What about Amazon? It sounds to me that a large part of the drive toward better dev tools is Microsoft trying to promote its cloud. Amazon has no such relationship with developers. If that becomes a competitive advantage, wouldn't Amazon try to get in?
I've thought about this, or maybe Atlassian or GitHub doing so, or even GitLab, they're all companies that cater to developers and if they acquired JetBrains it would be a move that would keep them on top of their competitors on a new platform, especially Atlassian and GitLab since GitHub at least has Atom (though it suffers performance issues among other things).
We indeed have no plans to acquire Jetbrains. I think they are doing awesome and we probably couldn't afford them. But also we would like to have a development environment that runs online while allowing for browser based and client based editors. Currently we're looking at Koding https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12759
This doesn't change the affordability bit, but IDEA is working on a web hosted IDE. They are rolling it out as an online code review tool first, with nice features like goto definition, but eventually going to full run tests or edit code.
JetBrains are in the middle of a daring switch to SaaS which may or may not work; they face threats from all sides; and they're not exactly a "cloud first" business.
I bet if anyone showed up with a huge bag of cash, they would sell.
As nice as it would be for Microsoft to kind of run those IDE's and toolsets, I think it would be bad for the market altogether, we can't have just one company running every developer offering out there, competition is good. I hope someone else buys them out though, just to see how that ends up.
This, in so many ways. I'd be considered a Microsoft schill, and even I don't like that idea. Microsoft needs companies like Apple, Google, and JetBrains to keep them from getting complacent.
