4 ms·
The short answer is that selling developer tools is hard. Software engineers especially do not like to pay for stuff. We used to be in the DevOps space [0] and
by narrationbox 6y ago
The short answer is that selling developer tools is hard. Software engineers especially do not like to pay for stuff. We used to be in the DevOps space [0] and it is something that requires heavy enterprise sales to monetise well. There are few companies that truly took off in selling digital shovels, one example is probably Jetbrains. Most developer tooling/platform companies either died or got acquihired once they run out of funding. Flynn and Deis were both acquired and I suspect even the new generation of PaaS like Vercel
would have to look for alternate sources of revenue once the VC funding dries up and if they do not achieve profitability. The container space is extremely challenging if you are competing directly with companies like Google with tremendous amount of cash and a willingness to buy developer mindshare. Docker may have popularised containers and singlehandedly brought the ideas of BSD jails mainstream but profiting from it is another thing entirely (you can do pretty well consulting on Kubernetes etc. but that would hardly give unicorn levels of return).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23254394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23254394
- agustif 6y agoThe eternal question of how much you can capture of the value you create.
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoWhich microsoft understood well: those dev tools are popular, but can't make money. Well, they have money and they need to become popular again. Deal.
- kyawzazaw 6y agoWhy is JetBrains a rare success compared to others?
- bdcravens 6y agoJetBrains seems to do a good job sticking with the core audience of in-the-trenches coders, instead of trying to expand in a way that feels corporatey and enterprisey.
- libria 6y agoI suppose it's hard to sell tools to people whose job it is to build tools, e.g. John Resig could never have sold jQuery because someone would have just written a feature compatible version for free. (edit, well the source is visible so that might be a bad example) One thing coders do poorly is UX. Most things I’ve seen that are UX heavy done right are commercial and light-years ahead of open-source versions.
- thrower123 6y agoMostly because they are really, really good, and they don't ask much for it. I think I pay them less than $150 for a yearly subscription to their entire toolset, which is a price point that makes it stupid not to buy them. ReSharper is well worth a cup of coffee a week, by itself, and then there is DataGrip, WebStorm, IntelliJ, profilers, decompilers, and other stuff thrown in.
- yakz 6y agoI also enjoy their universal subscription but I recommend trying Rider if you like ReSharper. Outside of small solutions, I find that ReSharper requires more patience than I can muster. The type-and-wait is significantly worse than I remember from classic Mac all-in-ones from the early/mid 90s.
- apozem 6y agoThis is why Microsoft's strategy is so interesting. They're capturing the value of IDEs and GitHub (a company that struggled to monetize while solo) by soft-bundling them together with Azure, which is extremely easy to monetize. If it works, all those cool VS Code features will be covered in your monthly cloud bill.