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