We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on VS Code "Pro".
The context of “embrace, extend and extinguish” has kind of been diffused over the years, though; it never meant “buy a product and kill it,” but rather meant adopting open standards and adding proprietary (not necessarily closed, which is not the same thing) extensions to them that end up becoming de facto standards, so your product is perceived as better at the task then the fully standards-compliant original. What happened with Visual Studio Code and Atom isn’t an example of this at all. For a start, they’re just two products that are competing in the same space; they’ve never had the same extension standards, so the idea of “embracing and extending” just isn’t relevant here.
Secondly, Microsoft obviously didn’t buy GitHub to shut Atom down. I’ve seen the arguments that once Microsoft did buy GitHub, Atom was doomed, but Code was already arguably more popular than Atom when Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018: Stack Overflow’s developer survey showed VSCode as far more popular among surveyed users (34.9% to Atom’s 18.9%). If those numbers had been reversed—if Code never made a real dent and Atom kept growing—then I have little doubt Atom would be the one continuing.
Lastly, I suspect the runaway popularity of Visual Studio Code is pretty good insurance against a hypothetical “Visual Studio Code Pro” replacing the existing VS Code. This would almost certainly cause a fork (or more than one!) to be created, and it’s highly likely such a fork would get immediate backing and support from one or more technology companies willing to pay for continued open source development.
However, I don’t think that’s likely, because I don’t think that’s how Microsoft is interested in monetizing Code. It’s not a source of income in and of itself. It doesn’t have to be. If it just so happens to have great GitHub integration, maybe your company will pay for GitHub enterprise features. If you’re used to using it, you may be more likely to pay for GitHub Codespaces. If it has a great story for deploying to Azure, then maybe you’ll be more likely to deploy to Azure. And so on.
The revenue generating upsell for VSCode is already here and it IS GitHub Codespaces. They are going to add features you can't live without based off code synthesis (sky's really the limit here) and gate those off saying it can't run locally because it's too resource intensive. They'll charge you (or your company) by the second for all usage.
It would be much harder or impossible for them to do this if Atom and an independent GitHub had been further entrenching in this space for the last decade.
Many of the biggest developer tooling projects big corp are building now existentially threaten smaller developers and apps, by design.
Don't give Microsoft a pass here.
I think a simpler explanation is correct: Microsoft saw that open source developer tools are gaining a lot of popularity and also knew that it could help revitalize/modernize their image, so they authorized the funding for the creation of a (mostly) open source code editor, and it gained popularity because it was good.
This. Microsoft share price depends on the size of their recurring revenue from cloud. They can easily write off a few million on VScode for bringing more users to Azure
My money is on VS Code 365.
One of the main complaints many of the C# developers on my team have when they have to touch languages that aren't well supported by Visual Studio is that they don't know how to work VSCode.
And also why C++ workloads depend on .NET being available.
Or when they sunset the closed-source PowerShell and created the open-source PowerShell Core?
Like those?
Atom is inferior in every aspect to Visual Studio Code. Atom was on life support for too long.
We're basically fucked.
Contingency planning for this could be a small but wise time investment for dependent teams. VSCode could very well go the way of the Do... Docker.
I'd actually worry if the engineers I work with couldn't pick up a new IDE/text editor, etc. pretty easily and quickly, if and when something like this happens. And I'd say the risk of it happening in the next three to five years is pretty minimal at this point.
Once you start making full use of your editor, switching to a new one and reaching the same level of proficiency takes a long time. I can edit code even in notepad, but I can't ever be as fluid in it as my main editor. I've changed my editor multiple times and it's a huge pain every time.
I doubt that switching an editor requires a disaster-recovery plan.
I guess they have lots of "solutions" to "design and implement".
the normalization of this behavior within the industry makes using emacs or vim even more satisfying.
it's nice to having an unchanging cement foundation to stand upon once-in-awhile.
They maintain a trademark on the name Visual Studio Code and some other bits. And it is maintained by a Microsoft team.
But the code itself is MIT licensed. You can build it yourself. I have. There are one or two forks of it out there.
