Free is a huge minus in my book. If I'm not the customer, then I'm the product. I'll happily keep paying for my JetBrains all-product license: https://www.jetbrains.com/all/
This is not necessarily always the case, for example the free thing might be a loss leader, exist to boost secondary or tertiary effects or otherwise exist for non-profit motivated reasons.
Sure, it's a generalization, not an absolute. But for me there's not a big difference between "I'm the end product" and "I'm an intermediate product used to increase sales of the end product". Microsoft isn't a charity; they're an oligopoly pushing hard to keep their stock price up.
I think your characterization of being an "intermediate product" is also dubious since you aren't being sold in any reasonable sense ala the way you are with ad tech. And whilst MS are obviously in the business of making money that doesn't mean it's the only thing they'll do.
If you'd like to argue that MS is giving this away just to be nice, instead of as a calculated move toward sustaining or increasing revenue, I'd be interested to see that. But for now let's assume they're doing what their shareholders expect: making money.
We can't know whether I'm an intermediate product without knowing their goals, which they're unlikely to be transparent about. But lets suppose one of their goals is usage and market share statistics that they use as proof to convince paying customers. In that case, my usage is very much an intermediate product.
Or let's imagine that one of their goals is restored market dominance in developer tools. To that end, they would like their competitors to receive less money, leading to their collapse. If they paid somebody else to give away developer tools for that purpose, I'd obviously be the product. That they're paying for that internally obscures it, but fundamentally doesn't change the exploitative nature of the relationship.
If all this is really what you believe rather than just being argumentative then how can you use any product. Usage and market share statistics are just as useful to JetBrains in that regard and you pay them for the privilege of being an “intermediate product”.
Jetbrains shows no signs of wanting to be a monopoly player in development tools. I've been a customer a long time, and I think they've done a great job of balancing making money with doing solid work and serving their customers. Microsoft, on the other hand, has a long history of willful domination and exploitation, and they've specifically done that with free products to kneecap competitors.
No, I like competitive marketplaces, as they're one of the core engines of capitalism. I deeply dislike willful monopolies and oligopolies in general, because their goal is to break that engine in ways that harm consumers and often society. Microsoft themselves I can take or leave now that they've been mostly defanged.
I also really like having good developer tools. Many of them come out of community-driven open source. But some of them cost money. And for those, I very much want there to be a competitive marketplace, so there are strong incentives for all players to keep improving.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, care to expand? Aren't you also the product for JetBrains, since you're one of the customers that's keeping them afloat?
Sure. The foundation of commerce is sustained relationships where value is mutually exchanged. I give you a few bucks, you give me a cheeseburger. If fix somebody's problem with a computer, they give me cash. Product for payment; value for value.
When some commercial effort departs from that, it's good to be suspicious. The bills are getting paid somehow. E.g., look at network television from 1960-2000 or so. The viewers were not customers. The viewers were the product being sold to people who wanted to manipulate them. Advertisers were the customers, so the programs were generally about getting maximum influenceable wallet-connected eyeballs; quality was at best secondary.
In contrast, look at what's happened to TV since then. We're in a golden age. [1] Why? Many reasons, but a key one is that people are now paying for TV directly. To Netflix and Hulu and HBO and all the other paid streaming efforts, you're the customer, not the product being sold to somebody else. Now they have a strong incentive to make things that you don't just tolerate but love.
Microsoft in particular has a history of monopolistic behavior that has been harmful to the industry (e.g., [2], [3]). Are these developer tools awesome just because Microsoft is run by nice, generous people? I'd say instead they correctly recognize that if they want to regain some of their lost market power, they're going to have to compete with the existing tools, many of which are quite good. Why are they good? I'd say it's partly because smart people have built a strong business [4] making those tools. If Microsoft manages to eliminate the competition, they'll lose the incentive to build good stuff, just like they have in the past.
> Many reasons, but a key one is that people are now paying for TV directly
This is an insignificant reason. People paid for cable TV and were soon shown ads. Even people who pay to see movies are shown ads before the movie and during movies via product placement. Hulu makes great shows but sells ads more highly targeted than any broadcast channels.
The biggest reason for the current golden age is that streaming services don't have to try to create the most broadly appealing content to fill the most valuable timeslots and can instead cater to each viewer's tastes directly. Breaking Bad was a great show before it got on Netflix, but it wasn't a hit until wide on-demand streaming availability helped it find its audience. Tiger King is the kind of hot garbage that would normally get an afternoon time slot on a second tier cable channel, but making it available on demand turned it into a megahit.
The explosion in channels was definitely another factor. But being paid matters. HBO punched above its weight for years, for example. WHy? Because they had to.
I agree with you that oligopolies like big movie-theater chains will try to exploit that power by doing anti-consumer things like showing ads. But that's just more proof we should be suspicious of free products that may increase oligopoly power.
I can definitely see where you're coming from. In fact, for VS Code, I believe they collect quite a bit of metrics on your usage of the product through telemetry, so it's definitely not "free" in the sense of "nothing given" - essentially, your programming and usage habits of the program are being sent to MS every second.
Re: the case of VS Code eliminating competition and MS losing the inventive to build good stuff, I think the core editor engine being open source gives me hope that this won't happen like in the olden days of MS. But of course, still a risk.
Facebook (and Cambridge Analytica) is another example.
> If Microsoft manages to eliminate the competition, they'll lose the incentive to build good stuff, just like they have in the past.
Typical strategy. You provide a good and cheap product until you reach a relative majority of a market and customer lock-in, then quietly slow down on the free improvements and start extracting money from the users.
No the JetBrains IDE is the product. This phrase generally refers to things like Facebook or Google. They offer tons of free services in order to gather data about you and sell it to advertisers.
Thanks. VS Code is actually no saint in this regard. MS collects metrics through VS Code's "telemetry" option (I think toggle-able to off, not sure) and this data has no doubt been used to improve VS Code and help MS build better product offerings and hence more rake in more revenue.
This isn't always true, so it's best to look at it on a case by case basis. One wouldn't suggest that Typescript coders are a product of MS.
So far, they don't seem to be treating vscode users like the product. I think they're are building out great free tooling to entice users to use their other paid services like Azure.
Github has made their pricing model and the motivations for it pretty clear. They subsidize their hosted service with enterprise self-hosted pricing to justify expanding their feature set. This has been true for a long time, well before the MS acquisition. The things that have changed are:
- Developments that were in place were released.
- The subsidization model made pricing structure changes possible.
None of this has to be a big conspiracy or a big change from Microsoft's acquisition. It's possible they just have a business model that's less nefarious than you're able or willing to understand.
That's an adequate slam at the end there, but I'm more interested in your claim about "to justify expanding their feature set." How about you give me the elevator pitch on that. Because the obvious alternative explanation is that Github was doing what a lot of companies have done: use a loss-leader pricing scheme to establish market dominance, allowing them to charge more to customers for whom that dominance is a feature.
Well, you must then love Oracle. I mean, what you are saying is just silly. Of course the producers of FOSS want something in return, but sometimes it's not nefarious as you might imagine it to be.
It could be a strategical investment to create an ecosystem out of technology that you know the best and can influence its direction, to then sell customizations and develop services on top of it. Like MS is doing here. Or RedHat. Or Google with Kubernetes. Or Canonical with Ubuntu. And so on.
It could be a lot of things. Would you like to argue that it is some specific thing that couldn't possibly lead to the sort of oligopoly or monopoly position that Microsoft has eagerly sought and maintained in the past? If so, which exact thing?
I'm arguing that the premise of non-free software and services being somehow better because there must be a catch is just ludicrous. So no, I don't want to argue "it is some specific thing".
I don't think MS is very charitable company and dislike many things about them, but sometimes a deal is just mutually beneficial. Better at times than with paid products.
And if Microsoft has something terrible planned, the community would just fork the project and go in a different direction.
Moreover I want to add that people, and companies, change. Just like a nation isn't the same it was 100 years ago, Microsoft too might have toned down its malicious practises. Just as a thought to you. We don't anymore blame Germans for being Nazis either.
I'm not saying paid IDEs are necessarily better. But I am saying that in practice, commercial IDE vendors have been making superior products to the free-as-in-speech ones, and have been for 20 years at least.
You blow a lot of smoke here, with "sometimes" and "might". Sure, Microsoft could have been taken over by angels straight from heaven, and is now only intent on doing charitable works until the money runs out. Many things are possible. But possible doesn't mean true. If you'd like to argue something's true, by all means do it.
I think the only substance is "the community would just fork". One, there's no particular proof that a bunch of volunteers can make something like that. Two, that's an enormous effort. Look at how much work and time it took between MS using a free IE to kill Netscape and the emergence of Firefox. And that only worked because Mozilla found a revenue model that let it afford the large number of full-time engineers needed to produce a browser.
So if you're serious about your argument, why don't you explain exactly how "the community" will afford to do that fork. And why your imagined destruction of paid developer tool vendors like JetBrains and handing MS a monopoly in the market is ok as long as you're getting something free right now.
I doubt codespaces will be free- this is how VS Code starts seeing increased monetization. It'll be interesting to see if the self hosted codespace options are no-cost as well.
Not in the sense which that is meant. The foundation of commerce is long-term, positive-sum relationships between people. The people at my corner grocery are looking out for the needs of me and my neighbors; we look out for them in return. That relationship is fundamentally different than the one between cow and meatpacker.
Yes, you are the product in the sense that this is meant. The people at my grocery store track my purchases using my loyalty card, use that data to influence their ads, and sell that data to others.
Jetbrains might not do this, but if they can make money from this, they would be just as incentivized to do this as GitHub.
Good thing my grocery store doesn't have a loyalty program or track purchases then. Maybe you should use a different one?
I agree the lets-exploit-the-customers behavior you're talking about is currently common, but it's far from universal. And regardless, in a value-for-money relationship one has power that just isn't there when one is purely being sold.
Huh. Do you really not see any difference between a publicly funded accommodation and attempts to dominate a market by a company with a long history of abusing a monopoly?
I do see some differences. I was attempting to use those differences to illustrate one of the ways that this maxim about consumers and products is overly broad.
Exactly. All generalizations are broad. But nobody goes around objecting to generalizations every time they see one; they'd get nothing else done. So the pattern in which they do that is always informative.
