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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

#181

Post by justabystander »

Their "subscription" model was basically a year of small issue maintenance and 1-2 major versions. They spent more effort expanding into new markets than they did maintaining and improving existing tools. I don't really anticipate them spending any more time on tool improvement despite the cash grab.

I don't like companies that hold my development process hostage or treat me like a serf. I get that they want to stop maintaining old versions. But allowing people access to the full range of builds within their subscription (with maybe a slight exception of providing the next "stable" build after expiration) and some contract lingo should cover that.

Rental has its usage, but it's not for everyone.

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

#182

Post by toyg »

Latty wrote: post #131
gdulli wrote: post #123

Personally, they had lost my goodwill already with their old upgrade policy. If you bought a license on 01/2014, it expired on 12/2014, and you didn't need the product again until 04/2015, the upgrade you purchase in April begins on 01/2015, retroactively beginning after the end of the previous license. So you don't get the full 12 months they charge you for. When I realized that it was the end of my support for them…

Why would it work another way? You are paying to extend your old license, of course it carries on from when it finished. If you want a year from the present moment, that's not an extension, it's a new purchase. Otherwise, no one would extend until after a new release came out once it ended.

> Otherwise, no one would extend until after a new release came out once it ended.

That's only a problem if your renewal price is different from a new license.

This is the Oracle model, by the way. Say you buy Oracle with its compulsory support package, then you stop paying (because you don't need or want support, you're not going to upgrade etc). If at any point in the future you decide you'd actually like to buy the new version, you'll have to pay retroactive fees for all the time you skipped renewing. It's... not really nice.

In this sense, a switch to clear per-month pricing is actually welcome; it's just the "disabling stuff you paid for" that grates.

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

#183

Post by Latty »

mikeash wrote: post #125
fastball wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use the open source community edition of many of their products forever...

If that's the solution then I guess I might as well get started with it now. Edit: oh, exactly one of their products has a Community Edition. Guess that's not much of an option after all, unless that's the one product you need.

It's definitely not all their products, but it's definitely higher than one too - PyCharm and IntelliJ both have Community Editions.

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

#184

Post by lewisl9029 »

That's really too bad.

I actually used and liked WebStorm at one point. I've since switched to Atom, but I still occasionally miss some of the more advanced refactoring and navigation features that indexing and static analysis made possible.

Every time JetBrains released a new version of WebStorm I usually try to take a thorough look through the release notes and sometimes become tempted to give it another try.

But this new subscription model has managed to completely kill any enthusiasm I had left for WebStorm and other JetBrains products.

As a side note, I really hope this doesn't mean Cursive is going to have to switch to the same subscription model.

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

#185

Post by steve_taylor »

This was inevitable. Businesses want month-to-month licensing and now I expect JetBrains will see solid growth driven by their business customers. I would rather see a cashed-up JetBrains acquire - let's say - Xamarin than the opposite outcome, which would be an unmitigated disaster.

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

#186

Post by mattkevan »

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.

Ha, yes. As a daily user of Creative Suite, the 'cloud' benefits are fairly feeble.

The file hosting is handy, but we already use Dropbox and Google Drive. The other features seem like they could have been incorporated into the desktop apps but were pulled into the cloud to make it appear more worthwhile.

I can see how moving shrink-wrap software to a subscription can be good for the company – reliable income streams, no longer having to worry about headline features to get people to buy the next version – but (especially in Adobe's case) it's hard to see it as anything but a cynical attempt to milk customers for every last drop before the whole thing crumbles.

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

#187

Post by kyriakos »

leetrout wrote: post #95
teacup50 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This _feels_ pretty accurate. As a user of PyCharm, PHPStorm, and recently YouTrack, and in my experience, all the products either lack support for current trends (ES2015 for instance) or are riddled with bugs (YouTrack). YouTrack in general shocked me in the rough edges / lack of sane integration with SCM.

I disagree, at least for PHPstorm new features are cutting edge and don't exist in competing products.

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

#188

Post by jasonellis »

aikah wrote: post #106
WorldMaker wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Ultimate version of IDEA seems to support all languages at once.

It does through plugins. The language-specific IDEs are updated with language features earlier than the plugins for IDEA and they have simplified project creation/management. For instance, it's a lot easier to setup a Python project and choose your interpreter/packages in PyCharm than it is in IDEA.

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

#189

Post by dfox »

progmal1 wrote: post #129
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…

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 reason to use VS for .NET projects (VS being the "native" IDE), but I completely fail to see why one would use VS for C/C++ (which is even exaggerated by various quirks of MS's compiler, like not supporting C99 and different versions of stdlib that sometimes can be used at same time and sometimes can't).

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