A long time ago I wrote a blog post wondering aloud how JBuilder was going to survive as Eclipse become a better IDE. Well, Borland doesn't own JBuilder any more -- it now belongs to CodeGear. Now, using a recent version of Eclipse I wonder the same thing about IntelliJ IDEA: as Eclipse continues to improve, and more vendors provide tools that support it, how will IntelliJ survive? It's hard to compete with "free", especially when the free tool is getting closer and closer to what you do.

It seems like if there's any hope for the IntelliJ folks they need to deliver an IDE that is vastly superior to Eclipse in performance, functionality, and appearance. IntelliJ used to be lightning-fast and a real "pleasure to use", but lately I've used Eclipse and haven't missed IntelliJ.

Unfortunately this isn't like comparing Mac OS X to Windows, or comparing Starbucks to coffee at McDonalds. In both of those cases you're comparing a quality product (arguably superior), but in both of those cases you're comparing something that costs something to something else that costs more. With IntelliJ versus Eclipse there's a big difference: Eclipse is free.