Oh I dunno.... back in the day, there was Texmate, and it was like a pretty Emacs. Then came Sublime, Coda and Espresso. That was an era of pretty text editors. I was used to vim, so all that beauty didn't really entice me. When Atom first was announced, I just figured it was another Sublime copy. I had no idea what Electron was at that time. I just thought... hmm, an editor from GitHub... ok... I'm sure there's some reason for it to exist. But from my perspective, it wasn't competing with other javascript/browser-in-a-box editors... it was just another in a long line.