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

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

#211

Post by glenndebacker »

aikah wrote: post #100

To be fair , it worked quite well for Adobe products ( most of them are now using a monthly subscription scheme ) despite all the dissatisfaction voiced by some customers at first. It is both good for Adobe and good for the competition. In fact allowed some challengers to be profitable when everybody pirated Photoshop before as 95% of people using it only took advantage of 1% of Photoshop features. It will be a good…

The reason why it works well for Autodesk and Adobe is the fact that they have a defacto monopoly in their fields. My boss doesn't like the fact that they have a subscription scheme but we have one for Adobe Cloud because there isn't another way. That is not the case for an IDE. I really like PyCharm and PHPStorm but I can (and also would) drop them in a heartbeat.

You will always find some (edge) case who can profit from these kind of schemes - an amateur photographer for example with Adobe CC or somebody who uses all the jetbrain tools - but there are a lot of cases that are a different and really don't have any benefits of using SAAS.

In Flanders we have a saying that goes a bit like this: "all small things makes on big thing". The personal problem that I have is that if I would add all those "inexpensive" subscriptions of services it will add up very fast to a point that it is becoming really expensive. I don't buy all software in a single month or can even wait for upgrading if an older version is good enough for me, with SAASS that is not the case.

But I have the same opinion that this race to convert all commercial software to SAAS will be beneficial for OSS alternatives. Personally I would even go as far as donating (or crowdfund) (for the same amount that I would give to jetbrains) to an OSS project, if that means that I would get an alternative that I don't need to "rent".

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

#212

Post by moe »

cwyers wrote: post #175
balabaster wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? The only product I use is Resharper... I was paying $119 an update before, now I'll be paying $240?!? Yeah, that's not a good deal for me. There's no amount of skewed math I can apply that makes $240 less than $119...

Here's the pricing policy: https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox/ The $20 is for all products, Resharper alone is $11.90 a month or $119 a year.

So previously $119 would buy him infinite years.

And now $119 buys him a single year.

Sounds like a downgrade to me?

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

#213

Post by jacquesm »

I would like to encourage everybody that does not like the new licensing scheme of JetBrains to band together and produce either an open source product that is as polished so it can be used for free or, alternatively to take this apparently huge business opportunity and run with it.

I never quite understood what makes people that make 100's of thousands of dollars per year so cheap that they would balk at paying a few hundred $ for their main tool of choice.

Looking at a moderately tooled up wood or metalworking shop you'd be looking at a very large multiple for the main tools + accessories without a hope to make the kind of money we can make in software.

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

#215

Post by joesmo »

silvestrov wrote: post #178

Polishing and bug fixes cost money, but nobody wants to pay for that. People only want to pay for new shiny features. If IntelliJ doesn't get money because developers think "old version is good enough for me", then there is no money for bug fixing and for keeping the product alive. It would end up as abandonware like most apps on the iPhone App Store. I'd guess the IDE have now reached this "fully featured" milestone…

"I feel that the core IDE has degraded in quality over the past years because the releases were feature-driven, and I'd be happy to see IntelliJ refocus on quality instead of quantity."

I couldn't agree more. The latest versions have a ton of bugs that were not present before. Some of the IDEs are totally unusable for certain tasks like debugging. I don't think they will focus on fixing bugs and they haven't introduced any great features, IMO, in years.

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

#216

Post by kisstheblade »

keyle wrote: post #22
vermooten wrote: post #3

Thank god Eclipse has gotten very usable in recent years.

Really? I mean I used Eclipse for years prior to VS and IntelliJ. IntelliJ wins hands down. This pricing model though.... upsets me.

I don't know how people use their ides, but I have had no problems with eclipse and feel plenty productive with it. Writing java code in my case. It has autocomplete and that's pretty much what I need... Great support with workspaces and multiple modules (I have about 50-100 "projects" in one workspace, and you can use filtered views also if needed). An it has a faster more responsive UI and better fonts thanks to eclipse's SWT, java's UI-toolkit is sluggish and horrible fonts. Also idea seemed to be indexing a whole lot of stuff the whole time... Eclipse just finds the stuff you need with no fuss indexing (it does indexing of course but it's barely noticeable)

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

#217

Post by jasonkester »

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…

The reason is that we're capable of multiplication and comparison.

$240 per year / $200/hour = 1.2 hours that this thing needs to save me each year to be worth paying for. I don't think that I could rewrite ReSharper from scratch in that amount of time. I know from long use that it will save me that much time each year.

It's the simplest money I'll spend all year. It would be if my bill rate were a tenth of what it is.

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

#218

Post by orangecat »

kailuowang wrote: post #166

JetBrian used to have to improve the product significantly every major release so that people would pay for the new version. Just want to point out that by changing to the new subscription model, they no longer have that drive. Of course there are still other reasons for innovating their product, it's just one less.

Right. In an alternate world where you had to pay Intel $20/month or they'd brick your CPU, I'd expect their rate of improvements to be much lower.

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

#220

Post by nbevans »

It's really odd how the C# community took ReSharper to heart so easily and somewhat irreversibly. The amount of C# developers out there now that will literally turn down a job offer if ReSharper is not used at that shop. It is also the #1 complaint of even higher-end C# devs as to why they would never move to F#... because there is not ReSharper for it. Duh. It's sad they can't see that ReSharper is merely a symptom of a poor language; to work around all its flaws.
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