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Usability
July 10, 2005
Lessons in Out Of Box Experience
Out of box experience (or as I like to call it OOBE) is an important parameter of any software. It basicly says how easy or hard it is for new users to work with your software. It's one of the important categories of software usability. So when I saw this cute flamewar on JavaLobby, I thought that a lot of responders misunderstood what the author of the post wanted to say. He didn't want to write a review or comparison of the IDEs but he just compared their OOBE from his experience. I agree, IDEA has great OOBE and both NetBeans and Eclipse have what to learn from IDEA. On the other hand, IDEA should learn from NetBeans and Eclipse about the price, shouldn't it?
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Comments ( 8 )
I don't think that $500 / €440 is too much for an IDE, I think it is reasonably priced, especially comparing to other IDEs, but I would like if they added more extras (maybe a DVD with some tutorials, something like that) to sweeten the package.
Borland JBuilder 2005 is about the same price $500 Developer version ($3500 Enterprise version now that's just obscene even the most expensive version of Visual Studio cost's -$1000, VS Enterprise Architect $2500), and Visual Studio .NET 2003 costs $800 Professional (expensive).
So the highest entry point is from Microsoft $800, and all java IDEs have pretty much the same price in terms of entry point.
Then you have Netbeans and Eclipse with entry cost of $0, comparing only those packages with JetBrains IDEA, you don't get the bang for the buck, especially comparing it with Netbeans 4.2...