It remains to be seen whether they will find this economical when they are not making any direct revenue on the product.
I understand that VSCode is part of a grand strategic plan that goes beyond revenue, but I seriously doubt that they'd be willing to internally maintain the absolute truckload of code that would ensue from getting to feature parity with Jetbrains on languages like Java or Python. I'd wager at some point the quality would derail, or someone would pull the plug altogether on such a cost sink.
And that's one of the things I love about Jetbrains products. I'm actually delighted to pay for a product that I use every day for ~8 hours and which I think is extremely well-designed, knowing that the money is going to a company of craftsmen who do that, and only that.
JetBrains produces some good products, but I think this is too late to the game to really compete against VS Code.
Perhaps there are some organizations whom don't want to let their developers use VS Code because of OSS paranoia or legalities, or no option to pay for support, then this could be a nice alternative. Otherwise I don't see this being much of a competitor unless they're willing to open source it and just pay some developers to do the bulk of the core functionality.
The new JetBrains products seem targetted at VSCode and specifically its remote code offerings.
I've liked JetBrains and I'm paying their license but the current $249.00 yearly fee is still too high and I fall back to VSCode frequently.
The $249.00 fee covers all of their IDEs but I don't need the .NET IDE's if I'm working on JVM languages or CLion or GoLand for instance. I was hoping for something like "Pick 2-3" IDEs for a certain fee, like say $129 for Scala, DataGrip & PyCharm, oriented towards common clusters of vertical stacks devs normally use.
I understand that $249 may not be a large amount for many folks here, but JetBrains isn't the only development tool I'm buying and supporting with a yearly license.
I pay for the full JetBrains subscription. While I still use vscode for typescript and rust, I use JetBrains for anything else. It's one of those no brainer purchases that pays for itself within a month.
Programmers create enormous value. If you can get even small single digit percentage improvements by leveraging better tooling, it pays for itself almost right away.
I estimate conservatively I produce $500,000 in value a year. If I can eke out a 1% improvement in productivity that's worth $5000 a year.
I think it's a big blind spot that developers don't invest enough in.
I abandoned JetBrains a long time ago.. too bad, because they always have really good language/framework/platform tooling, but I just can’t stand the IDE.
I don’t see them just creating a language backend for VSCode.
I’ve been very pleased with the quality of JetBrains products. My dev team has recently switched to VS Code and to get the same level of functionally we need several packages all in various states of maturity and the UX is no where close. It pays to pay JetBrains in terms of productivity.
VSCode is clearly a threat as any large firm market dumping is to any company. But JetBrains have seen off free competitors many times before. They matured in an environment where the go-to IDE was Eclipse, also free, also funded by a behemoth.
The thing is that without profits to justify continued investment, executives at firms like Microsoft or IBM eventually get bored of old projects and quietly defund them. JetBrains seems to try to limit the number of free-for-browny-points projects it runs. There are some, most notably Kotlin, but by and large cool but expensive-to-develop new features are things you pay for, e.g. Code With Me.
That gives JB sticking power. Also, Java/JVM has been a good platform for them over the years. The tools they're using are fundamentally well designed and it shows. Classical Visual Studio got knocked out of the race a long time ago, partly because it was written in C++ and failed to make the jump beyond 32 bit Windows. It took forever to go to 64 bit and never made it to non-Windows platforms. The JVM largely abstracted JetBrains from both transitions (albeit in recent times they've had to become co-maintainers of Swing), allowing them to focus on just adding features. And Java's general features and robustness compared to HTML5/JS mean they can ship features and improvements at an incredible pace.
They have historically also dogfooded their own philosophy. IDEA was never rewritten from scratch. It's been continuously upgraded and refactored for 20 years now. I actually worry a bit that they're losing this and becoming more "California" with efforts like Fleet and Space because those look suspiciously like large rewrites rather than incremental refactorings. Space might take off but I have grave doubts about Fleet. The way they developed Kotlin with great Java interop and even an auto-converter tool, and then started using it in IntelliJ development, is a much more JetBrainsy thing to do.
I don't know if the sort of deep refactoring and other integrations they offer in their IDEs would be possible in the LSP protocol as it exists today. I believe debuggers for vscode have a similar DAP protocol.
Any way, my point is, they have something great that works well for their users, so it doesn't seem like a very large market to make a less powerful version for a small set of new users.
I also suspect that the sort of developers who don't use their IDEs but instead use an LSP based editor that is free/open-source would be unlikely to _pay_ for Jetbrains LSP based offering, however high quality/unique it might be.
Given this, I wonder what the future holds for JetBrains. They've made a good business out of providing standalone solutions for the more popular languages.
If yout think about it, Jetbrains is more a counter part to Visual Studio then VSCode.
Vscode was more a advanced text editor to compete with atom. But I don`t see it losing it`s grip of the market anytime soon. Theres lot of tools that use vscode as base, that will be difficult for them to convert, like platformio IDE for example.
It amazes me that people put up with the gigabytes of RAM and full cores it takes to use Jetbrains products when VSCode/Vim/emacs can do 99% of what Jetbrains IDEs can do with LSP at a fraction of the power consumed. I guess fleet is Jetbrains acknowledging this shortcoming, but paying for current products that are marginally better than free and open source seems crazy to me.
I've used Jetbrains products for a long time, both as a student, and later professionally.
Jetbrains products are free for students, and paid for professional use. In my opinion, the pricing of the product is spot on. My company pays about ~200 euro per seat per year, which is a good price for the quality tooling you get.
In my experience, VSCode is not competitive with Jetbrains products. Their products come with support and good documentation. The proposition is clear and you get exactly what you pay for.
So please JetBrains, do not jump on the freemium bandwagon. Just have us pay for a professional tool without constantly being pushed to some SaaS product offering.
I feel really sorry for JetBrains. They've built, over a long time, a company that makes money from actually good engineering and I was happy to pay for their products for a long time. Then VSCode happened and there just doesn't seem to be a point any more :(
Not sure I like VS Code enough to cop to pay for it rather than just continuing into invest into Jetbrains. Their vik plugins blow VSC out of the water.
Jetbrains product segmenting is a bit strange yes. Right now as a full stack developer i have three options: 1. One instance of VSCode with a few plug ins for each language, 2. IntelliJ ultimate €499/year/seat, 3. Run four free IDEs from jetbrains simultaneously.
#2 is too expensive, #3 is too inconvenient and while #1 isn't as good as jetbrains it's too good enough to justify an upgrade to intellij ultimate. If you are saying native is not even supported in Ultimate this makes things even worse. Jetbrains should release something cheaper in between #2 and #3 that supports many languages but maybe hold back on certain premium features like profiling etc.
I understand that VSCode is part of a grand strategic plan that goes beyond revenue, but I seriously doubt that they'd be willing to internally maintain the absolute truckload of code that would ensue from getting to feature parity with Jetbrains on languages like Java or Python. I'd wager at some point the quality would derail, or someone would pull the plug altogether on such a cost sink.
And that's one of the things I love about Jetbrains products. I'm actually delighted to pay for a product that I use every day for ~8 hours and which I think is extremely well-designed, knowing that the money is going to a company of craftsmen who do that, and only that.
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