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Comment by BryanLegend | Hacker News Reader

They'll probably open source Unity someday. There's not much money in selling dev tools, just ask Borland, Sun, or Microsoft.

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I think jetbrains is doing a good job making and selling dev tools. But yes, very few in the world have been successful at it.

Jetbrains has been doing fantastic work for a long time now. I hope they stay private and profitable.

JetBrains have fantastic tools/products and a very pragmatic business model that is easy to understand. They spot real developer issues and solve the basics, that's why they are successful.

You won't find startup-y inflated delusions and useless-crap features there.

(disclaimer: I use their paid tools but I'm not associated the JetBrains in any way)

Sublime and Microsoft also are making it work - as are a number of smaller IDEs. Editors and dev tools tend to be pretty profitable as long as you remember the golden rule - let the small fish pirate freely, charge nothing for college students... and go after any of the large corporations using it - those are the people who subsidize the entire tool.

On the other hand - ask Epic. Yes, their fortnite income dwarfs everything else - but the engine is still highly profitable.

Hi, do you have a source for the "engine is highly profitable"?

>There's not much money in selling dev tools, just ask Borland, Sun, or Microsoft.

I think that's not the case for Microsoft -- GitHub, Azure, OpenAI, Visual Studio etc. The make lots of money selling Dev Tools.

Are Visual Studio Professional and Enterprise not profitable? Not bashing just curious.

They do give away VS Code and VS Community is free so I guess tgat must cut into profits...

I don't think the dev tools division has ever been profitable. It's always been done to support their platforms & operating systems.

Microsoft's DevDiv has been a billion dollar a year business for the past 20 years (I know, revenue != profit, but that's a big number to work with)

VS community came out right about when small businesses started really jumping onto LAMP/WAMP for LOB apps.

Not hard to draw the line from there to 'keeping people on IIS and MSSQL'

Not sure if it was the original plan, but vscode is now a sales vector for SaaS.

Yep. Doing Azure-related things is way easier in VS Code than other IDEs because so much deployment functionality is built in. It's still needlessly convoluted though.

Not just that, but “cloud” dev instances in the browser. Push a button, get your dev env set up in a container on Someone Else’s Server, presented through in-browser vscode (though I assume you can connect with regular vscode, too), is the promise.

There's a lot of money selling dev tools, but not necessarily Microsoft levels of money. Also, Sun was actually a hardware company if you looked at where their revenue came from.

Cadence, Synopsys, MATLAB, Mathematica, JetBrains, Windriver, and many others make a ton of money selling specialized dev tools. The key in that market seems to be specialization, though, so most devs don't see their work.

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