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

#371

Post by WorldWideWayne » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 5:53 PM UTC

andrewstuart wrote: post #346

What an incredible whinge and whine. Why are people so resentful about paying money for their incredibly useful primarily development tool? Often while I'm using PyCharm I'm awed by how powerful it is and amazed that JetBrains has the resources, time, brainpower and money to write it. And that's not worth a few bucks? Sheesh. Seriously, it's a trivial amount of money and if you or your company can't afford it then yo…

> What an incredible whinge and whine.

What a bullshit way to start your own complaint. There is absolutely nothing wrong with people complaining about this.

> Why are people so resentful about paying money for their incredibly useful primarily development tool?

It's not about the money, it's about the principle. Poor people rent things. That's how they stay poor. How would you feel if you woke up one morning and couldn't go buy some eggs from the supermarket until you joined their club for 100$ a month? You'd go to another supermarket. What if you couldn't buy a car, only lease one?

> Loving the tool enough to use it but hating on a company enough to declare it's lost all its customer loyalty makes my blood boil.

Have you ever heard the saying "You have to love someone before you hate them?" Does that saying also make your blood boil?

> Also, how does this guy elevate himself to the all-knowing position to declare from his personal opinion how much customer loyalty JetBrains has actually lost?

Because he's talking about himself and his own loyalty to the company?

> I want the companies who make great software to make money and keep doing it.

OK. But if people disagree with the pricing model and it drives away customers, that's not going to work either and no amount of your own whining is going to stop that.

> This guy should just go use a different product that he doesn't have to pay for.

Yeah it's a good solution. I think that's what he said he'd do in the last paragraph. Many of the comments here and on his blog echoed the same thing saying that they'd use Eclipse or NetBeans instead.

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

#372

Post by nilliams » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

wonkaWonka wrote: post #368

andrewstuart wrote: post #346

What an incredible whinge and whine. Why are people so resentful about paying money for their incredibly useful primarily development tool? Often while I'm using PyCharm I'm awed by how powerful it is and amazed that JetBrains has the resources, time, brainpower and money to write it. And that's not worth a few bucks? Sheesh. Seriously, it's a trivial amount of money and if you or your company can't afford it then yo…

This isn't about paying money (we'll pay the money), this is about whether the software will just curl up and suddenly die on you, while you're on the hook to meet a deadline where minutes count.

I really doubt that JetBrains will allow your IDE to just stop working without any advance warning.

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

#373

Post by steven2012 » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #348

steven2012 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If software developers expect to be paid well for their talents, the cost of software has to increase. And it's not just bugfix updates, it's new features and innovations.

If they expect to paid well; they should make software worth buying and price it properly. In the subscription model, they're still (likely) under-pricing but now they don't have to keep with features and innovations -- because if they do nothing, and you don't pay, you lose access to everything you had before.

>they should make software worth buying and price it properly

They do make software worth buying, and I have already stated that I believe it is priced properly NOW.

Wrong. You don't lose access to your files, your code, your data. You only lose access to the IDE. If they stop innovating, the great thing about this model is that you can leave immediately to another competitor that likely is copying all their feature.

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

#374

Post by rebootthesystem » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

jordigh wrote: post #294

rebootthesystem wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I don't get it. Even if you have no interest, why would you willingly give up the option? All other things being equal, wouldn't you want the ability to do it? You'll get a great product, you'll pay someone else to take care of it, and, should you ever want to fix it yourself or take it to someone else to fix it, you can do that too…

Not aggressive. I am simply stating my position based on thirty years of running a range of tech businesses. Others can do as they wish. And they do. And the overwhelming majority of software developers have exactly zero time or interest in deviating from their work to mess with tools source code. Some percentage will customize via macros and relatively minor scripts but virtually none go so far off course as to spend non-trivial time hacking source.

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

#375

Post by crimsonalucard » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 5:58 PM UTC

I know exactly why this is happening. It's the same for adobe: cracks and hacks.

The keygen for jetbrains currently unlocks ultimate mode on all products for 100 years. It's not hard for your average script kiddie to find.

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

#376

Post by benologist » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 5:59 PM UTC

steven2012 wrote: post #296

Frankly, I support this. We need to pay more for software, not less. The Freemium model is killing products because you can't make any money from writing programs anymore unless you get a huge homerun. People only want to pay $0.99 for a program that took months of man-hours to write. $5.99? Fuck it, that's too expensive! IntelliJ is magic to me. It's a wonderful piece of software, and I generally do not like Java. B…

Programming gets easier and more accessible every year. Here's some other industries that wished their skills were worth more even as they became generic or commoditized:

- scribes

- blacksmiths

- http://www.sfgate.com/jobs/slideshow/14-jobs-that-don-t-exis...

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

#377

Post by s73v3r » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

ovulator wrote: post #366

HelloNurse wrote: post #290

The social cost of subscription-based offers can be enough to make users forfeit good products. If a developer convinces a manager to buy a perpetual license of IntelliJ, mission accomplished: the developer will be able to use IntelliJ forever. Persuading the manager to spend more on IntelliJ by making a convincing case that an upgrade is worth the money is an optional campaign, reserved for a favorable moment (e.g.…

I've used Eclipse for development at my current place of employment for years. I recently tried the JetBrains product and loved it, so I started pitching to my bosses that this will improve productivity blah blah blah. I can still do my job without it, and pitched it 2 months ago and have still not gotten approval (but haven't got said no to either) and it's a good year money wise, so the upfront cost is nothing to u…

If your company is that tight when it comes to developer tools, maybe you should consider alternate employment.

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

#378

Post by manigandham » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

jordigh wrote: post #179

manigandham wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please... some of us need to get work done and are perfectly happy to pay someone else to give us good quality products. Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's worth doing yourself.

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

I havent really seen that many instances where this happens.

If you're paying, you also get support - in fact this is a very common structure for open source products where you pay for a service contract. In this case you're paying for them to do it and have the ability to make updates, but since you're paying them to do, they end up doing it.

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

#379

Post by nilliams » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 6:07 PM UTC

balabaster wrote: post #357

andrewstuart wrote: post #346

What an incredible whinge and whine. Why are people so resentful about paying money for their incredibly useful primarily development tool? Often while I'm using PyCharm I'm awed by how powerful it is and amazed that JetBrains has the resources, time, brainpower and money to write it. And that's not worth a few bucks? Sheesh. Seriously, it's a trivial amount of money and if you or your company can't afford it then yo…

Moving to a subscription model for 1 thing is okay, perhaps 2, or even 3. But with every company gradually moving to subscription models, it is emptying out our wallets every month and removing more and more of our income to maintain the status quo. From my own perspective, and I know this doesn't apply to all, but I cannot imagine I'm the only person with this viewpoint, I'm sick of other developers saying things li…

So would you rather pay a one-off fee for a JetBrains product and have no maintenance and support for it?

And by that I mean not even access to their public forums and for their devs to stop posting on Stack Overflow. Because that's the reality for most one-off purchase products. You'll get minimal over-the-phone customer support if you're lucky.

Not sure why you see it as a product that doesn't fit a subscription model. These devs have to constantly put in a ton of work to support this kind of product.

And like other comments have pointed out, if you don't see the value, there ARE free alternatives. It's your call. Ultimately if JetBrains have in fact got this offering wrong then customers will say no and JetBrains will lose out.

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

#380

Post by kileywm » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 6:12 PM UTC

pasbesoin wrote: post #250

cwyers wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It used to be you would stop getting updates but could still use the product at its frozen (for you) point. For example, to re-examine an old project (even if you might not want to do any fresh builds on an outdated platform). Can you still do that, or does the tool "die" for you altogether once you stop paying? P.S. Assuming underlying OS compatibility, which would probably eventually break unless e.g. also frozen i…

After 30 days of a failed payment [1] or 30 days without contacting JetBrains servers [2] it will only allow you to open their software briefly before "the product will gently notify the user and will allow some time to connect to the Internet before asking to close the application".

[1] https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/204344871-Does...

[2] https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/204348441-What...