Good point. I don't think that necessarily matters too much though. You obviously can't just give everything away and not have a strategy to make money at all.

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 agree. Particularly with the first point. One of VSCode's big strengths is it runs on the web as well - it's easy to see it becoming a fully integrated cloud IDE (whether you run it in Electron or your browser), and then MS can sell VSCode Premium for $2/mo to integrate it with your corporate login etc.

It’s incredible how it runs on the web. CodeSandbox is an awesome tool because it’s the same thing you use on your desktop (if you use VSCode). Just the other day I saw some post here wondering why you can’t “code in the browser” and uh, you can! Just go to CodeSandbox.

I suspect MS will be selling VSCode premium, as I mentioned elsewhere on this thread, they are already maintaining closed components.