Comment by ren_engineer
2 years ago
Surprised more people aren't talking about how Microsoft has a near monopoly on the developer ecosystem. They've got GitHub, OpenAI, and VS Code all working together and collecting data that strengthen each other's products while also using their embrace, extend, extinguish strategy with WSL and all of these steer people towards Azure services whenever possible. Seems like something that verges on an anti-trust situation when you think about the flywheel effect data has for AI
credit to Microsoft for rehabbing their reputation with developers but it seems like a massive trojan horse
> more people aren't talking about how Microsoft has a near monopoly on the developer ecosystem.
But do they? In my day job, outside of the occasional use of Visual Studio and developing on a Windows machine, I use no Microsoft products for development.
> credit to Microsoft for rehabbing their reputation with developers
With a fair number of younger developers, but certainly not all. Most devs I know don't think of Microsoft any more kindly now than in the past.
Your particular individual experience is not representative of the overall reach that Microsoft has, which is what OP is pointing out.
GitHub is the defacto "point" of software these days, with most devs jumping to that before anything else.
VSCode is the highest ranked editor from the StackOverflow 2023 survey, with (IIRC) something akin to 70%.
Azure is the icing on the cake, because now you have an entire generation of developers building on GitHub, from VSCode, and deploying onto Microsoft infrastructure.
2023 isn't live yet, but 74% of respondents used VSCode in 2022[0].
That said, the numbers are hard to compare because they allow selecting multiple choices and they split the JetBrains products up, while VSCode is considered as one tool.
If you add together all the JetBrains products they reach 94%. I expect there's a ton of overlap that brings that number back down, but it's enough to make me suspect that VSCode's lead isn't as high as the numbers in the survey make it look.
[0] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popula...
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> But do they? In my day job, outside of the occasional use of Visual Studio and developing on a Windows machine, I use no Microsoft products for development.
According to your comment history, you are using JavaScript or used it in the past at least, which usually means you've used npm, which is owned by Microsoft.
And since lots of "young" developers use JavaScript and TypeScript, most of them are also interacting with npm.
Microsoft has captured maybe a larger part of the developer market than you realize. Not by being amazing or with "Microsoft <3 FOSS", but by buying up lots of the market.
I don't think they have one today, but it is looking like they could soon have one. Especially since I believe recent reports show that Azure is starting out pace AWS in adoption? So you have .NET, Visual Studio (Code), Azure, Github, OpenAI, Windows, and I am pretty sure more I am forgetting about. I think the big one that wasn't initially mentioned was Azure.
All of that adds up to having a very significant, perhaps majority, of the market locked up. But it's also all centering around a particular sort of product and product development. Microsoft might be able to lock up that segment, but I don't think they're in a position to monopolize the larger software development space in the near or medium future.
Don't forget TypeScript and npm as well which basically covers 99% of the JavaScript ecosystem if not more.
Then Dependabot for large swatches of more developers outside of the earlier mentioned ecosystems. LinkedIn for everyone's career.
"monopoly on developer ecosystem"
GitHub? fair
OpenAI? how is this a part of dev. ecosystem?
Vs Code? wtf? there's a lot of other IDEs/editors and many would argue that they are better
>embrace, extend, extinguish strategy with WSL
They are EEEing their product - Windows?
> Vs Code? wtf? there's a lot of other IDEs/editors and many would argue that they are better
VS Code is hugely dominant in terms of IDEs used by developers per the StackOverflow survey. It commands more than double the percentage of the next most used… and the second place is Visual Studio.
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technolog...
Those numbers are a bit misleading because they split up the JetBrains products, making JetBrains look like a smaller market than it actually is. If you add up all their tools, they hit 94% to VS Code's 74%. Obviously there are a lot of people using multiple JetBrains tools and that bloats that number, but the huge difference demonstrates how flawed SO's numbers are for gauging market share.
Also, I suspect that most people who mark a JetBrains IDE also mark a secondary editor that's lighter weight, but it's hard to tell how that all breaks down with the way they present the data. I spend about 90% of my work day in WebStorm and occasionally move over to VSCode for loading a large directory that I don't want to index. When I filled out the survey, due to they way they worded it, I marked both tools.
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VSCode is just the lowest common denominator IDE that works decently with most languages and platforms, I use it a lot but would not think twice about switching to something else (as I have many times in my career). I don’t think it really has any “moat”
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> > embrace, extend, extinguish strategy with WSL
> They are EEEing their product - Windows?
No, Linux obviously.
First they like and integrate Linux into their own products. Azure, WSL and others.
Then, they provide extensions that are closed-source on top of those.
With the goal to extinguish the original project so they have more control over the direction.
WSL has been out for at least five years now and it’s still just a fancy kernel adapter without feature parity. I might begin to worry once things like containers actually work properly. Until then, I don’t think Microsoft has fully embraced Linux much less extended it.
I did just now learn that systemd was finally added to WSL. Originally that was never going to be added and back in the days of WSL 1 I remember the WSL writing blog posts about that being ridiculous. Who knows, proper container support might be added soon.
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If it was that easy to kill Linux it would have happened already. Chad Linux, open source free software, withstanding the full might of the multi billion dollar juggernaut Microsoft.
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I mean google uses VSCode internally as their officially supported IDE… i’d say they’re doing pretty well.
No it's based on theia
Because of products created before VSCode
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except windows itself is not loved by most developers, microsoft will take over the developer world when it replaces its windows with linux fully(instead of WSL2, which is nice but not great)
Can't see Linux replacing windows, their most profitable products (Windows and MS Office) are both based on closed ecosystem
Isn't Azure a much higher percentage of profit than Windows or Office for MS at this point?
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I don’t know. I’m happily using ms office on a mac and in the browser.
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Part of the reason Windows isn't loved by developers is also hardware. So a switch to Linux won't fix this, unless they made the switch when Apple was releasing those horrific keyboards!
No one is talking about it because developer tools is literally the core business Microsoft is in and was founded as such, 48-years ago.
Yes, they have expanded in many ways - but developer tools/languages/IDEs/libraries is their bread & butter.
The famous “Developers Developers Developers” by Steve Ballmer.
https://youtu.be/Vhh_GeBPOhs
Now it's helping developers to feed the AI for free.
I think there was a lot of discussion on this when Microsoft took over GitHub but as time goes people kind of accepted the reality.
i think it extends further than that, since they have: vscode, github, linkedin, npm, typescript, chatgpt. for many, this is almost the entire developer ecosystem.
at a high level they pretend to embrace open source but many of the best features of vscode are closed source, such as remote editing and various language servers (pylance, etc.) the lsp saga is particularly unfriendly, since they pushed it as an open standard, tons of people contributed and adopted it, and then they closed the source to their most valuable language servers, making them only compatible with their product (vscode).
there are countless similar examples. the way i see microsoft and the way they want to be perceived are entirely different.
I guess Steve Ballmer was right all along...
About developers?
No, about Playday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7PYQCXdX3A
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developers, developers, developers, developers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxbJw8PrIkc
I would expect them to purchase StackOverflow too. I guess it's not that essential, seems a low cost acquisition.
Why would they purchase StackOverflow ? They are partnered with the StackOverflow killer: ChatGPT.
If StackOverflow dies, surely the developer-relevant quality of training data will suffer?
After all, the capabilities of ChatGPT are basically proportional to how well a topic is represented in the training data, which is largely the internet.
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Most of the use I get out of GPT is letting it summarize stackoverflow posts for me.
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Don't forget Teams, which seems to be killing every other Chat/Video platform in the enterprise sector.
Github -> gitlab, vs code -> jetbrains. why use wsl just go to linux. No one forces you to use their products they’re just a better developer experience imo aside from windows. Plenty of competition in the space. The question is does better equal monopoly?
How is WSL an example of EEE? Other than adding a few things like the ability to navigate the Windows filesystem from WSL, they have really done nothing in the way of extending or extinguishing.
If anything is classic EEE of what you listed it’s GitHub, given it’s basically a series of extensions on an open standard. Its Linux EEE program is Azure where Microsoft sells you a Linux server running in its datacenter in fancy ways that lock you in.
I feel Microsoft’s monopoly around development is not that strong and it’s not terribly hard to completely avoid them.
I had the same realisation. Also remember they’ve extended JavaScript with Typescript, and built LSP. It does indeed feel like they are eating the whole of software.
Aren't those FOSS?
Meanwhile CMA: you are leading cloud gaming and hence can't acquire Activision.
Count me in the list of dev teams where that is not remotely true. I use exactly 0 microsoft projects at my software engineering job.
gitea
... is nice but needs the social network effects. Maybe adding some federation and stars / comments as a protocol (not just a program) could help. Maybe it exists and lacks coherence/ publicity.
One of the best things that could be done for open source is to break the monopoly on those damn stars.
Open source would be a lot healthier if social proof were portable across platforms.
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good for small projects, I guess the real competitor is gitlab
Now they just need StackOverflow.
They already run a .NET stack....