Rant: Unresponsive companies

Dear JetBrains,

A little while ago, you mass-mailed us, your customers, to announce the imminent arrival of your new product, IntelliJ IDEA 9. As a user of your product, I was excited to upgrade! Your e-mail solicited inquiries for upgrade pricing, which wasn't published at the time. I duly responded with an e-mail inquiring about upgrading. Guess how many replies I've gotten from you? Let me give you a hint: it's the integer just before the first natural number.

Fortunately for me, I'm also a user of NetBeans. I am in fact a very happy user of NetBeans, which happens to be free. I also happen to get great support from my local Sun rep too.

Unfortunately for you, this means you're losing me both as a customer and advocate for your product. Losing a customer is bad enough. Losing a customer who was an enthusiastic advocate for your product is far, far worse. Word of mouth is still one of the main factors for a sale these days. All it takes for you to lose business is for people to not say anything at all.

I bought your product out-of-pocket because I liked what I saw at the time and wanted my own personal (non-corporate) copy. I still do like your product very much but I'm not willing to pay for it again when there is a perfectly acceptable alternative in NetBeans. With the economy being what it is, you have to work hard at keep your customers. Everyone has to these days.

With a fantastic IDE like NetBeans around, I had to take a hard look at whether to purchase an upgrade to your product. Your one chance to sway me was your upgrade offer, which you flubbed. Now, I just can't justify upgrading to your new product when I can get a perfectly acceptable and free alternative which is as full-featured as your premium offering.

Never ever ignore a customer who wants to give you money - if you can't even get that right, I don't trust you to make the tools for my work no matter how pretty they are.

Yours sincerely,
A Former Customer