Their devtools team is surprisingly competent when they choose to be. Pre-2015, people used Sublime Text, Atom, Textmate, Notepad++, Light Table, Brackets, Emacs/Vim, Intellij. VS code single handedly crushed all of them with code completion and language servers that require zero configuration. Emacs/Vim lost share, Jetbrains (and also Eclipse) were forced to release their own "lightweight" code editors, and everybody else became mostly irrelevant (except perhaps Sublime Text since it has the best native performance out of all editors).
I would contend that JetBrains has only grown even with VS Code around. They're still more than viable, support things on a near similar cadence (and even in some cases, faster and/or better) than VS Code gets support for it.
I agree with the rest, they've all mostly lost market share or completely no longer exist due to VS Code, but not IntelliJ, that platform is going really strong.
Though no doubt, VS Code has pushed JetBrains to rethink some things, and be better in general.
Free doesn't matter here. JetBrains is an established toolset that people pay for. They've already been competing with free, and free didn't put them out of business. In some ways, free likely made business better than ever (I know alot of devs that started with VS Code and moved to JetBrains for various reasons)
They can have all the money in the world and it doesn't mean much in this context.
For while Microsoft is going to invest heavily in a Cursor / Windsurf like product and likely do alot to ship it in their editors - likely with exclusions or lag times between updates on other platforms - there's zero reason for Google to do this for example, when they could sell through Gemini for Code as an extension across all editors.
I don't see JetBrains having issues because of AI tooling, for most of these companies, its a boon to be on the JetBrains platform. Especially because JetBrains has lots of enterprise customers who would naturally be very interested in buying AI tooling for their developers. Its a natural market
100%, I swore by emacs, but then switched to vs-code recently, and believe-me, switching editors is one of the hardest things to do due to ingrained muscle-memory - but vs-code made it easy with emacs-mode etc.
vs-code is one of the few products coming of of microsoft that leads the pack by a big margin, and it is no surprise that all of these startups are forking it.
Microsoft is owing its bad reputation to Windows, Office, Sharepoint!!!, Teams (and more?). The quality of developer tools and languages (C#, Visual Studio, Code and .NET Ecosystem, Azure UI is also great) from Microsoft has been flawless (with some exceptions like webforms, or ui code generation tools of the past).
I wouldn’t say that. JetBrains is incredibly bloated and has significantly less community support.
I’ll agree on Teams being crap though, mostly for how dumb it is that they’ve rewritten it multiple times and created a confusing slate of weird versions like “Teams (work or school)”
Probably.
> And deliver them with far greater stability and polish
That seems ... overly optimistic given MS's history.