11 ms·
As a former Borland employee (not for very long, 2006-2009, and actually working in their Austrian offices, which originally became part of the company through
by _ak 11y ago
As a former Borland employee (not for very long, 2006-2009, and actually working in their Austrian offices, which originally became part of the company through the Segue acquisition), I certainly didn't have the complete picture, but our managers, even going as far as those located in Cupertino, and later Austin, were quite open about what Borland's issue was: even with the rise of Java, they thought they could continue in the IDE business like they did before. Apparently, JBuiler used to be their #1 cash cow. Well, until Eclipse came along: within 18 months, JBuilder license sales dropped to essentially zero. They eventually realized that the whole IDE market was dead, so that was spun off into CodeGear, JBuilder was relaunched as an Eclipse distribution with "premium" extensions, and CodeGear was ultimately sold to Embarcadero, while the rest of the company was trying to refocus on producing software for other parts of the development lifecycle, from requirements management to automated testing and test management (hence Segue) to SCM. Company performance was atrocious, and that really screwed over people that took part in the employee share program, but they somehow managed to make it over to get acquired by Micro Focus.
- meddlepal 11y agoSomeone should tell JetBrains the whole IDE market is dead.
- CydeWeys 11y agoBorland was also many times JetBrains' headcount at its peak, and even today is significantly larger. It doesn't follow that because a market supports a company of one size, it must also support a company of a much larger size.
- adevine 11y agoExactly. I also wonder whether it would even have been possible to start Jetbrains in the US. Being based in the Czech Republic gave them a much lower cost structure, and in the beginning, competing with Eclipse's free price tag meant noone could ever have supported a sizable company in the US.
- naa42 11y agoCzech Republic is just a registration place. JetBrains is based in St Petersburg, Russia. Until recently all the developers were in St Petersburg, then some people moved to Germany. JetBrains was started as a small startup and then absorbed people from St Petersburg office of Borland.
- _ak 11y agoI'm not saying the market is still dead, but for a company like Borland, 10 years ago there was nothing they could have done to recover from Eclipse taking over the market. Even then, IntelliJ was a relative niche product (compared to the vast ubiquity of Eclipse), and JetBrains did diversify their product portfolio to both more aspects of the development lifecycle and to more specialized needs in IDEs. Anyway, my point was that Eclipse was a game-changer that triggered great change in Borland.
- kjhsadklj1 11y agoI'm curious - what do you think / what did you see in your experience - that was the reason people chose a Borland product over another choice?
- Conjoiner 11y ago>"there was nothing they could have done" How about creating a better product worth paying for? Eclipse was and is not exactly universally well liked.
- mreiland 11y agoagreed, Loved the old Borland compilers, hated JBuilder.
- MichaelCrawford 11y agoI regard Eclipse as a tool of the Devil. I'll be taking up Android again soon. Every time I try I find Eclipse giving me the goatse but now I'm going to use TextWrangler and Ant.
- lvillani 11y ago> I'll be taking up Android again soon. Every time I try I find Eclipse [...] Is there a particular reason to choose Eclipse instead of Android Studio? Google is pushing its weight on the latter with their Eclipse+ADT combo being essentially on life support (and for good reason since Android Studio provides a vastly better experience). Moreover, the next version of Android Studio will include C/C++ support based on JetBrains' CLion that will cover development with the NDK.
- jquery 11y agoA coworker introduced me to PyCharm after years of development in vim, and it has been an incredible productivity boost. It's painful to watch coworkers slowly fiddle around with text editors. I almost don't like telling people this because it's such a professional competitive advantage for me after switching. Even my coworkers using Sublime run into pain points that I don't (perhaps because they aren't installing all the plugins they should?)
- _d8fd 11y agoWhat are your top 2 or 3 fav productive boosts in PyCharm? I've tried RubyMine for Ruby, and I didn't like it so I went back to Sublime.
- bdcravens 11y agoI mostly develop in Sublime/Atom + iTerm2, but after working in RubyMine for several months, it feels like I lost some sensation in a limb. (and I only explored the bare essentials) Biggest wins for me: Cmd-click pretty much anything and jump to the file, even if it's a gem somewhere outside of my app. Code hinting. The way a Rails console behaves.
- thejosh 11y agoI'm just curious those using Sublime how they debug their programs?
- malyk 11y agoRuby web dev here...I pretty much use liberal puts statements (actually the awesome_print) gem. It's never really been a problem for me with ruby. 2001-2007 I was primarily a Java developer and the debugger was essential. But since switching to ruby in 2007 I've just never felt the need. I think it's probably the cycle time...we were using BEA weblogic as our Java server and cycle times weren't quick so you didn't want to waste time and needed to be able to step through the code. With ruby/rails it's almost instant to see your logging so I've never even looked into how to use a debugger in ruby.
- 11y ago
- crististm 11y agoIf professional software developers don't get to have professional IDEs for their languages, then the software quality will continue to stay at the present levels. The mentality of "good-enough and not even that" is pervasive. When IDEs market is dead, this means the professional pride of the industry as a whole is nonexistent. (Eclipse does not even come close to amateur level, let alone professional. Vim and emacs which you have to configure yourself to come close to a decent level of proficiency don't count either - I'm using all three)
- kriro 11y agoSlightly off topic but I think they would be a great acquisition target for Google. Acquire, open source, push hard. I think there's tremendous strategic advantage in providing the goto tools for programmers. Could be well worth giving up a nice revenue stream, too. [it's similar to providing scholarships and other "early access" recruiting measures]
- mahmud 11y agoPlease don't! IntelliJ is both perfect, and very affordable. Google will only ruin it by neglecting for a few years, before shuttering it down. JetBrains, stick to what you do best.
- on_and_off 11y agoThe only way I can see this kind of acquisition make sense would be in order to push Kotlin as a Java replacement on Android. It looks like Google intends to go the Java 8 way though, so that's not terribly likely.
- alcalde 11y agoJetBrains sells $99 IDEs like in the Turbo Pascal days. The current producer of Borland's Delphi, Embarcadero, sell the product for a minimum of $1000 plus a subscription is now required to get ANY bug fixes at all! Accessing a client/server database is a $500 add-on (or upgrade to the $2000 package), etc. Delphi Professional + c/s add-on plus subscription runs about $2147 the last time I checked! Who in 2015 pays $2,147 to be able to develop software? Note that you'll need to spend even more to target mobile and there's no Linux solution yet either. Delphi users refuse to accept it (or that mobile or web are here to stay, or that there are better VCS systems than subversion, which is the only VCS that Delphi's IDE fully supports) but the days of the expensive, proprietary IDE are indeed dead. MS releasing a free VS Community Edition was just the final nail in the coffin.
- ExpiredLink 11y agoIIRC, JBuilder cost almost $500 back then. Eclipse initially wasn't better but open (for extensions) and gratis.
- Shivetya 11y agopretty much was the fast release track that Delphi had and constant feels as its full price for each release. It got stupid expensive for those paying their own way while all these other options appeared at such better pricing. The packages were structured that some really nice features were bundled with stuff many likely would never use and the upcharge to each tier wasn't small.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- brianwawok 11y agoI pay approx that for Idea. So people will pay that if the product is good.
- hibikir 11y agoHopefully you pay far less than that now: Their prices have come down. But yes, it used to be a $600 product, that was totally worth it to many developers, because of how much better it was than Eclipse. In a world full of boilerplate like Java, IntelliJ's intentions just saved so much time. I remember asking companies that were using Eclipse to please let me use my own license of IntelliJ, because just what alt + tab and alt + insert brought to the table saved more than the price of admission on any given month. I made a similar argument for a second and even third monitor, given the resulutions we had those days.
- brianwawok 11y agohttps://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/ https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/ A commercial new license is $500. Not sure where you get the big price drop from ;) And yes, it is easily worth $500.
- jtwebman 11y agoMaybe you guys should have tried harder, Eclipse sucks but is free, provide value and people will buy.
- aurora72 11y agoThese days Torrent activities are extremely effective thanks to computers like Raspberry Pi and whenever an application appears which is useful but must be paid to be used, a reverse engineered and cracked version of it joins the Torrent network soon. I think, business of software as a downloadable application is dead. See what Microsoft is doing.
- laumars 11y agoYou talk as if this is a recent thing that the Raspberry Pi has enabled. Yet people have been pirating software long before bit-torrent was around; and people have been using torrents, specifically, long before the Raspberry Pi's were a thing. I very much doubt the Raspberry Pi has made any significant impact on the numbers of people who torrent - let alone pirate in the wider scope of distribution mechanisms.
- T3RMINATED 11y agoBorland helped me make trojans - it was the best!