3 ms·

> if not the best Them's fightin' words. But on a more serious note, I think 50% is a massive overestimation. We haven't seen pricing. Unless MS is willing to

by vlunkr 6y ago

> if not the best Them's fightin' words. But on a more serious note, I think 50% is a massive overestimation. We haven't seen pricing. Unless MS is willing to take a huge loss on this there's no way it will be free. We all know the resources required to run a modern web app in development mode. I can certainly see this being useful if you happen to be away from your dev machine, or if you just want to contribute to something without setting up the whole environment, but not as a full-time solution. Especially considering github is known to have outages. You'll really be SOL then.

JoyrexJ9 6y ago
I don't think anyone would suggest this a full time replacement for your dev environment and IDE
topkai22 6y ago
There is preview pricing available for VS Code Spaces, which is almost the same thing. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/visual-studio-online/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/visual-stu... The estimated cost for a full time developer to use the system is $23.30/month or roughly $280 a year. That's quite competitive- my "portable" workstation costs north of $2k and has a 3 year life span, so the "yearly" cost is $666. The benefits of being able to get use cheaper dev terminals in the general case could pay for itself, even before you get to the benefits of having a common environment. Also, you can self host for free. 50% is an over estimate (I've never seen 50% of developers agree to ANYTHING), but broad adoption looks highly likely.
- prepend 6y ago
  I use my workstation for lots more than typing into vscode. If that’s all I do, then I could just use a chromebook. I think my $2k laptop uses its local storage for evaluating software, working with large data in memory, lots of other stuff. So that’s not going away. This would be a cost on top of my hardware $666/year.
  - topkai22 6y ago
    I'll admit I've got a particularly killer use case. My daily project has an enterprise system for its backend. Its obnoxiously complex software, so devs generally only run part of it locally and part of it off of shared infrastructure in Azure. Because we are distributed team, cross-country network latency really hurts application performance under "local" dev conditions. Running in a codespace, the entire codebase runs in Azure. The application performs almost as fast while debugging as it does in production deployment. It's awesome for where we've been able to convert to it.
crdrost 6y ago
MS may indeed be willing to take a "huge loss" on this. It may dwarf the added revenue from other sources. So like I don't know your particular context but I imagine MS's moves would seem surprising for developers, say, at startups. Whereas if you work at an IT adjoint to a mechanical contractor it might make more sense. What's at stake is that MS might be ramping up to some bigger announcement, "GitHub Cloud" or so, where you pay some fee for the cloud hosting and the sales pitch is, "imagine that you can fix a bug from a bug report in a non-crappy editor like VS Code, do a quick code review and push a button which will run your tests, canary deploy, then version it and push it live -- we take care of all that infra, you just pay for the Azure hosting." If you give half of that for free to everybody, you nominally "lose" but you increase the adoption rate of a separate revenue machine, which makes up for it. A similar strategy was used by Microsoft to make their initial profits with Windows. There it was "you don't have to worry about the hardware specs -- we have already worked all of those out and all of them work with Windows." The key point in both is to say, "what are people seeking out, at the same time as they are seeking out my product?" and then to either give people a lot of freedom or a really easy option. You would rather take one pill that is carefully engineered to have the right omega-3 balance to stave off depression AND is a good probiotic AND has all of your daily vitamins, than to have to bother with a separate fish oil pill and probiotic and multivitamin. Focusing on product "complements" is often a really good strategy.

by vlunkr 6y ago

JoyrexJ9 6y ago

I don't think anyone would suggest this a full time replacement for your dev environment and IDE

topkai22 6y ago

There is preview pricing available for VS Code Spaces, which is almost the same thing. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/visual-studio-online/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/visual-stu... The estimated cost for a full time developer to use the system is $23.30/month or roughly $280 a year. That's quite competitive- my "portable" workstation costs north of $2k and has a 3 year life span, so the "yearly" cost is $666. The benefits of being able to get use cheaper dev terminals in the general case could pay for itself, even before you get to the benefits of having a common environment. Also, you can self host for free. 50% is an over estimate (I've never seen 50% of developers agree to ANYTHING), but broad adoption looks highly likely.

prepend 6y ago
I use my workstation for lots more than typing into vscode. If that’s all I do, then I could just use a chromebook. I think my $2k laptop uses its local storage for evaluating software, working with large data in memory, lots of other stuff. So that’s not going away. This would be a cost on top of my hardware $666/year.
- topkai22 6y ago
  I'll admit I've got a particularly killer use case. My daily project has an enterprise system for its backend. Its obnoxiously complex software, so devs generally only run part of it locally and part of it off of shared infrastructure in Azure. Because we are distributed team, cross-country network latency really hurts application performance under "local" dev conditions. Running in a codespace, the entire codebase runs in Azure. The application performs almost as fast while debugging as it does in production deployment. It's awesome for where we've been able to convert to it.

crdrost 6y ago

MS may indeed be willing to take a "huge loss" on this. It may dwarf the added revenue from other sources. So like I don't know your particular context but I imagine MS's moves would seem surprising for developers, say, at startups. Whereas if you work at an IT adjoint to a mechanical contractor it might make more sense. What's at stake is that MS might be ramping up to some bigger announcement, "GitHub Cloud" or so, where you pay some fee for the cloud hosting and the sales pitch is, "imagine that you can fix a bug from a bug report in a non-crappy editor like VS Code, do a quick code review and push a button which will run your tests, canary deploy, then version it and push it live -- we take care of all that infra, you just pay for the Azure hosting." If you give half of that for free to everybody, you nominally "lose" but you increase the adoption rate of a separate revenue machine, which makes up for it. A similar strategy was used by Microsoft to make their initial profits with Windows. There it was "you don't have to worry about the hardware specs -- we have already worked all of those out and all of them work with Windows." The key point in both is to say, "what are people seeking out, at the same time as they are seeking out my product?" and then to either give people a lot of freedom or a really easy option. You would rather take one pill that is carefully engineered to have the right omega-3 balance to stave off depression AND is a good probiotic AND has all of your daily vitamins, than to have to bother with a separate fish oil pill and probiotic and multivitamin. Focusing on product "complements" is often a really good strategy.