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Comment by gortok | Hacker News Reader

It seems likely that JetBrains moved to this model because their current revenue model doesn't allow for enough runway to allow them to make updates as needed or grow the business. So from that perspective changing to a model where they continually get money helps them stay in business.

Where they 'went wrong', if you could call it that, is that they forced developers down this new path without allowing us to 'dip our toes in'. It would have been better to open this up as a separate way of paying for their products alongside the current model, and then in a year or two simply switching over.

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IMHO the "dipping toes" was the switch to the current model, which they did 4 or 5 years ago. It was a clear attempt at moving from shrinkwrap to SaaS. The constant stream of reminders in-product, on blogs, twitter etc was a strong hint that they'd really like you to pay something every few months. They were much more forceful than the average software vendor. This is why I wasn't really surprised by recent news.

As a hobbyist developer (I use PyCharm with a personal license, but I don't actually sell anything), I'm basically in the "screwed" camp. I thought it was about time for me to upgrade, but now I'll just keep using my current copy forever. I'm sad, because the tool is great; but stopping it from working when the license expires, rather than just disabling updates, is really a low blow. It signals that they don't think their upgrades are worth paying for (which in some cases is absolutely true, a lot of recently introduced PyCharm features are of no use to me whatsoever), and that they've stopped innovating and are now just rent-seeking.

I've not needed any of the new PyCharm features in about two years - but I've still purchased the new versions. In fact, as I work for an open-source company, my PyCharm license at work is free. I buy the personal license for home even though I don't work on non-free software... because I want to support JetBrains.

You are absolutely right. As someone who uses PHP, Python, JavaScript and a little Ruby, I had purchased IntelliJ so I didn't have to renew multiple licenses each year. If they had just come out with their "All Products" subscription service at $149/year, I would have signed up for it immediately.

I don't like their proposal that I must forfeit my perpetual license to IntelliJ to take advantage of the lower price and that if my subscription lapses for any reason I'll be forced to pay an extra $100 a year!

Where JetBrains went wrong is in spreading themselves too thin on too many development fronts, letting products like IntelliJ languish with few significant features added and far too many bugs unfixed, and then deciding the solution to a lack of effort on these products was to switch to a subscription model so that all of their customers would pay for the updates whether or not they're worth paying for.

It seems to me that where JetBrains went wrong was building every language supported as a separate application. According to their announcement post the stated goal of was to deal with the customer ask to get easier discounts on multiple language products or to move from one language to another more easily. To JetBrains the solution was apparently to switch to SaaS, which kind of makes sense, but from my perspective maybe they should have just consolidated some of their product efforts?

The Ultimate version of IDEA seems to support all languages at once.

It does through plugins. The language-specific IDEs are updated with language features earlier than the plugins for IDEA and they have simplified project creation/management. For instance, it's a lot easier to setup a Python project and choose your interpreter/packages in PyCharm than it is in IDEA.

Not quite - it doesn't support ObjC/C++/C

The subdivision served multiple purposes: it increased revenue by segmenting the market, and it allowed for a level of specialization that was difficult to achieve with a single tool. For example, some of the PyCharm stuff requires hacks that most Java developers wouldn't want in their IDE, and I honestly wouldn't want to deal with any Java stuff if I can avoid it.

At the end of the day, the announcement is just corporate speak for "we need more money more regularly, so from now on you're going to pay rent; to make it a bit sweeter, rent includes use of swimming pool and sauna, which you may or may not need". Most businesses switching to SaaS don't do it for the customer, they do it for themselves.

This _feels_ pretty accurate. As a user of PyCharm, PHPStorm, and recently YouTrack, and in my experience, all the products either lack support for current trends (ES2015 for instance) or are riddled with bugs (YouTrack). YouTrack in general shocked me in the rough edges / lack of sane integration with SCM.

I disagree, at least for PHPstorm new features are cutting edge and don't exist in competing products.

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