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

#471

Post by manigandham » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 5:56 AM UTC

jordigh wrote: post #383

manigandham wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

I dont see the big issue with Jetbrains: the product is still available, still works, is still supported and pretty much costs the same. It's just a pricing model difference. And you can still develop without it so it's not a critical tool.

And if it's really such a problem... then stop using it? I dont know what else to say. What exactly is at risk here?

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

#472

Post by SixSigma » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 6:05 AM UTC

steven2012 wrote: post #313

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Freemium model is killing products because you can't make any money from writing programs anymore unless you get a huge homerun. This isn't Freemium. This is the equivalent of Buy-To-Play. You are paying for the product. Paying quote a lot, in fact. And unlike an MMO, there's no servers to run, just possible bugfix updates.

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.

Imagine this scenario :

Big company sees Jetbrains income / username; buys Jetbrains. Decides to cut costs, lets a few devs go. Income doesn't change but profit rises. Let a few more devs go. Switch to minimum viable development model. Customers are locked in to access their work, don't really care about updates because they already like the product. Gradually customers drift away. Not enough revenue for minimum viable product, close it down. All customers can't access files "too bad".

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

#473

Post by orillian » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 8:06 AM UTC

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…

I agree, it is cheaper but there are some of us that simply have no way to force, convince or otherwise cajole our employers to adopt a service license model. I have designers on staff using old Adobe products due to this same problem. JetBrains isn't going to magically convince management to open their wallets for monthly fee's. If this goes through, I'm boned. Stuck trying to make shitty IDE's work like jetBrains products. Not a happy day.

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

#474

Post by dang » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 9:37 AM UTC

throwaway999777 wrote: post #12

logicchains wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about IDEs, but if you install Evil mode you get a pretty awesome text editor.

Fuck off.

> Fuck off.

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the HN guidelines.

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

#475

Post by csomar » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 9:49 AM UTC

simoncion wrote: post #413

killface wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so don't fucking use it. if it's literally not valuable enough to justify 100/yr, just let it go and use eclipse or notepad or something.

Pixard said: > I think (for me anyway) the problem isn't the price at all. It's the fact that if you let your subscription lapse you CANNOT use the product . (emphasis mine)

So pay yearly and make sure at the annual accounting meeting to renew your Jetbrain subscriptions because they are the ultimate infrastructure for your company?

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

#476

Post by awjr » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 9:49 AM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #64

awjr wrote: post #24

I'm going to take a wild guess and suggest this was driven by the CFO trying to provide better predictive earnings to their shareholders. It may also enable them to plan developer recruitment better but this feels very shareholder driven. Personally, Webstorm is exceptional and worth every penny.

> Webstorm is exceptional and worth every penny. Webstorm was heavily discounted compared to the other specialised IDEs (mostly because other specialised ones included Webstorm's features, at least before AppCode and CLion) That has been rectified, Webstorm is now 99/year and completely worthless (since RubyMine, PHPStorm and PyCharm give you Webstorm + a "server" language for the same price)

"server" language? You may have heard that Javascript is doing rather well these days ;)

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

#477

Post by toyg » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 10:09 AM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #464

nitrogen wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (ID…

For some proprietary formats (such as Microsoft Word, PDFs, or photoshop PSD files), this is absolutely the case. However, when it comes to code, the format is _unicode text_. There's very little danger of losing your code to the sands of time because a company whose product you used to write that _unicode text_ went out of business. Of course, businesses are realizing danger and are publishing specs to their proprie…

An IDE is not just a text editor. There is a nontrivial amount of configuration that goes in a build system, and the IDE takes care of some of it. Having to ditch the IDE often means having to manually reconfigure a good chunk of the build system, as well as tracking down the exact version of build tools the IDE was shipping with in a particular release.

And this just for IDEs. Intellij also ship a lot of tools (youtrack etc) which may or may not be replaceable without significant data loss.

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

#478

Post by toyg » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 10:12 AM UTC

antod wrote: post #440

cmdkeen wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. A better term would be DaaS, "development as a service": you stop paying, they stop developing the tool for you. That would still imply that you can keep the software as-is in perpetuity if you stop paying though; otherwise it's basically ransomware.

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

#479

Post by agumonkey » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 10:42 AM UTC

cbd1984 wrote: post #460

agumonkey wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some times emacs has perf issues, but Eclipse overhead is really too much for me to enjoy. And the UX is miserable, all this OOP, OSGi plugins and frameworks for this leaves me meh.

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

#480

Post by lemming » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 10:45 AM UTC

toyg wrote: post #477

falcolas wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some proprietary formats (such as Microsoft Word, PDFs, or photoshop PSD files), this is absolutely the case. However, when it comes to code, the format is _unicode text_. There's very little danger of losing your code to the sands of time because a company whose product you used to write that _unicode text_ went out of business. Of course, businesses are realizing danger and are publishing specs to their proprie…

An IDE is not just a text editor. There is a nontrivial amount of configuration that goes in a build system, and the IDE takes care of some of it. Having to ditch the IDE often means having to manually reconfigure a good chunk of the build system, as well as tracking down the exact version of build tools the IDE was shipping with in a particular release. And this just for IDEs. Intellij also ship a lot of tools (yout…

Note that YouTrack and other tools are not moving to subscription licensing, only the IDEs are.

Pretty much everyone has their project set up to be able to build via an external tool for CI anyway. I'm really not seeing the lock-in argument here, except that moving back to Eclipse would be painful for a lot of people. But I don't see why you would go through that pain now if you're currently happy with what you get from JetBrains for the money that you're paying.