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 a

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.