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I don't think people have problem paying for tools that are genuinely useful for them, regardless of whether or not there are free tools around. The problem wi
by janoc 4y ago
I don't think people have problem paying for tools that are genuinely useful for them, regardless of whether or not there are free tools around.
The problem with Kite seems that their engineered first ("This machine learning AI is so cool, what can we do with it?" "I am a VC, are you doing AI? TAKE MY $$$$!") and only after burning through millions started to look at how to actually make money out of it.
And discovered that:
a) Hobbyist/individual developers rarely want to pay yet another subscription (can't justify it if you aren't making money with it & even $10/month subscriptions do add up!)
b) Corporate developers don't have purchasing authority. Everything must get approved, by both accountants and legal/compliance. Expecting a large company to pay a huge monthly/annual subscription fee for what is essentially a better autocompleter? Good luck with that.
That "Oh but your developers will be 18% faster!" argument is BS. 90% of the corporate developer's time isn't spent on typing code but on debugging, design, maintenance and meetings. Kite (or Copilot) don't help with that.
c) What about copyright/compliance issues? This has been trained on Github repositories - i.e. the same as Github's Copilot. How do I know where does the completed code come from? What about licenses on that code? Can I filter only for permissive/non-contagious (i.e. non-GPL) licenses? What about my code/whatever I type? Does it get sent to your servers? That alone is a complete no-go for companies.
In other words, a classic case where one shouldn't ask whether something could be done but whether it should. Someone outside of their engineering bubble and with a bit of business acumen would have told them that. Or at least told them to do a market research first, before spending all that time and money.
But hey, they had a good ride for the VC's money and are winding it down in an organized manner, without leaving a ton of shattered lives and a mountain of debt behind. So that's a plus.