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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

#431

Post by fastball »

sangnoir wrote: post #319
fastball wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. If they "go out of business" you will save money with the new model, because instead of paying for a year of the license in advance, you are paying by month. 2. Nothing in their old model prevented them from raising prices. Not sure how you think switching to a monthly subscription model changes that. i.e. your entire premise, that this is an investment of time and money, really has nothing to do with JetBrains' s…

> 1. If they "go out of business" you will save money with the new model, because instead of paying for a year of the license in advance, you are paying by month. Oh, it's much worse than that. With the old licensing model, if JetBrains went out of business, you'd be left with an antiquated IDE that works . Under the new model, you'd be left with nothing because the IDEs need to call-home and verify against a licensi…

If they actually went out of business, I'm sure they'd to something to remedy the situation.

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

#432

Post by mark-r »

toyg wrote: post #305
tobltobs wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Miracles of tax distortion, you mean.

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

#433

Post by Macha »

fenomas wrote: post #390
Daishiman wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't. I would pay twice as much as I did for PyCharm, but I want software that I can control which doesn't phone home to the mothership to see if I have the privilege of being able to use it for that month. I don't want to open the travel laptop I keep stored for when I'm away from home in an airplane or the middle of nowhere and be interrupted because I can't contact a licensing server or whatever such bullsh…

You're complaining about bugs you haven't encountered yet. If the software simply defaulted to working when it couldn't contact a licensing server, would that resolve things?

That would be a pretty weak DRM implementation, and unlikely to be used in the real world.

(Or... How many people pay for WinRAR?)

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

#434

Post by FormFollowsFunc »

spitfire wrote: post #338
mattkevan wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> before the whole thing crumbles. Are there any alternatives to adobe on the horizon? I'm asking because I'd like to know. All I know of is affinity designer and pixelmator.

Sketch is an alternative to Photoshop and Fireworks for UI design.

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

#435

Post by bluecalm »

chiph wrote: post #430
bluecalm wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You didn't "use" the new things but you get them now. They've spent 3 months developing stuff which you now want basically for free. Think about it as paying for work, it takes time to develop features, say 1 feature a week. You didn't pay for 3 months, they added 12 things. You now get them without paying if you were to get 12 months since renewal. It really is no wonder they don't want to offer that on a discount.

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

#436

Post by mikeash »

fastball wrote: post #431
sangnoir wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. If they "go out of business" you will save money with the new model, because instead of paying for a year of the license in advance, you are paying by month. Oh, it's much worse than that. With the old licensing model, if JetBrains went out of business, you'd be left with an antiquated IDE that works . Under the new model, you'd be left with nothing because the IDEs need to call-home and verify against a licensi…

If they actually went out of business, I'm sure they'd to something to remedy the situation.

But what? We'd all like them to push out one last update that makes everything free, and I'm sure the odds of that are decent. It's not guaranteed, though. What if the assets get bought up by somebody who wants a quick turnaround on his money, and sees jacking up the subscription rates as the key to success?

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

#437

Post by krupan »

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…

rebootthesystem, you have simultaneously some of the best and worst views on productivity I have ever heard. You seem to understand human factors around burnout and work quite well, but completely misunderstand an engineer's relationship with his or her tools. It is precisely because we are not unskilled factory workers that we can and should each individualize and tune our tools to our liking. I would hope that you at least don't forbid the use of editors such as emacs or vim.

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

#438

Post by sangnoir »

fastball wrote: post #431
sangnoir wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. If they "go out of business" you will save money with the new model, because instead of paying for a year of the license in advance, you are paying by month. Oh, it's much worse than that. With the old licensing model, if JetBrains went out of business, you'd be left with an antiquated IDE that works . Under the new model, you'd be left with nothing because the IDEs need to call-home and verify against a licensi…

If they actually went out of business, I'm sure they'd to something to remedy the situation.

I like JetBrains & am a fan of their products (I'm a paying customer). I'm sure they are good people with good intentions. However, I'd rather not have this unnecessary complication - it wasn't broken before.

> If they actually went out of business, I'm sure they'd to something to remedy the situation.

That all depends on how they go out of business. They could too busy fighting other fires to write a patch that removes license-check, or it could be a hostile takeover with the subsequent "we are discontinuing $PRODUCT from next month" announcement

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

#439

Post by solidpy »

nadams wrote: post #112
mikeash wrote: post #66

What bugs me about this is when I asked them about the change on Twitter and they kept trying to blow smoke up my butt about how it's better for everyone. 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? Then they said it's better because you can jump in and out at will. Only need Product X for a month? Only pay for a month. Which is fi…

> 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…

With the previous model you could just stop paying them and keep using your current version of the software. With the new model stop paying them and you are locked out.

I want DRM-free IDEs!

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

#440

Post by antod »

cmdkeen wrote: post #208
toyg wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A taxi driver will buy a nice pair of comfortable shoes and then keep them forever. The seller will not come around every month asking for money and threatening to take back his shoes if he doesn't cough up. That's what a different type of "business" does.

Seriously, someone on HN equating SAAS to extortion... Much like the OP talking of not being able to do development if your employer fails to approve the payment in time. Resharper is nice and all but you can actually write C# without it. (I know PyCharm etc might be harder but the article was about Resharper).

Stuff like this and Adobe's efforts aren't really Software as a Service - at the most it's just Software License as a Service. You still download, install and run it on your own hardware.

The value of actual SaaS is that the expensive management of the software has been taken off you hands.

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