The commercial (Java) IDE market has been going through a transformation that started more than 3 years ago. And it all started with the introduction of NetBeans and Eclipse free IDEs.
I remember (and experienced in person) the love-hate relationship between Metrowerks and Sun, with the CodeWarrior (CW) folks creating the CodeWarrior for Wireless product, and saying “we are investing in tools that help sell more Java, but Sun is not helping us here with their free tools”. Eventually Metrowerks decided to drop from the Java IDE race – a hard but smart move by Metrowerks.
Today Borland announced they are set to sell their IDE business.
Any commercial IDE will see its market share erode over time. It takes big cojones to enter the IDE market today. It is just too hard to compete against free tools. Even if the commercial tool has unique features, it is a matter of time before similar features will show up in the free tool(s). IntelliJ has done awesome, and has a large number of followers, but its market share will erode over time as well.
Back in 2002 my team at AGEA created extensions for CW and NetBeans that allowed developers create MIDP applications for the enterprise. I believed back then, and I believe now, that from the tools developer perspective, plug-ins to existing IDEs are the way to go.
ceo