> That's a bit like saying "This person won the lottery, so therefore..." Caveat: I love Jetbrains, and am a happy subscriber. However, as the parent commente

> That's a bit like saying "This person won the lottery, so therefore..." Caveat: I love Jetbrains, and am a happy subscriber. However, as the parent commenter says, it's important to realise that Jetbrains has been lucky as well. Java dev tools suffered from poor performance and poor UX for the longest time. Eclipse, despite its early promise (SWT and native widgets) has much 'rougher' UX compared to IDEA. But I remain surprised how much better even simply typing feels on IDEA, and how good the refactoring tools are. (The latest Eclipse has improved a lot in the refactoring dept, though.) Java's combination of openness and poor dev tools definitely helped Jetbrains a lot and gave them a cachet in the marketplace that helped them as they expanded into other languages. That said, I've also used their Microsoft VS addins and those were very good too, but they likely would have made much less money if they were a Microsoft-only shop.