33 ms·

> But clearly, that was unacceptable. They continued to shoehorn in irrelevant crap that nobody wanted. It will be interesting to see if the SaaS subscription/

by pbowyer 11y ago

> But clearly, that was unacceptable. They continued to shoehorn in irrelevant crap that nobody wanted. It will be interesting to see if the SaaS subscription/rental model changes this. Or if they feel as beholden to adding features each release as people trying to sell software releases to get upgrade income.

sangnoir 11y ago
>It will be interesting to see if the SaaS subscription/rental model changes this. I think the rental model will slow this down, but not get rid of it entirely: not as long as people still want to write blogs about the "new version of our product". I think JetBrains will make a good case study: their products are feature complete and they seemed to struggle to find new features to add lately (plus they have switched to rental model). What we really need is something similar to API versioning: when GMail has a new version, bump up the version to 24, but keep version 23 accessible to those who prefer it.
- mschuster91 11y ago
  > I think JetBrains will make a good case study: their products are feature complete and they seemed to struggle to find new features to add lately (plus they have switched to rental model). What Jetbrains MUST do: improve the performance! Replacing my MBPs spinning rust disk with a SSD helped, but it's still eating up CPU when running on battery with indexing... it's a text editor for fucks sake.
  - spdionis 11y ago
    It is NOT a text editor and I think it's eating that cpu for a good reason.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      It totally is a glorified text editor + some support tools and I'm pretty sure the reason it's eating that CPU is because of piles of unoptimized cruft. Like every other big project in contemporary "it's nil until you ship it" culture.
      - ishansharma 11y ago
        PhpStorm/WebIDE is definitely not a glorified text editor. Editor is definitely the core but all the support tools make a big chunk of features and usage. Sure, I can get quite a lot of those features in Sublime with some packages but they aren't that well integrated and easy to use!
      - rylee 11y ago
        if you think it's just a text editor and some support tools then switch to vim.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        I use Emacs for almost everything, so I'm pretty aware where text editing ends and support processing starts. That said, consider Microsoft Word. Since forever, it's been doing similar - if not greater - amount of work processing and reprocessing text every keystroke than IDEs contemporary to it. Yet somehow, it is not bloated, it does - and always did - work well on even low-tier machines. Also compare with OpenOffice, which does more-less the same things, only much slower and buggier. If M$ can keep Word functional and performant, I'm pretty sure Eclipse and IntelliJ could be made fast as well.
        chris_wot 11y ago
        You were doing well, right up to the moment you stated that Word is not bloated and compared it to OpenOffice (who even uses OpenOffice? Everyone with any clue uses LibreOffice!). P.S. as someone who has commit access to LibreOffice (and much to everyone else's chagrin, sometimes uses it), I could be a little bit biased.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        In my experience of using Word - since mid-90s 'till today - I've never felt it's bloated. It has a lot of features, yes. I don't know what half of them do, true. Recent versions hide them in random places and made the thing a bit confusing to use. But it almost never locks up, it lets me enter text as fast as I type even in very large documents, and generally feels... slick. Not something I could say about OpenOffice when it was "the thing", not something I can say about LibreOffice (sorry). I know that M$ has a pile of hacks going on there, but hey, it works. OTOH, all Java IDEs I've used so far lag by default. It's often about the little things - like those 1 second delays in menus, or 100ms delays between keystroke and letter appearing on screen, etc. Enough to make the experience frustrating. If I keep using them it's only because some advanced features don't have an equivalent (or easily installable equivalent) in Emacs. But it's a tradeoff between having a powerfool tool that I use every once in a while vs. enduring the constant experience of bloat. Features of IDEs are cool, but they seriously need to optimize them. And to stop assuming that every developer gets to work on a brand-new machine. Maybe it's true in the US, but it's not true in other places (sometimes because managers don't see a problem with paying developers $lot but then being cheap on the equipment those same developers have to work on).
  - ecopoesis 11y ago
    Acrually, it's not a text editor: it's an IDE. How do you think all the fancy find usages, highlighting errors, and general contextual knowledge works? The IDE is constantly reparsing every time you make a change.
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      Visual Studio doesn't seem to have the same problem.
      - lightlyused 11y ago
        That is why VS gets confused often.
      - brianwawok 11y ago
        Isn't this why people get resharper? Add in missing features.
- mark_l_watson 11y ago
  Off topic to bloated web sites, but: I like the subscription models of JetBrains, Office 365, etc. Long term, I think this business model will enable tighter more focused products because the "add new features to get update revenue" goes away.
  - Angostura 11y ago
    So selling good feature-complete software is insufficient. People must be forced to keep paying for it at regular intervals, whether they need updates or not.
    - jarek 11y ago
      Software is the perfect product - it doesn't wear out, it doesn't go bad, if you really need to you'll be able to use software you got in 1990 in 2090. For the software creator, once you've sold someone your software, the only way to make more money is to sell it to someone else, or create and sell a new version. Eventually you run out of someone-elses to sell to and can make new versions or go out of business. ... or sell a support contract or a subscription model. I don't like it from a user's point of view, but squaring my preferences as a user with preferences of business isn't easy.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        It's not just software. Most of the things we buy and use are being purposefully broken because otherwise they wouldn't wear out fast enough. That's the sick side of capitalism.
        jarek 11y ago
        Well sure, but there's an ultimately sustainable business model if your product needs replacing in 30 or 50 years. (Leaving aside the things like marketing claims of a "30 year" or "lifetime" warranties from a company with a 10-year lifespan.) Capital needed for initial production is then the only issue. But there isn't such a model if the product never needs replacing again.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
SaaS is the literal embodiment of all those problems. Things are being dumbed down both because you have to target the mainstream with short attention span, and most webapps can't support any kind of serious load. It's all glorified toys, with the added benefit that the company can - and will - get acquihired or go out of business at any time, leaving you without the service you dependent on and without the data you've entered into it.

by pbowyer 11y ago

sangnoir 11y ago

>It will be interesting to see if the SaaS subscription/rental model changes this. I think the rental model will slow this down, but not get rid of it entirely: not as long as people still want to write blogs about the "new version of our product". I think JetBrains will make a good case study: their products are feature complete and they seemed to struggle to find new features to add lately (plus they have switched to rental model). What we really need is something similar to API versioning: when GMail has a new version, bump up the version to 24, but keep version 23 accessible to those who prefer it.

mschuster91 11y ago
> I think JetBrains will make a good case study: their products are feature complete and they seemed to struggle to find new features to add lately (plus they have switched to rental model). What Jetbrains MUST do: improve the performance! Replacing my MBPs spinning rust disk with a SSD helped, but it's still eating up CPU when running on battery with indexing... it's a text editor for fucks sake.
- spdionis 11y ago
  It is NOT a text editor and I think it's eating that cpu for a good reason.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    It totally is a glorified text editor + some support tools and I'm pretty sure the reason it's eating that CPU is because of piles of unoptimized cruft. Like every other big project in contemporary "it's nil until you ship it" culture.
    - ishansharma 11y ago
      PhpStorm/WebIDE is definitely not a glorified text editor. Editor is definitely the core but all the support tools make a big chunk of features and usage. Sure, I can get quite a lot of those features in Sublime with some packages but they aren't that well integrated and easy to use!
    - rylee 11y ago
      if you think it's just a text editor and some support tools then switch to vim.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        I use Emacs for almost everything, so I'm pretty aware where text editing ends and support processing starts. That said, consider Microsoft Word. Since forever, it's been doing similar - if not greater - amount of work processing and reprocessing text every keystroke than IDEs contemporary to it. Yet somehow, it is not bloated, it does - and always did - work well on even low-tier machines. Also compare with OpenOffice, which does more-less the same things, only much slower and buggier. If M$ can keep Word functional and performant, I'm pretty sure Eclipse and IntelliJ could be made fast as well.
        chris_wot 11y ago
        You were doing well, right up to the moment you stated that Word is not bloated and compared it to OpenOffice (who even uses OpenOffice? Everyone with any clue uses LibreOffice!). P.S. as someone who has commit access to LibreOffice (and much to everyone else's chagrin, sometimes uses it), I could be a little bit biased.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        In my experience of using Word - since mid-90s 'till today - I've never felt it's bloated. It has a lot of features, yes. I don't know what half of them do, true. Recent versions hide them in random places and made the thing a bit confusing to use. But it almost never locks up, it lets me enter text as fast as I type even in very large documents, and generally feels... slick. Not something I could say about OpenOffice when it was "the thing", not something I can say about LibreOffice (sorry). I know that M$ has a pile of hacks going on there, but hey, it works. OTOH, all Java IDEs I've used so far lag by default. It's often about the little things - like those 1 second delays in menus, or 100ms delays between keystroke and letter appearing on screen, etc. Enough to make the experience frustrating. If I keep using them it's only because some advanced features don't have an equivalent (or easily installable equivalent) in Emacs. But it's a tradeoff between having a powerfool tool that I use every once in a while vs. enduring the constant experience of bloat. Features of IDEs are cool, but they seriously need to optimize them. And to stop assuming that every developer gets to work on a brand-new machine. Maybe it's true in the US, but it's not true in other places (sometimes because managers don't see a problem with paying developers $lot but then being cheap on the equipment those same developers have to work on).
- ecopoesis 11y ago
  Acrually, it's not a text editor: it's an IDE. How do you think all the fancy find usages, highlighting errors, and general contextual knowledge works? The IDE is constantly reparsing every time you make a change.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Visual Studio doesn't seem to have the same problem.
    - lightlyused 11y ago
      That is why VS gets confused often.
    - brianwawok 11y ago
      Isn't this why people get resharper? Add in missing features.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
Off topic to bloated web sites, but: I like the subscription models of JetBrains, Office 365, etc. Long term, I think this business model will enable tighter more focused products because the "add new features to get update revenue" goes away.
- Angostura 11y ago
  So selling good feature-complete software is insufficient. People must be forced to keep paying for it at regular intervals, whether they need updates or not.
  - jarek 11y ago
    Software is the perfect product - it doesn't wear out, it doesn't go bad, if you really need to you'll be able to use software you got in 1990 in 2090. For the software creator, once you've sold someone your software, the only way to make more money is to sell it to someone else, or create and sell a new version. Eventually you run out of someone-elses to sell to and can make new versions or go out of business. ... or sell a support contract or a subscription model. I don't like it from a user's point of view, but squaring my preferences as a user with preferences of business isn't easy.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      It's not just software. Most of the things we buy and use are being purposefully broken because otherwise they wouldn't wear out fast enough. That's the sick side of capitalism.
      - jarek 11y ago
        Well sure, but there's an ultimately sustainable business model if your product needs replacing in 30 or 50 years. (Leaving aside the things like marketing claims of a "30 year" or "lifetime" warranties from a company with a 10-year lifespan.) Capital needed for initial production is then the only issue. But there isn't such a model if the product never needs replacing again.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

SaaS is the literal embodiment of all those problems. Things are being dumbed down both because you have to target the mainstream with short attention span, and most webapps can't support any kind of serious load. It's all glorified toys, with the added benefit that the company can - and will - get acquihired or go out of business at any time, leaving you without the service you dependent on and without the data you've entered into it.