The business case is a combination of Discretionary Pricing, and Moat - those are the business school names for the strategies you can look up if you like.. Th

The business case is a combination of Discretionary Pricing, and Moat - those are the business school names for the strategies you can look up if you like.. The Discretionary pricing comes in the Tiers, while the Moat is provided by VS Code reducing the chance of real competition against Tier 1 or 2. The removal of hot reload from VS Code is to provide differentiation between Tier 2 & 3, to drive customers to paid versions. -- Tier 1 .. Visual Studio Enterprise - expensive Tier 2 .. Visual Studio - low medium cost for a business Tier 3 .. Visual Studio Code - 'free' in exchange for your info (via telemetry) and reduces the chance of a truly open competitor challenging the above tiers. This one must walk a line between being less useful than above tiers so there's value to buy them, while being more useful than other 'free' competition in the short term so they attract mindshare away from other OSS that might otherwise grow to challenge the higher Tiers