> "Are we really going to start using Spotify after so many years of hating on it?" —our 15-year-old.

Genuinely curious here - why are so many techies desperately passionate (both positive and negative) about choice of unseemly unnecessary tech products? I feel like there is this peculiar subculture of tech-minded folk who defend at odds their tech choices. "Slack is the best" "Hell no, IRC has been around for years!" "Let's fight!" I don't see any rational reason to "hate" on the success of a company or a brand...

You have to keep in mind that this is a kind of game. Almost no one truly, really hates the other product. People don't get into fistfights over Vim vs. Emacs. It's just a community joke.

So for instance I'm in the IRC camp of group communication, and I'll go to great length to use it over Slack, but if you really need me to use Slack and it makes sense, then I'll use Slack. But I will be doing cynical jokes so that you won't forget I'm in the other camp :P.

>People don't get into fistfights over Vim vs. Emacs. It's just a community joke.

Unfortunately, this can get out of hand, see systemd death threats. Hope people will learn to be nicer on the internet now that the general population is on it.

That's not a product rivalry, that's a deeper upset with how systemd is handling things.

Nobody thinks vim is trying to take over the editor space.

But I would hope you'd still think that death threats over it are utterly ridiculous, and unacceptable?

Yes.

I actually had a real-deal power struggle with an employee once about using hipchat instead of IRC. They refused to use hipchat, then left the company eventually. So it's not a game for everyone.

People do get into fistfights over sporting rivalries, though, not to mention religious ones.

I know. I just haven't seen this dynamic go that far in the tech sector yet.

Well, in the case of Rdio vs Spotify, Rdio is way better, UI-wise.

But that has nothing to do with our 15-y-o — she grew up with Rdio and it's the only streaming music service she's ever known.

It is basic human nature to polarise into distinct communities and take sides. Look at football teams. They wear different colours, have minor differences in ethoses but both play more or less the same game of football. Slack versus IRC is the same concept.

The tech generation grew up in a 'free' culture of internet: illegal downloads, open source, pro bono collaboration. Paying for something that is equally equivalent to something that was free for decades usually is a tough sell. This doesnt apply to all people.

This probably also explains why it's so hard to find a good editor. So many devs are totally unwilling to pay a decent amount for anything. Maybe the exception being hosting. Outside of hosting a server and dns and an SSL cert, it's hard to get engineers making 6 figures to spend more than $50 on a tool they use every day of their working life.

Intellij recently switched to a new plan that adds up to like $15 to $10 a month for all their awesome (but very specialized) IDEs and people are going nuts over how much that is. It's nothing. But devs want to pay for very little. So we get shitty tools. Like vim[1] or atom[2]. Thanks I guess. Seriously can I have a generic text editor that's as good at editing as IntelliJ is at Java?

[1] http://geoff.greer.fm/vim/

[2] https://news.floobits.com/2015/10/14/developing-atom-plugins...

> it's hard to get engineers making 6 figures to spend more than $50 on a tool they use every day of their working life

I paid JetBrains $100, because their IDE is awesome, and worth every penny. $100 is probably worth more to me since I am third-worlder[1], I earn far less than 6 figures.

>Intellij recently switched to a new plan that adds up to like $15 to $10 a month for all their awesome (but very specialized) IDEs and people are going nuts over how much that is

No - it wasn't about the money for me; I was one of the very vocal critics about that[2]. The subscription was actually worked out cheaper per year! My complaint was that once you stopped paying subscriptions, your IDE would stop working (they have since backtracked). Previously, if your licence expired, you'd be left with a working IDE which you can no longer upgrade/get updates for, but working nonetheless.

It also didn't help that I felt personally betrayed by the decision after recommending JB to my colleagues and coworkers for years.

1. Middle class third-worlder, but $100 is a larger percentage of my income vs. first-wolrd

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10171551

I disliked the IntelliJ move because I have a preference for owning over renting. Possibly because I grew up in a country with a preference for owning property and seeing rent as dead money, or because I grew up buying and collecting CDs and putting them into alphabetical order.

In this case, I am happy to pay for RubyMine. And happy to pay a little more if I want to update to the latest version. But I don't like the idea of only being able to use it this month as long as I've paid the rent.

> it's hard to get engineers making 6 figures to spend more than $50 on a tool they use every day of their working life.

On the flip-side, why invest all of your time become accustomed (possibly married) to an ecosystem that is beholden to someone else? Just because you spend $100 on VisualStudio doesn't mean that MS will take your input to heart when some manager "on high" decides to change direction with the product.

Depends on what are the alternatives: if there is an open alternative with the same features for free then sure use it, but if there is no alternative with the features you need then you have to invest your time/money to build that feature and very likely it's more time/money than to buy and learn an ecosystem.

If developers are currently using the OpenSource solutions, then they probably work for those people. Who are "you" to question what works for them and what features are a priority to them?

Many developers pay for close-source editors and IDEs, and the companies that support/develop them aren't necessarily going under. Heck BBEdit is still around despite falling out of favour as the de facto MacOS editor years ago.

Just within the Python ecosystem there are 2 or 3 IDEs that cater to Python developers despite the number of Python developers that prefer Vi(m) or Emacs.

The idea that developers don't or won't pay for an editor or that the OpenSource/Free alternatives are the equivalent of developers coding in Notepad on Windows just for save a few bucks is a false premise.

ReSharper has been worth every penny that I've given them over the years for upgrades.

Seriously, it amounts to one or two days' worth of salary for a software engineer. The break-even point is extremely low.

"I chose X so to validate my choice I will tell you why Z is the worst!"

It happens everywhere. Some get more caught up in it (Video Game console, iPhone / Galaxy, etc.).

Marketing tries to play into this a bit for free promotion. Make you feel intelligent for choosing them and you're part of a club so you'll spread their gospel.

Tribalism is human nature. It's not rational. In a tribe, being rejected is pretty much a death sentence, so I can see why humans have a strong motivation to be in one. It turns irrational when that tribe is coke vs pepsi, xbox vs playstation, vim vs emacs, etc.

As a dev, if you are tool-agnostic, then you're also productivity-agnostic.

Techies are generally idealist and strongly opinionated about stuff they think they know best.

It all goes back to Emacs vs VI.

Speaking to the question you posed at the end: Having worked at Grooveshark I think Google Music is the obvious choice now that Rdio will soon be gone.

I had Google Music for 6 months and, while their music selection is great, their UI is horrendous.

For example if I'm scrolling through an artists albums, they would list every release of an album (European release, NA release, Japan release, extended version, radio friendly, non-radio friendly). Maybe that's nice for some? It was just a hassle for me.

Overall navigation through the app I found to be really, really bad.

I've never noticed that myself, but if you say it's a feature, I'll believe you, and applaud Google for doing it that way.

As different album releases often contain different recordings, sometimes finding EXACTLY the song I want to hear is hard to do. Having fallen for Sublime when they were still playing live shows, but knowing that they were only able to capitalize on their fame after the death of their singer, they've (necessarily) released a bunch of versions of old songs, which are often vastly different from one another. Finding JUST the right recording of a particular song is only enabled by having that otherwise needless duplication in the selection process, and I'm certainly willing to endure that if it means being able to add every version of X to my queue to find just the one I was looking for.

Offtopic, if they could only add Whitesnake's "Starkers in Tokyo" recording, I'd have just the right version of "Here I Go Again" in my library.

The downside being that the duplicate detection is nonexistent - I have a playlist I sync to my phone, and often when I'm listening on "I'm Feeling Lucky" mode at my PC a song will come up that I like and I'll add it to the playlist. As you can imagine, this often leads to multiple versions of the same song taking up valuable space. The same goes for thumbs-up and thumbs-down - it won't apply to all versions of a song. Which is fair enough when they're actually different (live, remastered, remixed or whatever) but when we're talking about the European release, NA release and Japan release of the same album it's often literally exactly the same recording.

Trouble is, I can't come up with a "best of both worlds" fix that allows both (perfectly valid) use cases.

MusicBrainz has separate concepts of "works", "recordings" and "releases" that I think should allow for some resolution of your problems. I'm not aware of any tooling that actually makes use of this level of data though -- anyone more familiar than me?

On the other hand, some people don't care about the several slightly different recordings or remixes of "Santeria" and just want to listen to Sublime? A good UI would allow for both rather than just point the firehose of information at the user.

Having every version is good.

Listing them equivalently with no subcategorization makes navigation a huge pain.

> I realized that Rdio will never succeed due to lack of fanatical leadership—you can't have a company with absent founders, that's just not how it works—and left

Can you elaborate on this? How was the leadership absent? and why do you think that was?

Rdio co-founders sold Skype (twice). When they co-founded Rdio, they weren't hoping to build their life's work, they just wanted to try something new (I guess), in the US. Rdio was run by VPs.

That's OK when things are going great and there's lots of money in the bank. It's not OK when the ship needs some founder-inspired steering in a storm. It's not OK when the ship is taking on water. It's not OK if there are signs of mutiny. It's not OK if pirates are about to board.

And it so happens that most startups tend to spend their lives navigating rough waters with not enough money in the bank and pirates in tow.

Did you have trouble hiring, given the bad rep the founders got when they fired some employees at Skype and pulled back their vested options? [1]

[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-s...

When that news came out I personally became very aware of the absence of a real "Skype mafia", a la PayPal. It might be the old vs new world thing.

I don't know for sure, but I don't think Rdio had any trouble hiring, ever, because it is(was) a service that people love(d).

Do you think lack of founder attention negatively impacted lack of progress on the partnership/BD side? Seem to be key in the market (Spotify with Starbucks; Pandora in-car app).

Sad to see the "best" product in the market go under.

Absolutely.

Rdio had insane product talent but no business captain (this can only be an obsessed founder, pre-success).

With normal startups, they just fail off the bat in this scenario.

Rdio had enough money to hide the lack of captain issue for a really long time.

Offtopic, but thank you for starting (and linking to) sameroom.

I just started noodling around with some code last week to bridge the messaging gap within my own company (we're supposed to use Lync, or Skype, or whatever it's called now, but nobody does because we've all used it), so we have a mish mash of users on a variety of networks, and I'm looking forward to using sameroom, and hopefully, get to abandon the code I was working on.

You're welcome! Let me know if you need any help with the setup.

We're likely to build something that works with S4B (Lync) soon. Working on a Jabber bridge now, which is similar, deployment-wise.

It's still unfortunate because this easily the best product in the market. They cared deeply about the experience...

Vdio was a terrible decision though.

thanks for making sameroom.io, it's great irc -> slack & slack -> irc in less than a minute or two!