Visual Studio is quite expensive and yet it is selling very well to enterprise markets.
The trick is to pick the right customers.
The trick is to pick the right customers.
[0]Based on personal conversations with individual VS users, it actually appears that VS is what many developers want or think they want, not just something forced on them by management.
People pay absurd money (up to $10k per seat) for Team Edition which provides entire enterprise developer/tester/database/architect/team workflow instead of just IDE.
If you build something truly valuable people will pay, so long as they have the money. Like I said, the trick is to find the right people.
Perhaps Walter Bright can make money writing compilers, but that would be an exception. I think that you will find that compilers and other language tools are sold in conjunction with something else.