Comment by phillipcarter

I think IDEs took off plenty well, but several got frozen in time.

Visual Studio as the IDE for building windows client apps, especially WinForms, was and still is a genuinely incredible and productive experience. The ease of which you could click-and-drag a UI, context switch to logic in the code behind the forms, wire up a web service backend, share domain models and have navigation and search tools understand all of it was great. And the TFS integration was quite good too. You really only had to leave VS to do database work or administer some IIS pools.

Unfortunately, it couldn't keep up with the rest of the dev world. "Server Explorer" morphed to include your Azure VMs but froze for 30s each time you opened it. Docker tools came in super late, most Azure services didn't really have a VS tooling experience. The "right click publish" workflow meant for small systems never figured out how to graduate to real-world needs across many teams. Developers had to learn how to use many other tools for modern stuff, and so VS became far less of a center of gravity, often to their annoyance.