Spring 2008 Excelsior JET Customer Survey Is Over
The customer survey we have been running since the end of February is now over, and I want to share some results with you.
But, first of all, our congratulations and the $100 Amazon certificate go to our prize draw winner, and a big thank you goes to all the participants. The response rate was overwhelming: over 32% of sent invitations resulted in a filled survey. Thank you very much for your feedback, we appreciate it!
(The prize draw winner is a person from Brazil whose company has purchased Excelsior JET Professional Edition for Windows in mid-October 2007. We have not heard back from him yet, so I do not have permission to disclose the names. Notice to the winner: If you are reading this, please get in touch with us at earliest convenience, or we would have to choose again.)
Back to the survey, let me begin with the Java IDE usage profile. It turned out that over 65% of Excelsior JET customers use Eclipse, and about 25% use NetBeans, the latter being a bit surprising for us. Our favorite IDE, IntelliJ IDEA, occupies the third place with 8.7%, followed closely by JBuilder (7.7%). A few people use JCreator, while each of CodeGuide, EditPlus, Metrowerks Codewarrior, SlickEdit, Textpad, and XCode were mentioned only once, as well as Oracle JDeveloper and IBM WebSphere/Rational tools. One person uses MS Visual Studio 2005 as a Java IDE, which must be an interesting experience. Finally, 11.5% of all respondents indicated that they use no (Java) IDE at all. So do I – hello guys!
(For the sharp-eyed reader: yes, it was possible to specify more than one IDE, so the total exceeds 100% with about 1.37 Java IDEs per Excelsior JET user 
)
Every second respondent has expressed interest in sans-install distribution. It seems however that in most cases the Self-Contained Directory option, found on the page Backend in JetPackII, covers their needs.
Over half of all respondents use Ant to automate their builds, but most of them find calling jc and xpack from their Ant scripts good enough. Just about 5% of Ant users have expressed interest in tighter integration.
Now, the most interesting question that we used as the headliner: Excelsior JET for Mac OS X. First, it turned out that 60% of existing Excelsior JET users are not interested in us adding Mac OS X support. Then, only 12 people said they would pay for the Mac OS X version in advance. Unfortunately, even if all of them would agree to pay, say, the list price of Excelsior JET Pro for Windows in US Dollars, that would allow us to accumulate only $27,600. That is a nice sum on its own, but it won’t help us much, as our rough cost estimate for the Mac OS X port is in the low six-figure range.
Still, 40% of existing customers expressing interest in a new product is a good motivation to seek other sources of funding. Compare this to the 32-bit Solaris port: less than 11% of respondents have expressed interest, and nobody is willing to preorder it.
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