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GitHub is owned by Microsoft, the company that invented "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on

GitHub is owned by Microsoft, the company that invented "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on VS Code "Pro".

red_phone 4y ago
I’m not sure the term has ever been applied to Microsoft’s own products…
- dkarl 4y ago
  They embrace, extend, and extinguish products they don't make money on, so that people are forced to use products that they do make money on.
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    Microsoft doesn't make money from VS Code. Atom was retired due to a lack of activity with the project. I've never even seen anyone use Atom, since the time it was released 8 years ago.
    - wiseowise 4y ago
      > Microsoft doesn't make money from VS Code. They harvest an astonishing amount of data from it.
    - dkarl 4y ago
      Hence the parent comment: > We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on VS Code "Pro". I don't think it would serve their interests, so I'm not worried about it, but who knows? This cynicism is directed towards Microsoft because they've earned it.
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      Had two coworkers at my last job use it when they needed to edit some of our legacy PHP stuff (we were mostly a .NET shop) but even they switched to VS Code eventually because the writing was on the wall for support.
- civilized 4y ago
  Atom was developed before the acquisition. Which brings us to the second proud tradition of the tech titans, acquiring companies to end the products the acquirer doesn't like.
  - rob74 4y ago
    Well yeah, if you have two very similar products (editors/IDEs based on web technology), one of them much more successful than the other, putting a lot of effort into the less-used product sounds a bit hard to justify...
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    Does Microsoft not "like" Atom, or has its market share dwindled to the point that it is no longer worth maintaining?
    - jonwest 4y ago
      Probably a bit of both if I was to hazard a guess. MS has VS Code, which is definitely the elephant in the room as far as go to IDEs in the environments I’ve been in lately. So right now they’re spending engineering time on both VS Code and Atom, so they may as well focus their resources on the more popular one.
    - vchuravy 4y ago
      If you look at the contribution activity it dropped off after acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft and it seems that development was redirected to VSCode. The writing was on the wall for a long while now, and was one of the reasons why the JuliaCommunity stopped advocating Juno/Atom as a platform and instead switched to VSCode
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    > Which brings us to the second proud tradition of the tech titans, acquiring companies to end the products the acquirer doesn't like. Atom is inferior in every aspect to Visual Studio Code. Atom was on life support for too long.
  - 4y ago
- lijogdfljk 4y ago
  But Atom isn't, is it? It was started prior to Microsoft, to which Microsoft bought Github, and are now "sunsetting". While i don't think Atom was enough competition to actually warrant any real discussion here, the timeline seems quite fitting to EEE no?
tediousdemise 4y ago
When this inevitably happens to VSCode, I'm sure we'll all flock to Sublime Text in droves (or some hip new editor on the block). Contingency planning for this could be a small but wise time investment for dependent teams. VSCode could very well go the way of the Do... Docker.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  I don't know why Microsoft would do that - VSCode is HUGELY popular and at the forefront of Microsoft "I'm cool now guys!" 'open-source' movement.
- pineconewarrior 4y ago
  I am sticking to my Intellij products for this very reason. They work great and the motives of the company are straightforward.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    Same, but nvim
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Why would this happen to VsCode? VSCode is a proprietary form of Atom is not? It’s hugely successful Microsoft would never do such a thing.
  - mumblemumble 4y ago
    Sort of? They maintain a trademark on the name Visual Studio Code and some other bits. And it is maintained by a Microsoft team. But the code itself is MIT licensed. You can build it yourself. I have. There are one or two forks of it out there.
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    The codebases of VS Code and Atom are unrelated to each other.
jaywalk 4y ago
VS Code Pro already exists. It's called Visual Studio.
- mumblemumble 4y ago
  Despite the name, they have basically nothing in common. They don't share a user interface, they don't share plugins, they don't share hotkeys. One of the main complaints many of the C# developers on my team have when they have to touch languages that aren't well supported by Visual Studio is that they don't know how to work VSCode.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    They do share some plugins actually, that is why VS nowadays also gets a node instance running on the background. And also why C++ workloads depend on .NET being available.
  - jaywalk 4y ago
    I'm well aware of the differences between the two products, since I use both on a daily basis. My answer was a bit flippant, sure, but they are both IDEs developed by Microsoft and Visual Studio is definitely the "Pro" version of the two.
babypuncher 4y ago
"VS Code Pro" came out in 1997
reaperducer 4y ago
I'll go Nova before I go VS Code Pro.
alxlaz 4y ago
VS Code "Pro" is very 1998. My money is on VS Code 365.
- onionisafruit 4y ago
  It’s already here. They went with the name GitHub Codespaces.
  - oaiey 4y ago
    That is a very good analogy. Considering that Office was also an offline product before it became a cloud-subscribed web/desktop hybrid.
chipotle_coyote 4y ago
I know that perception of Microsoft will never go away in the open source community, and maybe it shouldn’t, although I’m not convinced Microsoft of 2022 is particularly worse (or particularly better) than most other companies operating simultaneously in open source and proprietary spaces. The context of “embrace, extend and extinguish” has kind of been diffused over the years, though; it never meant “buy a product and kill it,” but rather meant adopting open standards and adding proprietary (not necessarily closed, which is not the same thing) extensions to them that end up becoming de facto standards, so your product is perceived as better at the task then the fully standards-compliant original. What happened with Visual Studio Code and Atom isn’t an example of this at all. For a start, they’re just two products that are competing in the same space; they’ve never had the same extension standards, so the idea of “embracing and extending” just isn’t relevant here. Secondly, Microsoft obviously didn’t buy GitHub to shut Atom down. I’ve seen the arguments that once Microsoft did buy GitHub, Atom was doomed, but Code was already arguably more popular than Atom when Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018: Stack Overflow’s developer survey showed VSCode as far more popular among surveyed users (34.9% to Atom’s 18.9%). If those numbers had been reversed—if Code never made a real dent and Atom kept growing—then I have little doubt Atom would be the one continuing. Lastly, I suspect the runaway popularity of Visual Studio Code is pretty good insurance against a hypothetical “Visual Studio Code Pro” replacing the existing VS Code. This would almost certainly cause a fork (or more than one!) to be created, and it’s highly likely such a fork would get immediate backing and support from one or more technology companies willing to pay for continued open source development. However, I don’t think that’s likely, because I don’t think that’s how Microsoft is interested in monetizing Code. It’s not a source of income in and of itself. It doesn’t have to be. If it just so happens to have great GitHub integration, maybe your company will pay for GitHub enterprise features. If you’re used to using it, you may be more likely to pay for GitHub Codespaces. If it has a great story for deploying to Azure, then maybe you’ll be more likely to deploy to Azure. And so on.
- jimnotgym 4y ago
  > If it has a great story for deploying to Azure, then maybe you’ll be more likely to deploy to Azure This. Microsoft share price depends on the size of their recurring revenue from cloud. They can easily write off a few million on VScode for bringing more users to Azure
cookiengineer 4y ago
Note that this will lead to unmaintained Electron Apps until at least 2032. We're basically fucked.
naikrovek 4y ago
Like when they sunset the closed-source .net framework and created the open source .net core? Or when they sunset the closed-source PowerShell and created the open-source PowerShell Core? Like those?

GitHub is owned by Microsoft, the company that invented "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on VS Code "Pro".

red_phone 4y ago

I’m not sure the term has ever been applied to Microsoft’s own products…

dkarl 4y ago
They embrace, extend, and extinguish products they don't make money on, so that people are forced to use products that they do make money on.
- IncRnd 4y ago
  Microsoft doesn't make money from VS Code. Atom was retired due to a lack of activity with the project. I've never even seen anyone use Atom, since the time it was released 8 years ago.
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    > Microsoft doesn't make money from VS Code. They harvest an astonishing amount of data from it.
  - dkarl 4y ago
    Hence the parent comment: > We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on VS Code "Pro". I don't think it would serve their interests, so I'm not worried about it, but who knows? This cynicism is directed towards Microsoft because they've earned it.
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    Had two coworkers at my last job use it when they needed to edit some of our legacy PHP stuff (we were mostly a .NET shop) but even they switched to VS Code eventually because the writing was on the wall for support.
civilized 4y ago
Atom was developed before the acquisition. Which brings us to the second proud tradition of the tech titans, acquiring companies to end the products the acquirer doesn't like.
- rob74 4y ago
  Well yeah, if you have two very similar products (editors/IDEs based on web technology), one of them much more successful than the other, putting a lot of effort into the less-used product sounds a bit hard to justify...
- babypuncher 4y ago
  Does Microsoft not "like" Atom, or has its market share dwindled to the point that it is no longer worth maintaining?
  - jonwest 4y ago
    Probably a bit of both if I was to hazard a guess. MS has VS Code, which is definitely the elephant in the room as far as go to IDEs in the environments I’ve been in lately. So right now they’re spending engineering time on both VS Code and Atom, so they may as well focus their resources on the more popular one.
  - vchuravy 4y ago
    If you look at the contribution activity it dropped off after acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft and it seems that development was redirected to VSCode. The writing was on the wall for a long while now, and was one of the reasons why the JuliaCommunity stopped advocating Juno/Atom as a platform and instead switched to VSCode
- wiseowise 4y ago
  > Which brings us to the second proud tradition of the tech titans, acquiring companies to end the products the acquirer doesn't like. Atom is inferior in every aspect to Visual Studio Code. Atom was on life support for too long.
- 4y ago
lijogdfljk 4y ago
But Atom isn't, is it? It was started prior to Microsoft, to which Microsoft bought Github, and are now "sunsetting". While i don't think Atom was enough competition to actually warrant any real discussion here, the timeline seems quite fitting to EEE no?

tediousdemise 4y ago

When this inevitably happens to VSCode, I'm sure we'll all flock to Sublime Text in droves (or some hip new editor on the block). Contingency planning for this could be a small but wise time investment for dependent teams. VSCode could very well go the way of the Do... Docker.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
I don't know why Microsoft would do that - VSCode is HUGELY popular and at the forefront of Microsoft "I'm cool now guys!" 'open-source' movement.
pineconewarrior 4y ago
I am sticking to my Intellij products for this very reason. They work great and the motives of the company are straightforward.
- colordrops 4y ago
  Same, but nvim
edgyquant 4y ago
Why would this happen to VsCode? VSCode is a proprietary form of Atom is not? It’s hugely successful Microsoft would never do such a thing.
- mumblemumble 4y ago
  Sort of? They maintain a trademark on the name Visual Studio Code and some other bits. And it is maintained by a Microsoft team. But the code itself is MIT licensed. You can build it yourself. I have. There are one or two forks of it out there.
- IncRnd 4y ago
  The codebases of VS Code and Atom are unrelated to each other.

jaywalk 4y ago

VS Code Pro already exists. It's called Visual Studio.

mumblemumble 4y ago
Despite the name, they have basically nothing in common. They don't share a user interface, they don't share plugins, they don't share hotkeys. One of the main complaints many of the C# developers on my team have when they have to touch languages that aren't well supported by Visual Studio is that they don't know how to work VSCode.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  They do share some plugins actually, that is why VS nowadays also gets a node instance running on the background. And also why C++ workloads depend on .NET being available.
- jaywalk 4y ago
  I'm well aware of the differences between the two products, since I use both on a daily basis. My answer was a bit flippant, sure, but they are both IDEs developed by Microsoft and Visual Studio is definitely the "Pro" version of the two.

babypuncher 4y ago

"VS Code Pro" came out in 1997

reaperducer 4y ago

I'll go Nova before I go VS Code Pro.

alxlaz 4y ago

VS Code "Pro" is very 1998. My money is on VS Code 365.

onionisafruit 4y ago
It’s already here. They went with the name GitHub Codespaces.
- oaiey 4y ago
  That is a very good analogy. Considering that Office was also an offline product before it became a cloud-subscribed web/desktop hybrid.

chipotle_coyote 4y ago

I know that perception of Microsoft will never go away in the open source community, and maybe it shouldn’t, although I’m not convinced Microsoft of 2022 is particularly worse (or particularly better) than most other companies operating simultaneously in open source and proprietary spaces. The context of “embrace, extend and extinguish” has kind of been diffused over the years, though; it never meant “buy a product and kill it,” but rather meant adopting open standards and adding proprietary (not necessarily closed, which is not the same thing) extensions to them that end up becoming de facto standards, so your product is perceived as better at the task then the fully standards-compliant original. What happened with Visual Studio Code and Atom isn’t an example of this at all. For a start, they’re just two products that are competing in the same space; they’ve never had the same extension standards, so the idea of “embracing and extending” just isn’t relevant here. Secondly, Microsoft obviously didn’t buy GitHub to shut Atom down. I’ve seen the arguments that once Microsoft did buy GitHub, Atom was doomed, but Code was already arguably more popular than Atom when Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018: Stack Overflow’s developer survey showed VSCode as far more popular among surveyed users (34.9% to Atom’s 18.9%). If those numbers had been reversed—if Code never made a real dent and Atom kept growing—then I have little doubt Atom would be the one continuing. Lastly, I suspect the runaway popularity of Visual Studio Code is pretty good insurance against a hypothetical “Visual Studio Code Pro” replacing the existing VS Code. This would almost certainly cause a fork (or more than one!) to be created, and it’s highly likely such a fork would get immediate backing and support from one or more technology companies willing to pay for continued open source development. However, I don’t think that’s likely, because I don’t think that’s how Microsoft is interested in monetizing Code. It’s not a source of income in and of itself. It doesn’t have to be. If it just so happens to have great GitHub integration, maybe your company will pay for GitHub enterprise features. If you’re used to using it, you may be more likely to pay for GitHub Codespaces. If it has a great story for deploying to Azure, then maybe you’ll be more likely to deploy to Azure. And so on.

jimnotgym 4y ago
> If it has a great story for deploying to Azure, then maybe you’ll be more likely to deploy to Azure This. Microsoft share price depends on the size of their recurring revenue from cloud. They can easily write off a few million on VScode for bringing more users to Azure

cookiengineer 4y ago

Note that this will lead to unmaintained Electron Apps until at least 2032. We're basically fucked.

naikrovek 4y ago

Like when they sunset the closed-source .net framework and created the open source .net core? Or when they sunset the closed-source PowerShell and created the open-source PowerShell Core? Like those?