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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

#301

Post by kedean »

piqufoh wrote: post #82
corin_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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?

.. but then you lose the 'renew' discount and have to cough up full price when the update eventually arrives.

So the complaint is that, because you choose not to regularly renew the software, you don't get the discount that comes with it? That sounds kind of entitled, honestly.

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

#302

Post by alblue »

mdaniel wrote: post #269
agentgt wrote: post #203

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. Ec…

I have like 10 more bugs that I wish I could pay to have fixed. Are you aware of Bountysource? https://www.bountysource.com/ While I believe the audience size for it isn't super large, it's also conceivable that you could post a link to the Bountysource as a comment on the Bugzilla issue, at which point your incentive becomes more visible. I don't know if you were just using a number as an example, but $1000 will lik…

Note that Eclipse supports donations directly:

https://mmilinkov.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/users-can-now-fun...

Be wary of random donation sites that are unconnected to the host organisation - the chance of any real money flowing back upstream on average is zero.

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

#303

Post by Navarr »

teacup50 wrote: post #230
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…

Half the reason I haven't updated is that JetBrains hasn't been polishing. I'd pay for that, happily, but bugs sit unfixed for years while JetBrains rolls out entirely new (and similarly buggy) IDEs.

I wonder if that's part of the reason to move to subscription? To improve funding for that area?

If you operate on perpetual licenses you have to support that software and find a way to get people to purchase again - via new features etc etc

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

#304

Post by sangnoir »

silvestrov wrote: post #247
ceejayoz wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Polishing and bug fixes cost money, but nobody wants to pay for that. You pay for that when you buy the product - it comes with a year of updates.

I want more than a year because: 1) New OS releases might require fixes to IDEA's embedded JVM. 2) There's still a lot of bugs left after the first year. The ONLY reason that I have bought the past 2 updates is to get bugs fixed, but so far it has been for the worse. A company can't live forever on one-time payments. It needs a continuing income, otherwise the most sensible business decision is to close shop.

This was a solved problem: simply buy another Jetbrains 'upgrade' and you get fixes (or upgrades) for the following year. Subscriptions should be entirely optional.

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

#305

Post by toyg »

tobltobs wrote: post #68
mkozlows wrote: post #40

I 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…

The most developers will never need to bug their managers because a subscription based solution is a no go for the financial department anyway. Corporations do like getting blackmailed as much as a indie developer.

That's not necessarily the case. Corporations also love pre-tax operating expenses much more than depreciating capital expenditure. A lot of "cloud business" is moved by this simple accounting reality, rather than any technical benefit: renting AWS time might cost more than buying a server, but because the server is depreciating cap-ex, for your CFO it's actually the cheaper option.

Miracles of finance, eh.

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

#306

Post by Navarr »

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.

I want to agree but the problem with that on this is that it can be gamed by buying one month, using that until a feature entices you, and then buying another month.

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

#307

Post by yarrel »

PaulHoule wrote: post #231
nadams wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their first response was that it's cheaper than before. Except it's not. Did they think I wouldn't actually go look at the prices? Uh - their "everything" price is $20/month = $240/year (or $200 for the annual plan) (All renewal at current license price) PHPStorm - $129 PyCharm - $99 ReSharper Ultimate - $600 (no renewal price) If I were to purchase that with their old license it would cost me $828, with the new pl…

Yeah, Eclipse has the Linux GUI curse. Linux users expect the GUI to be unusable so they split into the camps who (i) think Eclipse is the bee's knees or (ii) use vi. The difference between IntelliJ and Eclipse is like night and day -- Eclipse fans think the plug-in feature is great but install one too many plugins and your Eclipse will get sick with pluginitis.

Eclipse is has the cross-platform GUI curse. :-)

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

#308

Post by vetinari »

newjersey wrote: post #285
PaulHoule wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Eclipse has the Linux GUI curse. Linux users expect the GUI to be unusable so they split into the camps who (i) think Eclipse is the bee's knees or (ii) use vi. The difference between IntelliJ and Eclipse is like night and day -- Eclipse fans think the plug-in feature is great but install one too many plugins and your Eclipse will get sick with pluginitis.

I am a complete newbie so my perspective is inherently flawed but I am wary of installing anything on a Debian machine that I can't just get using aptitude (sudo apt-get install foo). Correct me if I am wrong but isn't it possible to create a Debian repository server at Jet Brains that I can add to my aptitude sources list and then install Intelli J and stuff from the conventional command line interface? Why does Jet…

It opens web browser in Debian?

On Fedora, it just downloads a patch, applies it and restarts.

The pet peeve of mine is, that it downloads a patch, restart, then it finds out it has updates for plugins too, downloads them and restarts again.

It would be much nicer if Jetbrains had a yum repository for both IDE and plugins and would download delta rpms. Just like Google Chrome does.

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

#309

Post by fenomas »

mattkevan wrote: post #186
toyg wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Former Adobe evangelist here. In my opinion, what you said about headline features is the crux of the matter. Under the subscription model engineering's only job is to make the user happy, so they can focus on performance or stability when needed, but when you sell a new box each year their main job is to make sales happy, with new demoable features. The result is always bloat.

Whereas the "cynical attempt to milk money out of customers" angle is, IMO, not nearly as relevant as people expect. I mean, everything a for-profit company does is an attempt to milk money out of customers in some sense, so when Adobe (or JetBrains) sold shrink-wrapped boxes I assume they set the prices at whatever their models showed was the maximum people would pay, and presumably they chose the subscription prices the same way. I expect it's much of a muchness.

As for the SaaS stuff (storage, etc), I just see that as little extras that become possible once each install is tied to a user account, so the company tries them out to see if they work. But it's not like they're supposed to be so amazing that they justify the switch. (views my own, not those of my former employer, etc.)

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

#310

Post by zeveb »

rebootthesystem wrote: post #229
jordigh wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not pay them to do it for you and also keep the ability to do it yourself, should you ever need it?

Because I have exactly zero interest in deviating from what I should be focusing on (my business, my product, my clients, my revenue stream) to go dork around with a text/code editor. Doing so, in the context of a real working business with clients, projects, timelines, deadlines and deliverables would be irresponsible if you can simply pay a company for which that product IS their product and business to deliver wha…

> Because I have exactly zero interest in deviating from what I should be focusing on (my business, my product, my clients, my revenue stream) to go dork around with a text/code editor.

You can improve your productivity (i.e., increase your revenue) by improving your tools.

A blacksmith makes his tools; a developer should be want to extend his environment.

> unless you are a huge company that can afford to lose clock cycles to your devs playing with FOSS

It's not a loss: it's an investment which pays dividends.

> The vast majority of software developers across all disciplines (there's a huge world outside of Silicon Valley, Web Dev and Mobile) have exactly zero need or interest in deviating from their mission to go fix their tools.

I have exactly zero interest in hiring or working with someone who is uninterested in improving his productivity.

> This is the same reason the vast majority of software developers (again, think outside web folk) have exactly zero interest in vim. It is an utter waste of time compared to point-click-go-go-go.

Both vim and emacs are far better and faster at moving structures of code around than the vast majority of GUI editors. Better and faster means…more revenue for less effort. And it's fun!

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