Comment by nine_k

13 hours ago

Microsoft is big, internally incoherent (even inimical, according to some accounts), and people responsible for VSCode and WSL are likely totally unrelated to people determining when and how to crack MS's crown jewel, the Office suite, in an attempt to squeeze out a few dollars more.

17 comments

nine_k

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hotstickyballs  12 hours ago

That's why anything that goes against the long-established corporate culture aren't likely to stay around for long.

  • emodendroket  11 hours ago

    Visual Studio Code has been around over a decade and there is zero indication it's going anywhere.

    • adithyassekhar  1 hour ago

      Apart from academics, who are forced to stay away from ai, i feel vs code will regress to a code reader as the models improve.

shimman  12 hours ago

Why are we acting like VS Code is nothing but a way to stop independent developers from selling their tools? Things like VS Code literally destroy the cottage industry and likely has held back our industry by several decades.

MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That would kneecap the company and destroy its parasitic blight on our industry for several decades and if luck we with us indefinitely.

  • gucci-on-fleek  11 hours ago

    > Things like VS Code literally destroy the cottage industry and likely has held back our industry by several decades.

    VS Code was released in 2015, so even if its initial release somehow completely stopped the entire software industry, it would still not have held the industry back by several decades.

    > MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That would kneecap the company

    I'm pretty sure that all of those (aside from Xbox) are profitable on their own, so I don't think that them becoming independent would kneecap them at all.

    • watermelon0  11 hours ago

      Is GitHub really profitable, considering how much Actions credits are given away to open source projects as well as free users? Same goes for Copilot.

      1 reply →

    • ornornor  9 hours ago

      > VS Code was released in 2015, so even if its initial release somehow completely stopped the entire software industry, it would still not have held the industry back by several decades.

      Why not? That’s 11 years, times (say) 5 potential independent editors or IDE that didn’t exist because of VSCode in that time is over 50 years worth of software innovation.

      1 reply →

  • nine_k  11 hours ago

    Have releases of other open-source tools destroyed cottage industries? Certainly they have, to an extent.

    Would it be better if most tools you use were proprietary, built by cottage industries? I doubt it. Especially if we notice that cottage industries tend to consolidate, and the few remaining players are rarely very community-oriented.

    • shimman  9 hours ago

      No, what would be better is creating a VAT against big tech and VC investments so that the public can decide what technology is worth developing.

      If the VAT amounted to $10,000,000,000 of tax revenue annually (something that is quite easy to do against an industry that has several trillion dollar corporations) that is enough to 100,000 open source projects with $100,000 grants.

      This would literally unleash to much economic value that would be truly controlled by the public.

      That is the future I want to build towards, anything that gives people more power against corporations and in the software world that means funding open source.

      I can't think of a single open source dev that wouldn't mind a $100,000 grant for the likely millions they provide in economic value.

  • fithisux  10 hours ago

    I started migrating away for VSCode, piece by piece.

    But if you need it:

    Theia/Positron/VSCodium

    For Python/Julia? Many alternatives. For C family? Similar Java/Go? Similar.