I'm pretty sure MS has to actually behave anti-competitively (and in the current climate, possibly show obvious harm to customers) before they'd get in trouble. It's not illegal to own 90% of a market; it's illegal(ish) to use that to shut out others, which I don't see them doing (yet).

(IANAL; this is one layman's understanding, not legal advice)

That's exactly what happened in their late 90's antitrust case. It wasn't the OS monopoly, it was them abusing their relationship with computer makers to prevent installation of other software.

Well, and I've heard a rumour that their unwillingness to say "how high" when the doj wanted them to jump wrt "lawful intercept" played a part as well.

Is there anything to back this up at all?

What's Microsoft's strategy? The AppGet saga has made me cynical.

Start selling Microsoft products to the bought userbases? But I suspect Microsoft is targeting companies rather than the developers themselves. Cynically, the drug dealer strategy? Get your (big, slow to change) customers dependent on the free stuff and then jack up the price?

Or bundle free software in a development environment to attract SMEs and open source developers. Then integrate and promote Microsoft's own propitiatory development offerings? Convert open source developers into Microsoft developers by owning the open source developers' tools of choice?

The tools will be maintained well. And also they'll integrate incredibly well with Microsoft's own software[1]. And with more Microsoft developers that means more Microsoft software sold to companies.

[1] Kotlin is a good example of this. Kotlin was integrated so well into Android Studio. I just pressed one button and, bang, kotlin. I never went back to Java.

My best guess: Expand the clientele of Azure from 'corporations and C# shops' to 'everybody and their grandma' like AWS has done - basically going after the long tail of cloud hosting. And I think, apart from improving Azure itself, they're also trying to do this by making sure the best possible developer experience is via Microsoft's developer infrastructure, so they get every chance to 'upsell' and integrate seamlessly in the tools you're already using. At the same time, they're trying to make cross platform development (via Xamarin and WSL) the most convenient way to target other OS's, so they're still in on the action when iOS, Android and Linux webservers are involved.

> basically going after the long tail of cloud hosting.

I want to really stress that your thesis is on point, but it's not about cloud hosting per se. If software is eating the world, and everyone is going to have some level of proficiency as a dev, Microsoft is targeting being the digital operating system of the economy. You write and run your business on Microsoft, whether you're a Fortune 500 or 5 people working out of a coworking space, and you can even get email, team chat, office apps, workflow automation tools, and everything else under the MS umbrella if that's what your business needs.

Developers, developers, developers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaVTHG-Ev4k

I don't know if I should be happy about Microsoft going away from the Not Invented Here-mindset or sad that the best companies get owned by the biggest companies.

if you're asking these questions, you probably don't understand how microsoft makes money.

MS already has a working business model (a very lucrative one at that) for enterprise, they can just integrate it into their existing user base and they will gladly pay. There's no hidden agenda.

I'd mark it largely under marketing. As others have already said, Azure is Microsoft's real moneymaker. Forget about Windows and Office, they are a shrinking market.

In the end, who makes the decision on which tools to use? Developers and technical leads, not some CEO or middle management. Position yourself withing the developer community, built a good name, andbe sure they will consider other Microsoft services as well. Especially when they already integrate very well with you toolchain.

I don't even know what you are talking about. Even the highest estimates analyst estimates place Azure revenue at 20bn out of the 130bn MSFT pulls. Earnings-wise it-s even more lopsided

Yeah, the AppGet/WinGet fiasco is disappointing to say the least.

I think MS is mostly trying to ensure cohesion between the tooling and their Azure platforms/services. This is their longer term strategy... which has largely moved Directory services and Office to subscriptions models, and shoring up the losses of Windows Server deployments with rented servers on their infrastructure being the least friction and a revenue source moving forward.

Honest question; how does Microsoft's ownership of those stifle competition? How is it anti-competitive? Just because they're popular doesn't mean they are somehow stifling competion.

Again, honest question, obviously IANAL.

> The idea of the integration is to make it easier, faster and more efficient to include Docker containers when developing applications with the Microsoft tool set. Docker CEO Scott Johnston says it’s a matter of giving developers a better experience.

What they actually mean is the opposite. They want to make Azure the easy choice when developing with Docker. They go on to say it can take hours or days to get the integration set up manually.

If Azure “just works” and the other clouds take days to get integrated, owning Docker would let them make Azure integration a priority while neglecting or sabotaging integration to other clouds. The gap gets bigger and Azure feels even more like the obvious choice if you want to get anything done.

IMO one of the major cloud vendors will buy Docker this year. Microsoft seems like the obvious choice right now.

> If Azure “just works” and the other clouds take days to get integrated, owning Docker would let them make Azure integration a priority while neglecting or sabotaging integration to other clouds. The gap gets bigger and Azure feels even more like the obvious choice if you want to get anything done.

Which is a playbook they've demonstrated as recently as last October, on Mover[1]. It used to allow you to migrate data between a whole host of sources and destinations, and the guides/help docs even still reference those capabilities. Microsoft acquired it and made it free, but have turned it into a one-way tool: the only supported destinations are now Azure, Sharepoint, and OneDrive.

[1] https://mover.io/

Totally agree with you. This is an attempt to make heroku for enterprise-scale systems. The risk, as a user, is that you end up locked into a ton of automatically configured, Azure-specific costs. It's a recipe for an anti-trust suit based on bundling (ie. the same situation that MS lost with IE many years ago).

Well, they did just make a bunch of previously paid GitHub stuff free. That's something only a company the size of Microsoft can do.

According to GitHub's CEO posting here [1], the costs are sustained by the paying GitHub Enterprise user base.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867808

Sure. Large companies make things free because they can subsidize them with other products.

The question is: did they do this to win market share? I think it makes _total_ sense for MS to make a bunch of GitHub services free. I also think it's harmful to competition.

One of the worst policy choices the US has made in the last 30 years is judging antitrust almost _entirely_ through the lens of "monetary cost to end users".

I would argue they made this due to competition with GitLab, backed by their working business model.

The less reasons there are for using GitLab (private repos was one thing which got me initially, using GitLab over my self administered servers to move code around and share with friends) the better for keeping their quasi-monopoly.

Gitlab has always had many of those same features- and more- for free- and they aren't as large as Github alone was.

seriously now. Microsoft built VSCode. It’s their fault that they managed to build something successful?

Antitrust doesn't punish success, it punishes the abuse using the position that success brought. In the US, the Chicago School of Thought says a company doesn't do anything wrong from a market position until customers are charged more, so megacorps dumping free use of product on customers is not factored into the position.

In the EU, monopoly is gauged by how much choice and diversity is lost, even in the face of free product. I am very much aligned with the EU view of monopoly.

Dumping free services is great (temporarily) for the user, but ultimately harms them in that it starves out competition that can't afford such dumping.

*edit, words.

> In the US, the Chicago School of Thought says a company doesn't do anything wrong from a market position until customers are charged more

> In the EU, monopoly is gauged by how much choice and diversity is lost, even in the face of free product. I am very much aligned with the EU view of monopoly.

Interestingly the US used to have the EU viewpoint as well, until the 1970s. Robert Bork was one of the main people behind that.

For those interested in a deeper look at Antitrust in America, Planet Money had a great three part series on the topic [1].

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/20/704426033/anti...

Are there not already viable free alternatives to all of MS's, as well as to many of their paid services? I don't see how MS is in a unique position, aside from being more vertically integrated than anyone else (excepting Apple, on a different range of products).

Users of technical software (I.e. developers, especially for websites) have never had it better.

that’s a false dichotomy

IMHO, price is one thing you look at as a customer. If the value you derive is greater than what you pay for it you should definitely pay the price for the product.

people don’t use vscode because it’s free. they use it because it’s great.

I use vscode because it's free. I use eclipse because it's free. I use sublime because it's "free for evaluation" forever.

The convenient to download and install on any machine at any given time without having to deal with payment removes friction and it's a huge thing.

vim is free, and has a large user base. But even more people use VSCode because it's powerful, free, and easy to use. Meanwhile, folks are rebooting their boxes just to exit vim.

counterpoint: i pay for intellij because it’s great. eclipse can be free forever but that does not make it less of a dumpster fire.

Don't kid yourself with it. People use vscode, because it's free - first - and because it's great - second. It wouldn't have probably even 1% of it's user base and plugin writers otherwise.

There are tons of free options out there though. People chose to use VSCode from the list of free tools because it is great.

And I have no problem paying for an IDE, but I stopped because VSCode was as good, if not better, than any paid option out there for my uses.

If "free" and "has plugins" were what mattered, there is Notepad++, Atom, Emacs, and many other choices. VS Code is doing rather better than all of them.

I only said that price is an overriding consideration. It would not matter how much better it is, if it would not be free.

no i think it's quite a feat and admirable. I actually hope the government doesn't step in unless MS tries to take advantage.

it was just a hypothetical question.

Nobody's assigning fault from that, it's just an observation about expanding market share across the realm of software dev.

Isn’t VScode a fork of Atom?

Parts of VSCode predate Atom. The core "Monaco" code editor was built for parts of Azure and battled hardened in IE10+'s Dev Tools. The biggest chunk of code that VSCode even shares with Atom is Electron, which is likely the source of most confusion that VSCode "forked" from Atom given Electron was still called Atom-Shell when VSCode started.

as far as I know no. Both Atom and VSCode use Electron but VSCode is something MS build from scratch.

And Electron was built for Atom, so in turn Viscose uses the core of Atom, even though Electron (after VSCode started using it) became more independent.

sure. the point is that it’s not a fork of atom. if you use leftpad you’re not a leftpad clone

They both are electron-based, and when MS acquired GitHub, Atom took the worst part...

I doubt MS acquiring GitHub had a major role in Atom downfall. Atom's market share was already declining fast

i tried atom but it was atrocious when it came to even medium size files. vscode loads huge files without blinking. atom would just freeze

I concur with both and I made the switch along then because my atom was unbearable (although heavily loaded with probably unneeded extensions).

But VS Code has been a smooth experience since then.

I only brought it up because it certainly played a role on github having no longer a reason to invest resources in it having a better alternative being also developed in-house. And I also recall from other HN threads, much vocal users asking GitHub CEO about it, and why he stated just after the acquisition that Atom would be maintained even as Microsoft owning Github from there on... Which didn't happen.

IIRC Nat Friedman's words were something along the lines of "we'll keep developing it until there's enough people using it"

When vscode just came out all the developers in my company were using atom. Then a few of use started using vscode and it was a smoother experience. Atom would freeze all the time. Then slowly one by one people tried vscode and switched over.

Could any Atom users explain what it is that made you choose Atom over another text editor?

Can't speak for GP, but VS Code came out after Atom and Brackets both used similar approaches and both largely sucked. In fact, I almost didn't even try VS Code because of how bad the experience with Atom was.

In retrospect, I'm glad I did. The biggest features to me beyond a simple editor are a directory tree view, and an integrated terminal. I don't think anything had that, or at least not nearly as well working before VS Code that I recall. Everything else on top of that is just extras. Git integration, test extensions, integrations galore. In the end, VS Code has been a really great experience for me. It takes a little longer to load than the simple editors.

This doesn't even get into the Remote WSL/SSH extensions that I've started to make more use of the past few months. I've used vscode on Windows, Linux and Mac, and overall don't think I've been happier with a single editor.

I believe it’s based on Electron (which itself was part of Atom)

no

They also own Azure, so you can run everything you build in their ecosystem. It’s quite the achievement, and likely their plan to beat AWS. Developers, developers, developers.

I am a huge AWS user. However, as a VSCode fan and generally happy GitHub user, I also regularly consider playing with Azure integrations just to see how seamless they have made the experience.

Some food for your thoughts?

You can connect one Excel File via Azure functions via another Excel file with seemless integration.

You can connect to two Excel files together using Power Query. No need for Azure.

Might be a good thing for them to get picked up by a company which would continue working to make the tooling better. Docker seems to have been struggling as an independent company.

This wouldn't be the sort of acquisition where MS takes what it wants for itself and kills the product. Not mentioned (unless I missed it) in the article is that Docker has been putting in a lot of work to make the tooling work well with WSL 2. So, having a foot in both Windows and Linux.

An antitrust case wouldn't really apply in a situation when all these services and tools have numerous alternatives and no one is compelled to use any of them in isolation or together. Not to mention the fact that a great deal of this things listed are open source, or offer a free tire. Hard to make a case for unfair competition practices of vertical integration when you give away those services and tools and alternatives are a click away, of not without costs from migration and loss of network effects for having to leave the established platform for a given ecosystem.

The real argument is that the ever increasing scope of these entities create moats far out from the walls of their code product to drive user inwards to the paid offerings and, either by design or happen stance, alt the earth for miles from other smaller rivals gaining any foot holds delivering a service to sections of the user base of these hegemonic organisations from which in time might see the smaller rivals use such traction to then offer competing alternatives of those paid services which hegemonic organisations are based on.

I don't disagree with your prediction - however, after Microsoft's infatuation with Linux these past few years and the impressions I got from the recent Build conference, I think the next purchase that Microsoft will make will be Canonical.

Microsoft was famously against open source. Then open source prospered, and I'm sure some saw that as Microsoft's comeuppance. Yet Microsoft was able to shift some of their focus to become OSS friendly, and for those parts of the ecosystem that have a commercial focus, they can acquire what they want.

I think it was more of a slow transition and more focused on Linux. Once Linux become big enough to disrupt them that’s when they started to change . Microsoft research has been contributing to Haskell for a long time. I think they are moving forward a more service oriented company that doesn’t care what you do but will make it easier to stay in their ecosystem like Azure or just focus on getting more developer goodwill and lock-in .

They saw that developers are eager enough to do Microsoft's work for free. See .NET Core and its related projects where Microsoft accepts a lot of patches from outside contributors and sometimes needs to admit that others know their code and its sometimes decade old history better than they do.

I think the greater community would rather have it this way. Trying to get a bug in .Net 1.x fixed was not a pleasant or completely legal experience (peaking into .net assemblies, and decompiling to even get the to root of the issue).

Even if I only ever had to do it once... having the option is much better than not.

Except for github (which has at least one credible competitor in Gitlab), the important parts of all of these projects are open source, which means that microsoft don't really have any leverage. You can be sure that there'd be well supported forks if MS tried to take docker or VS Code proprietary.

There already are forks for VS Code (telemetry removed iirc).

How they don't already own StackOverflow, I don't really know.

Then Linux world move to systemd-container, cri-o or something more sane and the world keeps moving.

The Linux world is mostly on the runtime side of it, not the developer side of it. Both are important and docker will likely continue to see success with Windows and Mac users.

The move is well underway.