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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

#191

Post by EthanHeilman »

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…

Its not the price, it is that if I write some software in an IDE, I want the capability to push a bug fix out two years later without having to "subscribe" again. This will just further contribute to bitrot.

>taxi drivers invest more money than software developers

Citation needed.

>software developers make quite a bit more money than taxi drivers.

You are assuming that everyone who develops software is employed as a software developer. There is fine work done by hobbyists and independents.

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

#192

Post by jrs235 »

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…

"Polishing and bug fixes cost money" and should be factored into cost of development and price of the product...

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

#193

Post by epalmer »

LoneWolf wrote: post #65
epalmer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use IntelliJ, phpStorm and pyCharm all on a regular business. But I work for a university and just assume that the subscriptions won't lapse. That may be a bad assumption given that I control the departments budget and it would come out of my allocations if the cost go up. Mixed feelings on this change. But I really like the three products I use and will continue to use them.

If you work for an university you should probably be able to use the education license, which is free.

Not free for internal use just for classroom. Discounted and a pain to get them to give us the discount.

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

#194

Post by estefan »

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.

+1

I'm happy enough to pay a subscription for intellij since the price seems about the same (oh actually they're putting it up by £20 or £30 per year after the first year). I'd rather get frequent updates, but since I've already bought it outright twice (upgrading when I feel I need to) it seems a bit lame to just pull the plug should you ever take a break.

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

#195

Post by matwood »

macca321 wrote: post #51
mkozlows wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more immediately obvious comparison is MSDN. Anyone who's using ReSharper, at least, is already almost certainly subscribing to MSDN.

I'm not. Why would I subscribe to MSDN? I used to have a paid for VS Pro, now I use Community.

Yeah, MS has been moving in the opposite direction and making more and more of their developer tools free or nearly so.

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

#196

Post by Latty »

gdulli wrote: post #171
Latty wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Why would it work another way? Because I shouldn't have to retroactively pay for a period I didn't use a product and the natural thing for me to assume was my status as a previous customer/license holder was what enabled me to an upgrade with the advertised "year's" worth of upgrades? Because that's how upgrade licenses work for other software products? (Windows/Office, other stuff I've used.) They can define a lic…

So you'd rather they packaged all the updates into big yearly versions you paid for all at once, rather than getting things as they are done? That sucks.

If you still want updates as they come, either they are free if you own the version (in which case, you feel cheated if you buy a version then a new one comes out soon after), meaning people will avoid buying the product until the new version comes out.

With the year of upgrades included, it works. Now, in your case, you want to have your cake and eat it too - you still benefit from the upgrades the software got while you were not using it. You were not paying for using the software (that's the new model), you were paying to receive updates, so you either pay continuously for them at a reduced price, or pay for a new year when it runs out.

In fact, what is kind of crazy is what you are saying is you only want to pay for the software while you are using it, which is exactly the new model. You want to use the version you have forever, get all the updates, and also not pay when you don't use it. How is that going to be a sane business model from the other side?

Hey, sure, it's not worth it for you - that's your call, but what business model would actually be good enough for your standards?

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

#197

Post by toyg »

hoopism wrote: post #128

In the previous thread on the announcement I expressed some concerns ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10165919 ). An employee responded: "I see this is turning into a conspiracy theory ) Fortunately, there's a little thing called competition that prevents raising rates at will without facing the consequences, and JetBrains is no exception: we're no monopoly" So the message first was "We did this for YOU!" and t…

A lot of JetBrains employees speak English as a second language, and can come off a bit too harsh and direct at times, so you have to give them some leeway when trying to read between the lines.

Just... never trust a business that says "we're doing this for you, beloved customers". They are not. Even if they did it to make you happy, it would simply mean they profit from your happiness in some way. A business does things to make a profit and expand, nothing else. JetBrains are doing this because they feel they have to, likely because of cashflow constraints; everything else is just corporate doublespeak.

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

#198

Post by joesmo »

Wow. This is terrible. I'm a user of a few of their products (PHPStorm, PyCharm, IDEA, and RubyMine), two of which I've paid for and gotten upgrades for in the past on a fairly regular basis. I've extolled Jetbrains and praised the to such great lengths you'd think I was an evangelist for them. But now, it seems like it's time yet again (something I though was over after discovering Jetbrains) to find a proper IDE.

Their products have been going down in quality. In the latest PHPStorm for example, I've had serious problems with the debugger not working and it rewriting my code to put many lines into one (fun!). Jetbrains hasn't released a new feature that I use on a constant basis for two major versions (multi-cursor is debatable, but certainly not a daily-basis feature). I seriously regret upgrading PHPStorm simply because I wasted $129 on a product that's worse than the previous version in every single way. I asked, but was not offered a refund. Not only that, but prices have already doubled in the last couple of years, with new versions being $200 instead of $100 as they used to be (and sometimes they'd have discounts like the End of The World Sale in 2012 when they were selling PyCharm for $25 and upgrades for $12).

Jetbrains, IMO, is close to failing to provide quality software and now we get this insanity. The only thing I can hope for is that someone takes this great platform and start writing plugins for these languages that are better than Jetbrains (was hard in the past but shouldn't be so now and in the future) or creates another IDE platform (Eclipse need not apply).

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

#199

Post by saint_fiasco »

fastball wrote: post #86
microtonal wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How exactly do you think more "heads-up time" would improve the situation? Either you are gonna stick with JetBrains and their product, in which case heads-up is irrelevant, or you are gonna switch to a competing product, in which case heads-up wouldn't help either: you will still need to learn the new product, regardless of when you switch .

You still need to learn the new product, but if there is heads up time, it's easier to adapt your existing projects to that new product.

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

#200

Post by podgib »

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.

Not quite - it doesn't support ObjC/C++/C
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