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

> Who does that?

A company that knows that people will blindly say "Hey, if I only have to fork over $7 a month instead of finding $80 plus tax, plus gas, plus the inconvenience of going and finding a router myself, and configuring it so that my network works, seems like a good deal" and they purchase the rental - even though $420 for an $80 (plus tax and inconvenience) router is a terrible deal.

Then you get the types that have a box full of routers at home or know that if they purchase for $80, then in a year, it's paid for itself and everything else is gravy.

The situation of interest is when they are no longer interested in doing it or change the terms of the contract under you... which is what is happening right now with Jetbrains. Wouldn't you like to have a way out when they do that?

You are confusing matters and overstating productivity factors. Editors, yes, including vim, have nearly zero impact on the timeline for any non-trivial project. The time devoted to all things outside of typing code dwarfs any gains had by counting keystrokes with vim. It's an illusion of the first order.

Now, good tools, such as the JetBrains tools can have an impact that has little to do with productivity. We do hardware and software development. It is useful to have a tool that has the potential to feel like you are doing pair programming by helping you along. Why? Because if you are popping between Verilog and Python with a range of other languages across server, desktop and embedded while using multiple tools and IDE's you start valuing tools that can help you context switch. And, no, I do not want to waste time messing with source for the two dozen tools we use on a regular basis. And, no, in this context vim has no real measurable value whatsoever.

My guess is you might disagree. And that's OK. If your context is web development you simply don't have enough of a view of the rest of the tech ecosystem to understand. If you've never run a tech business you will not have had the financial feedback loop that allows you to understand these issues. I can improve productivity by a far larger margin by providing every workstation with three large monitors, lots of memory and making sure people work reasonable hours and don't burn out than through some magical editor that also requires my engineers to even as much as look at source due to shortcomings.

In fact, I can, and have, improved productivity dramatically by having everyone work half days on Fridays while being very flexible with daily schedules and liberal with vacation times. As an example, I had one engineer ask me if he could take a few days off to go to a concert in London. I said "send pictures", paid him for the time he was away and did not take vacation days off.

We are a team, we know what our mission is and we get shit done. We are not factory workers counting keystrokes per second. We are knowledge workers, which automatically means we spend far more time on things other than typing code.

Of course, you are free to do as you wish.

I rarely go looking for customer support for anything except on Stack Overflow. 90% of the time, community driven forums are way more helpful for most products than the original company... most developers give of their own time there by donation, to give back to the rest of the community that feed that cycle. I like that I can give back there, just as I can receive help. If Jetbrains suddenly required that their developers boycott such forums, I would wager it would be a downward spiral for loyalty to them.

I'm not knocking Jetbrains here, so don't take this like a personal gripe at their company. I've been a faithful purchaser of Resharper for a number of years and will likely continue. I'm quite happy to pay for software, and I pay for thousands of dollars worth of software and licenses every year to do my job. Developers have families to feed. I know, I am one and I have one. But I don't expect to write a piece of software that makes your life easier and say - hey, by the way, you can have that software for $10 a month and when you stop paying me, it stops working.

I don't mind paying for a support contract if I feel I need one, but that should not be the default model for the software. I'd rather pay for the software outright and then if I feel I will need support, pay for a support contract too. But I don't want to be told "the only way to 'purchase' our software is via a perpetual rental agreement."... as someone said below somewhere - that's how poor people stay poor.

What is being sold here is effectively the same as a perpetual support contract that comes with some free software... which stops working if you stop paying for the support contract because you decide you no longer require support...

Language such as "exactly zero", "dork around", "mess around" sounds aggressive, as if people who decide to hack on their tools were beneath you. When you say "utter waste of time" on people who do enjoy working on their vimrc or init.el or whatever, it sounds like you think the person themself is a waste of a person. When you mention how many years you have, you sound pompous, as if you were stating your opinions as facts (years of experience can't be wrong!).

It sounds aggressive even if you don't intend it to sound that way. There are ways to other ways to express your opinion without sounding this way.

Here, let me try to show you what I mean:

"I am not interested in modifying my tools. I would rather pay someone else to do it. If you are spending time modifying your tools, then that is time that could have been better spent on another task. I have many years of experience, which have convinced me that the right way to spend your time is on your product, not your tools."

Note the lack of dismissive language such as "absolutely zero" or "exactly zero" or "waste of time" or "I am simply" (this last one is another attempt to present opinions as facts).