> Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools.
Quite simply developers are not decision makers. Often engineering managers aren't even decision makers. I fully believe if you want to dominate in that area you need to target decision makers who force it upon their developers. How many of us have been told we're using X database or we're using X project management tool or even X virtualisation system? Management makes these decisions which is why if you go an AWS conference you'll find majority of the people there aren't techies but management and lots of the talks are aimed at management understanding the tech.
I've seen many other commenters lament the fact that "even though devs make a boatload of money, they don't want to pay for their tools".
This may be true.
But I think the biggest issue is that most developers are only developers "at work". And I've seen far too many people work with subpar tools (old, dingy PCs that would take ages to do anything). Management thinks this is fine, and that a 5 yo intel U laptop with 8 GB RAM is AOK for running heavy computations in 2022.
So, going out of their way to buy some "text editor" when vscode is free? Not gonna happen. Even if the devs themselves are convinced.
Quite simply developers are not decision makers. Often engineering managers aren't even decision makers. I fully believe if you want to dominate in that area you need to target decision makers who force it upon their developers. How many of us have been told we're using X database or we're using X project management tool or even X virtualisation system? Management makes these decisions which is why if you go an AWS conference you'll find majority of the people there aren't techies but management and lots of the talks are aimed at management understanding the tech.