How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by calebm » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 3:13 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #154

Rezo wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JetBrains produces a continuous stream of improvements to all of their tools, previously they would have to artificially hold some of the bigger changes back to justify the next big yearly version number increase. With subscriptions, this is no longer necessary, everyone can have the latest and greatest right away. And I do hope the next logical step is to offer an optional fully hosted service that has feature parit…

Yeah, but the "right" way to do it is to disable updates on license expiration, not just turn off a product you might have paid for since 2010. Maybe the best thing to do would be an initial payment worth, say, 6 months, followed by monthly renewals; if the renewal does not go through, updates stop. This would be closer to the current model, but would still switch most revenue (renewals) to the SaaS model.

Agree

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

#202

Post by rev_bird » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 3:13 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #141

jrs235 wrote: post #109

This isn't even Software-as-a-Service. Most companies that offer SaaS are HOSTING the software and thus incurring ongoing monthly costs. The Service part is that the purchaser doesn't have to install the software on their own machines, pay for nor update servers, etc. Selling rights to use [but not own] software on a monthly basis should be called RtpS - Rent-to-pwned-Software (cause you're pwned, you'll never own it…

Some SaaS "hostings" are paper-thin, like Adobe or Steam. They are glorified FTP sites.

I'm with you on Adobe, but Steam is a whole different thing, even leaving out its OS aspirations. Probably most importantly, it's free -- I think of it as an unusually heavy e-commerce site that needed me to install a bunch of stuff to get it to work. Kind of like if Netflix let me watch stuff offline, but only if I put their Chrome app on my computer: It's a client for accessing their platform.

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

#203

Post by agentgt » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 3:13 PM UTC

Ironically I just switched back to Eclipse Mars from Intellij. Intellij is an awesome product and for certain development environments it hands down beats Eclipse... but if your just coding in a JVM language (Java, Scala..) Eclipse Mars is pretty decent. For me It really was never the features that made me want to use Intellij but the simple fact that shit never seems to get fixed in Eclipse version after version.

Eclipse Mars is better than previous versions but there are still ancient bugs:

Mac OSX scrolling: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=366471

Font Line Height (thank you Atom for supporting this) https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=26765

I have like 10 more bugs that I wish I could pay to have fixed. Intellij had this problem too (but lesser) and I really wish a company had some sort of pricing option to have certain bugs/features fast tracked. Eclipse takes donations and Intellij purchaes but you can't specifically say hey I will give you $1000 if you just fix xyz bug/feature. I know there are services that do this on opensource projects... I just wish that companies did it as well.

Speaking of Atom I just created an Eclipse Color theme that looks like One Dark syntax https://gist.github.com/agentgt/fcaf75eb8acf92e08926 . Combined with the Dark widget theme (yes Mars seems to have made this better) it really looks pretty decent on Mac. Its nice because I use Atom for frontend work so I have consistency theme wise.

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

#204

Post by konradb » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 3:14 PM UTC

joshstrange wrote: post #117

alt_f4 wrote: post #60

Yet another reason for me to stick with Eclipse. When will people realise that true & complete OSS is the only answer.

When it stops being a massive PITA to use... I HATE Eclipse, it's a massively bloated POS IMHO and I wouldn't touch it with a 10' pole. Eclipse is what drove me FAR away from IDE's until a friend recommended JetBrains to me and I found how awesome it was. OSS fanatics drive me up a wall. I don't have unlimited amounts of time to customise something a ton just to make it useable. I'm not going to make my life harder o…

I'm with you in terms of productivity/results etc. I remember when I started with a new team that were all Eclipse. I gave it my all. I really did. No doubt much of it came down to familiarity but there was something about it that I couldn't jive with. It seemed to introduce concepts/abstractions that didn't need to exist. It crashed a bunch. There were more steps involved with everything. I had pick up after it. It was slow. Then I said, you know what? I can't hack this, I'm going back to IDEA. Suddenly it felt like I was in a ferrari rather than a trabant. Fully accept that a lot of that was down to me not being a particularly fast learner, that I was used to IDEA in the first place etc.

I'm happy to pay Jetbrains three times the amount I pay to continue with it. This deal is great for me because I wanted to use PyCharm and CLion, and have historically used Rubymine, and the amount I have to pay to have everything isn't that far off what I pay already.

I consider it money well paid to be able to be more productive. Understand other people feel differently... it's nice to be idealogically consistent and beholden to no-one. That's worth a lot to many.

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

#205

Post by Artemis2 » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 3:16 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #162

cool-RR wrote: post #137

I see a lot of whining in this thread. If you think that an increase of $100/year in the price of a tool that you use every day, for, say, at least 5 hours daily as part of your job as software developer as a meaningful price increase, than the cost of your IDE is not close to being your biggest problem. Even taxi drivers invest more money than software developers in the tools that they use every day, and software de…

A taxi driver will buy a nice pair of comfortable shoes and then keep them forever. The seller will not come around every month asking for money and threatening to take back his shoes if he doesn't cough up. That's what a different type of "business" does.

A taxi driver will need their car fixed periodically at their dealership. If they don't pay up, no car.

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

#206

Post by progmal1 » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 3:16 PM UTC

dfox wrote: post #189

progmal1 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right about being at the mercy, but I have not used free software as good as the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE for development.

I've heard many people say exactly that (or even that VS is simply the best IDE). I somehow fail to see why would anyone say that. The whole solution/project model seems to be optimized for something that does not make much sense to me. The UI is mostly unusable on small screens. Integrated editor feels somewhat weird to me (I'm probably too addicted to emacs' electric-indent, but even then). Thus I may see some reas…

For me, the small screen is not an issue, because I typically develop on as much screen as I can muster.

As far as the editor, there are some good attempts at code completion from other systems, but I have not found one nearly as good as Intellisense. That is coupled with the jump to definition and declaration.

Also, the integrated debugging and some of the edit and continue functionality is amazing.

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

#207

Post by jroseattle » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 3:16 PM UTC

zeveb wrote: post #126

What I don't get is why a developer would ever use proprietary software in the first place. I code—it's what I do. I want to tools to be excellent, certainly, and I don't want to have to spend a lot of time fixing them where they aren't, but I want to be able to improve them for my use cases. Who else in the world is as capable at knowing what I need as…me? If you use proprietary software, you're at the mercy of the…

In our business, we're building software -- not software tools. I give my engineers full reign to determine what tools they use. For our build vs. buy evaluation, we don't have a need to modify or extend tooling beyond their existing capabilities (I find the JetBrains plug-in model fairly decent.) We use a lot of JetBrains tools in our operation.

It all comes down to build/buy assessment, because build still costs money. JetBrains has a price point that puts a tight margin on that build decision.

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

#208

Post by cmdkeen » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 3:16 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #162

cool-RR wrote: post #137

I see a lot of whining in this thread. If you think that an increase of $100/year in the price of a tool that you use every day, for, say, at least 5 hours daily as part of your job as software developer as a meaningful price increase, than the cost of your IDE is not close to being your biggest problem. Even taxi drivers invest more money than software developers in the tools that they use every day, and software de…

A taxi driver will buy a nice pair of comfortable shoes and then keep them forever. The seller will not come around every month asking for money and threatening to take back his shoes if he doesn't cough up. That's what a different type of "business" does.

Seriously, someone on HN equating SAAS to extortion...

Much like the OP talking of not being able to do development if your employer fails to approve the payment in time. Resharper is nice and all but you can actually write C# without it. (I know PyCharm etc might be harder but the article was about Resharper).

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

#209

Post by joesmo » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 3:17 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #155

estefan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just use IDEA ultimate and install different plugins per language?

I tried, it's not the same. The dedicated tools are better.

Also, it doesn't support all the plugins for each language, only some languages.

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

#210

Post by mindcrime » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 3:17 PM UTC

We use a subscription model at Fogbeam, but here's the twist: all our software is open source, and you're free to use it as you like, with or without a subscription.

So why buy a subscription at all?

Because you get the kinds of things big companies care about: certification, maintenance, support, indemnification, somebody to sue if things don't work, a vendor to shift blame onto if the shit hits the fan, a discount on professional services work, perpetual upgrades, priority access to influence the roadmap and direction of the product, etc. Subscriptions are also a win for customers in that (depending on the details) they may be able to pay for a subscription out of an operational budget, rather than needing to go to some committee and get approval for a large one-time capital expenditure. And with subscriptions you are paying a portion of the cost in future, inflated, dollars instead of today's dollars.

Of course, like any vendor who does OSS, we run the risk of having a lot of people using our software and never paying, but that's just something we accept.

But here's the thing... we don't sell development tools - IDEs and the like. Our stuff is backend/middle-ware that costs in the tens of thousands of dollars and up (for companies with thousands of employees, anyway), which makes things like worrying about capital expenditures more of an issue. At the kind of price-points you are talking about for IDEs and what-not, I'm not sure the advantages of a subscription (from the customer POV) really carry much weight.