Comment by gucci-on-fleek

12 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.

8 comments

gucci-on-fleek

Reply
ornornor  10 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.

  • Rohansi  9 hours ago

    How does the existence of VSCode stop the creation of other editors? The existence of other editors clearly didn't prevent VSCode from being created, so what's different?

    • shimman  6 minutes ago

      Oh easy, you can't compete with a trillion dollar corporation that can subsidize loss leaders. We know there is a substantial market in this space if Zed is able to raised $30mil, but only letting VC or big tech dictate the direction of tooling is extremely troublesome.

      I, along with every other person in tech I know, would love to start a company but the biggest risk is lack of health insurance; which is why things like medicare for all are sorely needed if we want to improve the space by introducing more competition.

      Which is why you also need to specifically tax companies like MSFT to publicly subsidize alternatives.

      I mean how much would something like neovim or emacs or helix or neovide improve if they could hire a team of full time developers? Why should economic value both be dictated and captured by a small set of people? I rather have this be guided by a consortium of developers in the form of open source grants.

watermelon0  12 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.

  • gucci-on-fleek  11 hours ago

    > Is GitHub really profitable

    Well I had assumed that GitHub was profitable, since it used to be independent, and it feels like it should be profitable right now. But I tried Googling "is GitHub profitable" just now, and the first few results seem to suggest that either it's still losing money or that nobody knows. So I was likely incorrect about that point, sorry.

    > considering how much Actions credits are given away to open source projects as well as free users?

    GitLab does the same thing, and they are definitely profitable [0], so that on its own isn't necessarily a barrier.

    [0]: https://ir.gitlab.com/news/news-details/2026/GitLab-Reports-...