Comment by mthoms

4 years ago

I suspect JetBrains location in Eastern Europe helped a great deal talent-wise.

Maybe, but I really doubt it. "Our developers are cheaper" is rarely a winning strategy.

JetBrains did - and still does - execute well. They expanded their IDE to many languages and caught the Ruby, Node, and Typescript waves. Borland did JBuilder, yes, but it wasn't category-winning. Maybe Delphi could have dominated with more investment and more imagination, but it seems to have risen and fallen with Win32.

  • Their pricing strategy always sucked. I mean, 4000 Bucks for a Java IDE? Jetbrains on the other hand did the right thing from the beginning by asking money but keeping the price realistic.