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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

#421

Post by simoncion »

steven2012 wrote: post #412
bluecalm wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But previous model catered for that: you buy a tool and x months of developers' work. If you want to buy more work (updates) you pay again. The incentives are nicely aligned here. With the rental model they aren't because you will have to pay for 20 years even if they stop developing the software. This trend is disturbing. It really is similar to not being able to buy an apartment, a car or a kitchen knife. With all…

You are confusing an subscription-based IDE with software-as-a-service. Do you even use IntelliJ? You don't lose anything except access to the IDE. You can always switch to Eclipse if you don't want to pay. You lose NOTHING except the convenience and power of IntellJ, which is why you pay for them.

If the loss of access to IntelliJ is not a large one, then why would one ever pay to use it? :)

I, and many others in this thread, are happy to pay for a perpetual license to a particular version of software. We are also happy to pay for future versions of that software, if future versions are even vaguely worth paying for. We are not happy with making rented software that contains a built-in killswitch a critical part of how we get our work done. [0]

[0] kileywm found some JetBrains FAQ answers that indicate that if your license cannot be verified for 30 days, or your license payment is 30 days overdue, JetBrains's software will refuse to function: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10171998

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

#422

Post by teacup50 »

cweagans wrote: post #335
sgdread wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you paying not for upgrades, but the fee to use. No payment - you can't use it.

My point is, if you were paying the yearly fee before so that you can get upgrades, you were paying a subscription anyway . Yes, you could still use it if you didn't pay, but you paid. Why do you care?

You don't seem to understand how the choice defines the relationship.

Imperfect Analogy Time

Imagine a deli that you go to every morning. It's the only one in the neighborhood, but they make great bagels, so you don't go out of your way to find a new deli.

Now imagine the deli adopts a subscription pricing model -- no other options. If you want food from that deli, you have to subscribe month-to-month. If you don't want to subscribe, you have to walk 5 blocks out of your way to go to a different deli.

You decide to subscribe because you were going there every morning anyway.

Over the coming months, however, the food keeps getting worse. The service grows poor. You wind up waiting longer for your food. But you're invested in the deli, and it'd be a hassle to leave, so you put up with it.

Eventually you bail, of course. But for a number of months, you were stuck in that gray area in there in which the deli can take advantage of the fact that, if you drop your subscription, you'd have to have expended significantly more effort and time to come up with an alternative.

Unlike a deli, tools are a lot harder to replace.

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

#423

Post by kitsunesoba »

aikah wrote: post #100

To be fair , it worked quite well for Adobe products ( most of them are now using a monthly subscription scheme ) despite all the dissatisfaction voiced by some customers at first. It is both good for Adobe and good for the competition. In fact allowed some challengers to be profitable when everybody pirated Photoshop before as 95% of people using it only took advantage of 1% of Photoshop features. It will be a good…

I don’t know how it is on other platforms, but Adobe’s move to a subscription model has brought a flurry of far cheaper plain-old-purchase alternatives to OS X. Off the top of my head:

PS Alternatives: Acorn ($25), Pixelmator ($30), Affinity Photo ($50)

Illustrator alternatives: Sketch ($99), Affinity Designer ($50), iDraw ($25), Canvas Draw ($99)

And you know what? All of these options are far lighter than the Adobe behemoths while providing all the most relevant functionality and looking and feeling like real Mac apps instead of half-assed ports, all while taking advantage of the best part of the OS. Here in SV people I know in design are switching away from Adobe in spades.

If companies like Adobe can’t exist without subscriptions, maybe it means that large software companies that produce gargantuan beasts of applications are going out of style. Small indie teams producing lean, maintainable, focused apps are the way forward.

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

#424

Post by logfromblammo »

To analogize this, imagine the perfectly cromulent subscription model of printed magazine delivery. You pay $X, and they mail you a new wad of glossy paper every month. If you don't pay $X, you just don't get new magazines. You can still read all the old ones. Remember National Geographic? Remember how your grandfather kept huge stacks of them that were all only an awkward elbow away of toppling onto the floor? Presuming you could locate it in the stacks, you could re-read the article about Elbonian mud-rakers as often as you pleased.

If you subscribed to JetBrains's magazine, you pay $X, and every month they give you a new magazine, and take back the previous month's issue. If you stop paying, they would come to your house, confiscate your latest issue, and then search the premises to make sure you weren't keeping any older issues, or any photographs or copies of them. If you want to read something, it'll just have to be something else, like RMS's free gnewsletter.

What JetBrains is doing is not switching to a subscription model. They are switching to a DRM-enforced rental model.

Subscriptions are ideal from products that are consumable or otherwise ephemeral. Television shows or newspapers or foods or coupons or pharmaceutical drugs work for that. Things that are used once and discarded are perfect for subscriptions.

Rental is good for things that have a low marginal benefit in comparison to their upfront costs, such that it takes a long time to recover that initial investment. You rent a hotel room for a night or two. You rent a car when you fly to another city. You rent a pneumatic excavator when you only have one hole to dig. You rent things that you do not intend to use enough to justify paying their purchase price.

With respect to a tool of the trade--something you buy to help you make more money--you emphatically want to own that, rather than just rent it. That's a great argument for using open-source IDEs. Even the previous model was just a perpetual license with a limited-time upgrade option. The person who wants you to forever rent the tools of your own trade is not doing so with your own best interests in mind.

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

#425

Post by mosdave »

addicted wrote: post #321
malka wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price is not the problem. I simply do not want to rent the tools I use. I want to buy them.

So if instead of $100/yr they had raised the price to $500 but you "own" the software, you would have been okay with that?

yes.

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

#426

Post by tobltobs »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #363
tobltobs wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most wouldn't mind a price hike. But the outlook that in a few years the tool I rely on for my projects will not work anymore is unacceptable for most developers.

> the tool I rely on Then don't stop paying for it. Meanwhile, its not like they are holding your data hostage. Apart from your customized settings in their IDE you can always access your project files with another IDE or editor.

Is it written in stone, that Jetbrains and their tools will still exist in a few years? And that the then current version will be able to open my ancient project files?

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

#427

Post by tobltobs »

cweagans wrote: post #273
tobltobs wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So leasing a car for 1000$ per year is the same as buying a car for $1000?

Apples and oranges. Neither situation leads to constant improvements and upgrades to the thing you're paying for.

".. constant improvements and upgrades .." == marketing vomit.

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

#428

Post by somebehemoth »

steven2012 wrote: post #412
bluecalm wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But previous model catered for that: you buy a tool and x months of developers' work. If you want to buy more work (updates) you pay again. The incentives are nicely aligned here. With the rental model they aren't because you will have to pay for 20 years even if they stop developing the software. This trend is disturbing. It really is similar to not being able to buy an apartment, a car or a kitchen knife. With all…

You are confusing an subscription-based IDE with software-as-a-service. Do you even use IntelliJ? You don't lose anything except access to the IDE. You can always switch to Eclipse if you don't want to pay. You lose NOTHING except the convenience and power of IntellJ, which is why you pay for them.

IDE's have their own learning curve. We invest time in learning IDE software in order to be more productive. When we lose access to IntelliJ the knowledge we gained is worth significantly less than it was and now we have to go and spend time learning another IDE. We are also now less productive so we spend more time working to make up the difference. Time is money.

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

#429

Post by zeveb »

rebootthesystem wrote: post #385
zeveb wrote: post #310

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. 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…

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 ha…

> 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.

Editors are, or should be, the sole tool necessary to sculpt a system. Using poor languages, yes, there's a lot of ritual outside of coding which is necessary. With powerful languages, the design is the code and the code is the design and it all lives within an editor.

The editor is the interface to the documentation; it's the interface to the running system; it's an interface to the debugger; it's the interface to the world.

> 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.

Which is why I use emacs, which is able to provide a seamless interface between server, desktop, laptop and embedded environments, in which context switching simply doesn't have to be necessary. Emacs provides a whole heck of a lot more than vim. Vim is a powerful editor; emacs is an ultra-powerful environment.

Yes, it's also important to have large monitors, lots of memory and a great work environment. And kudos to you (honestly) for providing that.

> We are knowledge workers, which automatically means we spend far more time on things other than typing code.

Which is why I use a tool which enables me to work with units of knowledge, not just letters and symbols.

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

#430

Post by chiph »

bluecalm wrote: post #400
chiph wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes against decades of tradition. In the past, the upgrade was offered at a discount to reward your customers for staying with you. It also reflected the lower acquisition cost for that release -- since you didn't have to spend any marketing dollars to find them. Their policy was saying "We appreciate your loyalty, but only for the next year then you'll have to go back to paying full price." But the year didn't s…

I made sense if you think about paying for updates in terms of paying for their work. If you wait 3 months and then get 12 months license for updates you effectively got 15 months for a price of 12. They may be hesitant to offer that to you on a discounted price. I think it makes perfect sense.

The 3 months were spent using the previous version, so you didn't get the benefit of the improvements in the upgrade. But this scheme means you paid for them anyway.

Anniversary date: March 1st Upgrade announced: June 1st You get around to purchasing the upgrade: September 1st You get to use the new version for 5 more months (until March 1st) before your upgrade premium expires.

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