think JetBrains miscalculated just how much people like the current licensing model. I liked their first model - I paid for it and just used it. The current model, with the yearly upgrade premium, I tolerated. I felt it was a scam (are they going to publish an update in the next year so I get my money's worth? Probably not) but I could deal with it. This new model doesn't work for me at all. As someone who bought h…
> * I felt it was a scam (are they going to publish an update in the next year so I get my money's worth? Probably not) but I could deal with it.* Surely under the current model you can just not pay for another year until they release an update you want access to?
Your 1 year upgrade starts from when your last license ran, not from when you paid for the upgrade. So if your license ran out in January and you bought a 1 year upgrade next June. That upgrade would only last until next January, not next June.