Shouldn't that be the other way around? What good is it for a company if the only products people end up using are the ones given for free?

I'm sure other software companies faced similar fates (no one paying for services, only using freely available services) but I can't think of any ATM.

I’m thinking vertical integration where you write your code on VS, host it and collaborate on GitHub, and deploy to Azure. I always thought GitHub was a hedge for Azure against the other cloud providers.

> What good is it for a company if the only products people end up using are the ones given for free?

I think Facebook helps answer that question a bit: just because someone is a user doesn't mean they're not the product.

Giving out one product if it helps other ulterior motives is still profit. Vertical integration also plays a part in this. Especially if the paid product re-invents something in a non-standard way, and then the free product only supports than.

That's fair but I thought we were talking about in the sense of software companies? Facebook makes a large majority of their money through advertising, not the amount of installs they get from pytorch or react.

What sort of advertising can you honestly inject into something like VS Code to keep users from leaving?

I do agree about vertical integration, another user mentioned using VS Code and Github as a means to introduce Azure. That makes more sense to me and I neglected the thought.

Azure is vastly bigger than VS Code and GitHub. In my opinion the monetization needed for a hard carry would risk their popularity. There is potential for interesting synergies but there has always been potential, just ask Ray Ozzie how that went.

Given enough time, they all will rot.