Similarly, I'm amazed that I can build truly cross-platform .NET apps using Microsoft's own open-source tools from the Linux command line. (Apparently .NET Core, which both adopted the MIT license, and ushered in true cross-platform support, was announced later in the year that Nadella took over. [1] Not sure whether he had anything to do with it.)
What an about-face from 2000-era Microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish approach. Remember Visual J++? If you'd told me then I'd be willingly programming on a Microsoft toolchain 20 years later I would not have believed you.
I suggest that it's actually just a better executed embrace.
Is this a prerequisite to being a great technology company today? Or is this just one vector that some competitors choose to compete on? For example, would we say Apple isn’t a great technology company because it doesn’t have an industry leasing office suite like MS and Google?
The XBox division doesn't count?
Xbox also isn’t top dog among the big 3. They’ve really struggled to ship big exclusive system sellers (which is a bummer. I’m a big fan of a lot of Xbox IP), so they certainly aren’t “industry leading”. Doesn’t mean the exclusives they’ve shipped aren’t good. They certainly are, just that their is no Xbox answer to God of War or Last of Us
GamePass is one of the biggest success stories to come out of Xbox and is certainly the dominant game streaming service
Mario has everyone else smoked[1].
[1] A bit out of date but see https://www.statista.com/chart/26122/estimated-lifetime-sale... where in 2021 nintendo were selling more switches in Japan only (their 3rd biggest market) than the worldwide sales of both Xbox and PS5 combined.
Nintendo sold 4 Switches for every PS5 on the market.
That said, they have more market share vs Playstation than iOS has over Android.
Oh but they have brought 21st century advertising and bullshit to windows devices!
And then Microsoft bought Github.
Microsoft needs people to build things on windows, on azure, on their APIs, etc.
Google literally had the GitHub competitor, Google Code, and GitHub was only formed because google neglected Code. Remember how Google would only support mercurial over git?
And of course, Google shut down Code a few years ago.
I have to remind myself while Google hires lots of programmers and does lots of programming, they don’t really need anyone else to program.
Microsoft needs developers.
Windows and Office came before everything. The big change Nadella brought to the table was completely eliminating Windows as a primary goal for the company, and reducing Office’s importance as well.
I'm not knocking Emacs or Vim, they are powerful tools but to be able to show a typical first year student how to edit their code remotely using SSH/Container support in VSCode is comparatively dead simple. All the students I work with now use this strategy, much in the same way they prefer to use jupyter and pandas when they can.
TRAMP has been a thing for a very long time: https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/
and Olympic champion can jump for 5 meters, but bridges over creeks is nothing uncommon for masses.
and Emacs has been able to edit files transparently on remote hosts ...
Probably Emacs can learn [if they care to be dominating on the market] on technical possibility vs being simple and handy.
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And if we take VSCode Tunnel, things become even brighter for VScode for remote editing.
Furthermore, Emacs still has the best tooling for remote development. They're worth using even if you use other software for text editing, like I do. Dired, the file viewer, makes working with both local and remote files easy and seamless. Org mode, which can be used like Jupyter notebooks, can run code blocks remotely using any language, and can even pass data between them.
It's nice if software professionals were more open towards software that they're unfamiliar with. Software can be useful even if it takes some effort to learn. Not every feature of some software is worthless just because it isn't a clone of a more popular alternative.
One day I was not familiar with VSCode and I became familiar and many others as well. Just not Emacs. Assuming you are right and technically Emacs has all bells and whistles, it must be something else that not promoting it for being wide used.
And you skipped the part about VScode tunnels all along.
Bad replies, to bad replies
I assume this means "older-school Windows dev", as none of that is new in the UNIX world.
MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device and Nadella has not been able to change that but his bets on cloud computing, embracing of Linux and open source and the rise of VSCode are something to behold.
As an "older-school" dev, I am constantly amazed that I can open a linux prompt on windows or do VSCode work with a local gui on a remote computer or inside a docker container.