I think it's more about all of the integration leading to efficiencies that are hard to ignore while they're being subsidized / promoted. It'll start out as something where the value proposition is too good to ignore, but, as time goes on, they'll tier off features and charge a premium as you scale up.

There was a time when I was hopeful and though Microsoft would take a developer first approach with the end goal being making it easy to deploy to Azure. After seeing the VSO (the old name for Codespaces) pricing I'm a lot more cynical. Microsoft's going to be altruistic until they're not.

Go look at the pricing for VSO. They have a full time dev (100 hours a month - lol) estimated at a cost of $23 USD per month. Just wait until there's some type of marketplace for extension developers. The local version of VSCode will disappear overnight and (IMO) we'll be paying $50+ / month for the same thing that's free right now.

Get ready to pay for everything per user per month for the rest of your life.

> The local version of VSCode will disappear overnight

That's the beauty of open source though. VSCode is prominent enough that someone will fork it and maintain it if Microsoft pulls the plug.

My fear is that an officially supported marketplace for selling extensions would be appealing enough that important extensions would put all future development effort into their marketplace versions and cease development of local versions.

Hi! PM on the Codespaces team here.

I wanted to quickly help calm any potential concerns about changes to VS Code or its model.

Codespaces is a separate, additional service from VS Code, very much focused on providing compute catered to developers and their workflows. We hope you'll use and love it, but we're also very happy if you'd prefer to continue to use VS Code in the ways that you may have previously done.

Either way, we will continue to invest heavily in VS Code as you know it. Codespaces will not change that.

Hopefully that helps clarify any concerns!

I believe you when you say your intentions are good, but I'm skeptical. Even if it's not the official stance, getting as many people as possible onto the SaaS offering has to be the goal and, IMO, there could be a point where maintaining the standalone product isn't worth it.

I'm worried that Microsoft's going to be successful in shifting a bunch of developer workload onto Azure and that'll create a power imbalance where developers will see increasing prices while they lose control their own workflows.

Is it true that Nadella frequents the gym and chastises people for running on treadmills instead of Azure? Lol.

> we will continue to invest heavily in VS Code

Just like MS heavily invest in Atom now? :)

"nobody gets fired for buying IBM"