Microsoft doesn't seem to be investing that much, if anything, on languages other than JS/TS; it is delegating all on the OSS community through plugins. And while some of the plugins are really good, in my experience they don't even come close to the native capabilities of Jetbrains products.
Extend: have a plugin system that everyone can contribute to (sounds like eclipse or IntelliJ CE) and even make money off of. Plugins don't have to be free.
Extinguish: make your own plugins with full refactoring support etc. for the languages you see most actively used (everyone uses it for Go and Python now? Make a good enough plugin for that. Nobody uses it for Erlang anyway? Leave it to the community)
The good old MS in action.
I understand that VSCode is part of a grand strategic plan that goes beyond revenue, but I seriously doubt that they'd be willing to internally maintain the absolute truckload of code that would ensue from getting to feature parity with Jetbrains on languages like Java or Python. I'd wager at some point the quality would derail, or someone would pull the plug altogether on such a cost sink.
And that's one of the things I love about Jetbrains products. I'm actually delighted to pay for a product that I use every day for ~8 hours and which I think is extremely well-designed, knowing that the money is going to a company of craftsmen who do that, and only that.
Once you've killed off the competition, a lot of other things don't really matter much any more. From the money perspective, it's a well known strategy to loose money to kill off the competition. It's just about who has the deeper pockets/better stomach for it. Microsoft has traditionally been able to do it and I have no doubts that they would still have the stomach for it. I don't know if their pockets are still as deep as they used to be. Windows (and Office etc.) used to be so dominant and such a cash cow that it enabled a lot of the other strategies, but then again they also had to get Windows to that point first. The landscape looks a bit different nowadays I'd wager, given Apple's and Google's footholds on mobile but then again, I wasn't really old enough back in the day, to really compare from my own experience, what the landscape looked like back then with Apple, Amiga, Atari, SGI, Sun etc. in the mix.
I know about it and don't need a Wikipedia link to enlighten me, thank you.
In my comment I questioned your application of that theory to reality by raising concerns about the cost/benefit analysis from a Microsoft perspective.
I don't think you're accurately scoping the undertaking of getting VSCode to feature-parity with Jetbrains products in Java, Python, etc., nor the potential benefit for Microsoft. My contention is that the gap between Jetbrains and VSCode outside of JavaScript/TypeScript is massive, and that while VSCode is strategically important to Microsoft, they don't have the incentives to even try to extinguish Jetbrains.
But instead of addressing any of the concerns in my original comment, you've just pretty much gone on your own unrelated tirade.
Also, Microsoft ultimately lost the browser wars and many of the similar crusades that they undertook in the 90s and early 2000s, so maybe they've learned a few things along the ways.
We have a difference in opinion it seems on how much money we think Microsoft might be willing to pay for it and other items as well. That's fair enough. How any of that is a tirade is honestly quite nebulous to me but I probably won't be able to change your mind, even if I tell you that it wasn't written by the furiously typing mad dog you probably imagined.
Let's structure it, so you see how I thought I was addressing things:
> truckload of code
I.e. costs a lot of money: "it's a well known strategy to loose money to kill off the competition"
> pull the plug altogether on such a cost sink
Addressed in "Microsoft has traditionally been able to do it and I have no doubts that they would still have the stomach for it"
> feature parity with Jetbrains on languages like Java or Python
The rest that starts with "I don't know if their pockets are still as deep as they used to be." and which also includes "The landscape looks a bit different nowadays I'd wager" is basically me acknowledging that your opinion is different on this than mine and that I can see that potentially their cost/benefit analysis would lean towards your interpretation. They are trying to cover the Java side well enough with the Redhat maintained plugin. If Redhat does a good enough job to take customers away from Jetbrains that plays into Microsoft's strategy without spending a lot of cash on it. Brilliant.
It's an evolving thing too and as you point out in your reply here, MS did loose the browser wars eventually. The market changes all the time through technology breakthroughs for example and people are actively working against EEE tactics too. I for one am glad that MS lost the browser wars and to address one thing that I did not comment on (on purpose because I was concerned with the EEE discussion and not whether or not one or both of us like JetBrains):
> I'm actually delighted to pay for a product that I use every day for ~8 hours
I absolutely agree that IntelliJ is awesome and I don't want to miss it or use anything else. I don't even use vscode for FE code, unlike most of our FE developers. I'm traditionally a BE guy but have no qualms about doing FE work as long as you don't make me do pixel perfect reproductions of designs in CSS :)
That said, giving something away can still make you money or ensure that your competition does not make money either. This comes down to being a large enough entity to support that strategy, which I personally think Microsoft still is.
If I'm Microsoft, I can give away a "base IDE", enlist volunteers and other companies that can even make a buck themselves for quite some time (and spend some money myself) to kill two birds with one stone.
1) I can bind developers to my platform. From the 2019 annual shareholders report: "Beyond GitHub, we are investing to build the most complete toolchain for developers — independent of language, framework, or cloud. Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code are now the most popular code-editing tools in the world. And TypeScript is one of the fastest-growing programming languages."
2) Where I deem necessary use it to kill off competition by driving them out of business. For quite a few companies, the price point of the IDE that their developers use is important i.e. the choice that companies give their employee is: Use vscode or IntelliJ Community Edition (or something else that's free but we're not paying) and it's very hard to explain developer productivity increases to the bean counters.
I suspect MS will be selling VSCode premium, as I mentioned elsewhere on this thread, they are already maintaining closed components.
Meanwhile JB survive the assault, continue to invest in their core product (which have been incrementally evolved for decades and were never rewritten from scratch), and come out the stronger party. They cannot lose interest or make self-destructive decisions because the IDEs are their core revenue stream.
> They cannot lose interest or make self-destructive decisions because the IDEs are their core revenue stream.
But this can be said about Microsoft as well. IDEs are not the core of their revenue stream, but they're near the core, because "developers, developers, developers, developers" is still true. They're a software company, they make operating systems, a cloud platform, and hardware. They need to provide developer tooling. If IDEs aren't their core revenue, they're certainly near the core. If Microsoft hasn't been making money on IDEs lately, they have in the past, they see other people are, and they're certainly going to try and get back to that if they can.
They could try to do a reverse JetBrains and introduce an enhanced for-pay version. Supposedly they're already starting to do that with Python support, it seems. But starting commercial and going free is a lot easier than starting free and going commercial, in terms of user loyalty.
Why would you doubt this? Microsoft is huge compared to JetBrains and revenue opportunities of code editors have been clearly demonstrated since the 80s. Microsoft sold how many billions of dollars of Visual Studio in the 90s? Plus the red flags are already popping up: Microsoft is already not open sourcing Python language tooling [0].
...no surprise, why would they waste their time on it? They give zero fruitcakes about Java.
Let’s just say, 3rd party plugins (like the redhat Java language support) are.... not of the same quality... as the Microsoft plugins.
On the other hand, we’re talking about Microsoft. If you lived in the 90s, I find it hard to imagine how you can see Microsoft in any other light. I know: different times, different leadership. But still: it seems possible that they’ve got a huge vision for this and want to do the equivalent of Internet Explorer 1 and 2 just to be out in the market, so they can come back and do versions 3 and 4 as their position has become entrenched.
VS Code fails me for anything that isn't JS/TS in the worst way.
It does. All languages are basically the same. They parse to ASTs that you can manipulate programmatically. If those ASTs are strongly typed, you can safely perform refractors. What makes IntelliJ good is the base framework JetBrains uses, the same one they use in WebStorm, PyCharm, etc. VSCode is that same thing: an adaptable base and I’m sure making it on par for Java if it isn’t already will happened is only a matter of time if they invest.