[zeroc8]

In my opinion, Jetbrains has the better model. After all, what happened to JBuilder? Nobody is using it anymore, Codegear/Embarcadero priced themselves out of the competition. Eclipse was free, Netbeans was free, JDeveloper was free, IntelliJ could be had for around 500 bucks and asking price for JBuilder was 4000 or more.

Jetbrains proved that you can successfully can compete against free. But the pricing needs to be reasonable.

[zerkten]

Jetbrains seem to be able to compete because they are building for the mass market. JBuilder is an exception. Delphi is a niche product still strongest for fast desktop app development which has a small market compared Rider (C#), PyCharm (Python), IntelliJ (Java), etc. which are all much larger markets.

The pricing was intentional which is different from saying someone "priced themselves out of a market" (which I take to be an unintentional act). They (wrongly) intentionally targeted both an enterprise and niche desktop development segment of the market who are not building mass market apps and could never escape from there because the value of Delphi diminished when Java, and especially C# became mainstream in the early 2000s.

This mistake has more complexity to it when you understand what what going on around Borland and the market in the late 90s. If you are looking at it now, then it just seems like an obvious unforced error.