I think it's more that there are now many large companies that now deploy VSCode as a shared, distributed editor. When I was at Google they were starting to replace their proprietary "Cider" web-based editor (for Google3) with a "CiderV" which was a modified hosted VSCode. A hosted VSCode instance makes a lot of sense for a company like Google where source-code-on-laptops is generally forbidden and developers are often issued Chromebooks etc. It solves & improves the distributed/remote development problem without requiring organizational changes. And it's much faster and smoother than RDP, etc.
So those are potential customers that JetBrains was/is losing. My brain is almost 20-years-wired for JetBrains products. I would have been much happier to be able to use a remote JetBrains IDE vs a remote VSCode.
There are also people for whom the existing JetBrains IDEs will always feel big slow and bloated. They have a lot of features packed in and come with a lot of lifestyle assumptions. I can see the value in JetBrains rolling out something that feels lighter-weight.
Exactly, when you want to download JetBrian fleet, you'll first have to download their "JetBrain Toolbox", which looks and functions VERY similar to the adobe CC menubar app.
To be fair they ship a large number of IDEs and Toolbox makes managing them a lot easier. I mostly only use IDEA Ultimate and CLion but I use the others occasionally too for certain tasks but don't necessarily have them installed all the time. Toolbox is installed on all my machines so I can simply install what I need when I need it, i.e Datagrip to generate some nice diagrams of some random DB I need to look at, etc.
So those are potential customers that JetBrains was/is losing. My brain is almost 20-years-wired for JetBrains products. I would have been much happier to be able to use a remote JetBrains IDE vs a remote VSCode.
There are also people for whom the existing JetBrains IDEs will always feel big slow and bloated. They have a lot of features packed in and come with a lot of lifestyle assumptions. I can see the value in JetBrains rolling out something that feels lighter-weight.