Wednesday, November 20, 2013

CodeEnvy's Marketing Approach with Environment setup is Garbage

Cloud IDE environments are becoming more popular every day. One of the cloud ides that I have invested some of my money is CodeEnvy. I think they have a tremendous opportunity to become successful if they add features that developers need. Unfortunately, they are not at that point yet.

Their biggest marketing approach to developers has been "Save 13 hours a week". The idea is that the environment does not have to be setup locally because its provisioned in the cloud and you can save 13 hours a week by using their IDE. Well, that marketing approach is total horse shit.

Most "intelligent" software developers use reproducible environments with tools. Typically, I like to use virtual machines for my development. Using virtual machines in VirtualBox or VMWare allows me to do the following:

1) Create one base environment for my development.

2) Clone my environment for different projects.

The cloning is the key. This allows a developer to setup a development environment by cloning the base environment in a matter of 15 minutes at the most. This obviously depends on the size of the virtual machine.

There is no need or has there ever been to consume 13 hours a week to setup development environments. Don't fall for it. CodeEnvy should be focusing on promoting new features.

Sorry, I know its a little rant. All the CodeEnvy tweets on their marketing has me fired up.

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