I know that perception of Microsoft will never go away in the open source community, and maybe it shouldn’t, although I’m not convinced Microsoft of 2022 is particularly worse (or particularly better) than most other companies operating simultaneously in open source and proprietary spaces.

The context of “embrace, extend and extinguish” has kind of been diffused over the years, though; it never meant “buy a product and kill it,” but rather meant adopting open standards and adding proprietary (not necessarily closed, which is not the same thing) extensions to them that end up becoming de facto standards, so your product is perceived as better at the task then the fully standards-compliant original. What happened with Visual Studio Code and Atom isn’t an example of this at all. For a start, they’re just two products that are competing in the same space; they’ve never had the same extension standards, so the idea of “embracing and extending” just isn’t relevant here.

Secondly, Microsoft obviously didn’t buy GitHub to shut Atom down. I’ve seen the arguments that once Microsoft did buy GitHub, Atom was doomed, but Code was already arguably more popular than Atom when Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018: Stack Overflow’s developer survey showed VSCode as far more popular among surveyed users (34.9% to Atom’s 18.9%). If those numbers had been reversed—if Code never made a real dent and Atom kept growing—then I have little doubt Atom would be the one continuing.

Lastly, I suspect the runaway popularity of Visual Studio Code is pretty good insurance against a hypothetical “Visual Studio Code Pro” replacing the existing VS Code. This would almost certainly cause a fork (or more than one!) to be created, and it’s highly likely such a fork would get immediate backing and support from one or more technology companies willing to pay for continued open source development.

However, I don’t think that’s likely, because I don’t think that’s how Microsoft is interested in monetizing Code. It’s not a source of income in and of itself. It doesn’t have to be. If it just so happens to have great GitHub integration, maybe your company will pay for GitHub enterprise features. If you’re used to using it, you may be more likely to pay for GitHub Codespaces. If it has a great story for deploying to Azure, then maybe you’ll be more likely to deploy to Azure. And so on.

No, they didn't buy GitHub to shut Atom down. But they did create VSCode to cut off GitHub's growing expansion of their business through Atom. They could have just extended Atom with Azure plugins etc, but instead they essentially forked it and poured tons of resources and hundreds of developers into it. That effort helped suppress the valuation of GitHub, so that they could buy it for cheaper (or at all?).

The revenue generating upsell for VSCode is already here and it IS GitHub Codespaces. They are going to add features you can't live without based off code synthesis (sky's really the limit here) and gate those off saying it can't run locally because it's too resource intensive. They'll charge you (or your company) by the second for all usage.

It would be much harder or impossible for them to do this if Atom and an independent GitHub had been further entrenching in this space for the last decade.

Many of the biggest developer tooling projects big corp are building now existentially threaten smaller developers and apps, by design.

Don't give Microsoft a pass here.

I'd be willing to bet that even if Microsoft did create VSCode for the purposes of cutting Github's expansion, the effect that VSCode had on Github's valuation is extremely overstated here. The total valuation comes from a range of factors, but let's say there are two major ones: number of users and number of paying organizations. The latter is almost completely not dependent on Atom (companies would not use Atom as a deciding factor to use Github) and while some users might use Github because they used Atom first, I don't think that this is large enough that the migration from Atom to VSCode negatively impacted the valuation.

I think a simpler explanation is correct: Microsoft saw that open source developer tools are gaining a lot of popularity and also knew that it could help revitalize/modernize their image, so they authorized the funding for the creation of a (mostly) open source code editor, and it gained popularity because it was good.

> If it has a great story for deploying to Azure, then maybe you’ll be more likely to deploy to Azure

This. Microsoft share price depends on the size of their recurring revenue from cloud. They can easily write off a few million on VScode for bringing more users to Azure

VS Code "Pro" is very 1998.

My money is on VS Code 365.

It’s already here. They went with the name GitHub Codespaces.

That is a very good analogy. Considering that Office was also an offline product before it became a cloud-subscribed web/desktop hybrid.

VS Code Pro already exists. It's called Visual Studio.

Despite the name, they have basically nothing in common. They don't share a user interface, they don't share plugins, they don't share hotkeys.

One of the main complaints many of the C# developers on my team have when they have to touch languages that aren't well supported by Visual Studio is that they don't know how to work VSCode.

They do share some plugins actually, that is why VS nowadays also gets a node instance running on the background.

And also why C++ workloads depend on .NET being available.

I'm well aware of the differences between the two products, since I use both on a daily basis. My answer was a bit flippant, sure, but they are both IDEs developed by Microsoft and Visual Studio is definitely the "Pro" version of the two.

Like when they sunset the closed-source .net framework and created the open source .net core?

Or when they sunset the closed-source PowerShell and created the open-source PowerShell Core?

Like those?

I’m not sure the term has ever been applied to Microsoft’s own products…

Atom was developed before the acquisition. Which brings us to the second proud tradition of the tech titans, acquiring companies to end the products the acquirer doesn't like.

Well yeah, if you have two very similar products (editors/IDEs based on web technology), one of them much more successful than the other, putting a lot of effort into the less-used product sounds a bit hard to justify...

Does Microsoft not "like" Atom, or has its market share dwindled to the point that it is no longer worth maintaining?

If you look at the contribution activity it dropped off after acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft and it seems that development was redirected to VSCode.

The writing was on the wall for a long while now, and was one of the reasons why the JuliaCommunity stopped advocating Juno/Atom as a platform and instead switched to VSCode

Probably a bit of both if I was to hazard a guess. MS has VS Code, which is definitely the elephant in the room as far as go to IDEs in the environments I’ve been in lately. So right now they’re spending engineering time on both VS Code and Atom, so they may as well focus their resources on the more popular one.

Look at the Atom repo, very few commits in the last year, and it's not like there are loads of open pull requests (serious PRs do get merged), and it's been strongly dropping off for a long time. It's the programming community that abandoned Atom, not Microsoft.

> Which brings us to the second proud tradition of the tech titans, acquiring companies to end the products the acquirer doesn't like.

Atom is inferior in every aspect to Visual Studio Code. Atom was on life support for too long.

it was dead already, or at least, shown inferior to vscode in feature set. If anything you can accuse MS, it's using its market position and the VS brand name to "steal" adoption, but that completed before the aquisition too.

But Atom isn't, is it? It was started prior to Microsoft, to which Microsoft bought Github, and are now "sunsetting". While i don't think Atom was enough competition to actually warrant any real discussion here, the timeline seems quite fitting to EEE no?

They embrace, extend, and extinguish products they don't make money on, so that people are forced to use products that they do make money on.

Microsoft doesn't make money from VS Code. Atom was retired due to a lack of activity with the project. I've never even seen anyone use Atom, since the time it was released 8 years ago.

Hence the parent comment:

> We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on VS Code "Pro".

I don't think it would serve their interests, so I'm not worried about it, but who knows? This cynicism is directed towards Microsoft because they've earned it.

Had two coworkers at my last job use it when they needed to edit some of our legacy PHP stuff (we were mostly a .NET shop) but even they switched to VS Code eventually because the writing was on the wall for support.

> Microsoft doesn't make money from VS Code.

They harvest an astonishing amount of data from it.

I'll go Nova before I go VS Code Pro.

"VS Code Pro" came out in 1997

Note that this will lead to unmaintained Electron Apps until at least 2032.

We're basically fucked.

When this inevitably happens to VSCode, I'm sure we'll all flock to Sublime Text in droves (or some hip new editor on the block).

Contingency planning for this could be a small but wise time investment for dependent teams. VSCode could very well go the way of the Do... Docker.

Sounds like premature optimization.

I'd actually worry if the engineers I work with couldn't pick up a new IDE/text editor, etc. pretty easily and quickly, if and when something like this happens. And I'd say the risk of it happening in the next three to five years is pretty minimal at this point.

> I'd actually worry if the engineers I work with couldn't pick up a new IDE/text editor, etc. pretty easily and quickly

Once you start making full use of your editor, switching to a new one and reaching the same level of proficiency takes a long time. I can edit code even in notepad, but I can't ever be as fluid in it as my main editor. I've changed my editor multiple times and it's a huge pain every time.

I don't know why Microsoft would do that - VSCode is HUGELY popular and at the forefront of Microsoft "I'm cool now guys!" 'open-source' movement.

> Contingency planning for this could be a small but wise time investment for dependent teams.

I doubt that switching an editor requires a disaster-recovery plan.

Modern tech companies love to look busy and find the most perplexing solutions for the most basic problems.

I guess they have lots of "solutions" to "design and implement".

I am sticking to my Intellij products for this very reason. They work great and the motives of the company are straightforward.

Same, but nvim

While any software can be cancelled, I'd say Atom is being cancelled because of investment in VS Code (both currently owned by MS), I don't see any reason to think it's "inevitable" that VSCode will be cancelled, except in the sense that eventually everyone dies and the earth falls into the sun.

> When this inevitably happens to VSCode, I'm sure we'll all flock to Sublime Text in droves (or some hip new editor on the block).

the normalization of this behavior within the industry makes using emacs or vim even more satisfying.

it's nice to having an unchanging cement foundation to stand upon once-in-awhile.

Absolutely. Why continuously reinvent the wheel when there are far more interesting problems to work on :)

:)

Why would this happen to VsCode? VSCode is a proprietary form of Atom is not? It’s hugely successful Microsoft would never do such a thing.

Sort of?

They maintain a trademark on the name Visual Studio Code and some other bits. And it is maintained by a Microsoft team.

But the code itself is MIT licensed. You can build it yourself. I have. There are one or two forks of it out there.

The codebases of VS Code and Atom are unrelated to each other.

Indeed. At least I’m not the first person to make this mistake

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872976

https://thenextweb.com/news/microsofts-cross-platform-visual...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221917