Intellij is one of the few IDEs that it is worth paying for.
How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
451–460 of 507 posts
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#452Earlier 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.
Most of the large organizations I've dealt with are fine with this because they like having someone to call for problems. “subscription” is the same as “support contract” for the accountants and that's something they're very used to: it converts an unknown risk of an expensive outage into a predictable annual expense.
This is also known as having a "Throat to Choke" in IT circles.
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#453They gave me a free version of WebStorm because I'm a hobbyist open source developer. I love it, but I'm obviously not going to pay $80 a year. Does anyone know if they're going to continue having some kind of free option for non-corporate use?
We've never had a free option for non-corporate users. We provide free licenses for Students, OSS projects and certain other groups. In addition, we give discounts of 50% for start-ups. All of that will continue.
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#454I was with Adobe during their change (as a tech evangelist meeting a lot of users), and watched it play out from both directions. And setting aside questions of pricing, one thing people overlook is that a subscription plan is a much, much better way to make software than selling annual or biannual updates. The problem is that for a mature product, yearly sales cycles create a toxic incentive to focus engineering tim…
> Yearly sales cycles create a toxic incentive to focus engineering time on flashy demo-friendly features
I understand that argument, but what incentive does DRM with a killswitch create for the software company, if its customers must pay in order to keep the product running at all? Might it not create different perverse incentives, for example trying to close the ecosystem in order to make a switch a painful experience?
Or in other words: What incentive to improve the software (other than the threat from competitors) does subscription DRM provide, if you can just collect the rent, because the cost of switching is too high anyway and the customers are at your mercy?
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#455I'd love to see a sentiment breakdown of % of usernames in this thread who agree vs. disagree on this basic issue. Does a tool exposing this exist?
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#456Meh, $19 a month for all their products sounds like a steal to me. I currently use many of their products and upgrade every year so this actually saves me money.
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
No idea why this is being downvoted. If you ask me, it's irresponsible not to invest in your tools and productivity. If you don't, you're wasting your employer's time and money. A bit of time "dorking around" in Vim will pay huge dividends over time. Give it a shot. Open up `vimtutor`. It's easier than you think!
Interesting. You see, to me you are wasting our time and money if you do not realize that the time devoted to code entry is insignificant when compared to other aspects of a non-trivial project. It's like putting $300 racing tires on a Toyota Sienna minivan. You can quote all kinds of skid-pad numbers and amazing high speed capabilities, yet you'd be focusing on the wrong problem. You can go much faster by getting a…
Of course there's much more to software engineering than entering and editing text, and you'll need to make a judgment call based on your priorities. I do more than web development, so I don't think your "web dev bias" applies to me. I merely find disagree with your absolutism:
> It is an utter waste of time compared to point-click-go-go-go.
If you don't have free time to devote to learning an editor, then that's fine. I was referring to those who spend most of their time programming (i.e. at an editor/terminal).
As an aside, I'm not sure why you keep mentioning web development. Of all the things that I do, web development requires the least amount of code. Other things have vastly bigger codebases. But yes, if most of your time is spent doing R&D, then you won't benefit much from improving your engineering tools.
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#458Earlier 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.
> A company can't live forever on one-time payments.
Which is why they've been charging for updates outside the year. You yourself provided them two recurring payments with no need for a subscription model to prompt it.
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the problem is low revenue, they should just raise prices and be honest about it. I mean, if you're already paying £100 for an IDE despite the wealth of free alternatives, you do it for a reason: because it's worth it. There might be a price point where it stops being worth it, but it's likely not £120 or even £200. You're already competing with free, so price is likely not much of a differentiator already. Instea…
> they try to achieve a relatively modest increase Looking at their (current) pricing model for this, it seems like a drive for more predictable income, instead of additional profit. The ability to depend on getting X dollars per month makes it a lot easier to hire employees on, and justify working on the products. And for many folks, Jetbrains will be getting less money out of them, since they're offering quite a de…
Anybody who fears being unable to pay a $20 monthly bill is very unlikely to have paid $200 up front for the tool in the first place.
I avoid subscription software not because of the price, but because if I stop paying or the company goes out of business the software stops working. Say I completely change industries, then ten years later I want to go back and look at my old projects. If I was using a subscription (IDE|audio editor|DAW|video editor), I won't be able to preserve my historic work.
Re: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
#460Earlier 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 recently had to use Eclipse again, after 5+ years of Emacs mostly coding sessions, and boy it was tough. I kept thinking it's just one IDE, and others are better, thinking about IntelliJ. Heh. ps: people, take a look at Emacs, it really is nice, and only needs 8MB cough
> ps: people, take a look at Emacs, it really is nice, and only needs 8MB cough
As an Emacs fan, I feel obligated to, ahh, unpack this reference.
EMACS: Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping. A Humorous Expansion of the name from when eight megabytes of RAM was more than you had, bucko.
These days, I'm sure that, if you really worked at it, you could get an Emacs process to take up as much RAM as the Chrome tab you just opened to look something up on Stack Exchange.