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Microsoft really seems to have wrapped up the developer ecosystem with VS Code and the Github acquisition combined with OpenAI. They are going to have an absurd

Microsoft really seems to have wrapped up the developer ecosystem with VS Code and the Github acquisition combined with OpenAI. They are going to have an absurd amount of data to optimize their models thanks to that, not sure how other AI focused companies can overcome that have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-developer Microsoft used to be and potentially move away from their ecosystem. Credit to Microsoft's PR team for somehow managing to turn around public opinion about them, it's an all timer

gonehome 4y ago
Microsoft is a so well positioned on this I think Silicon Valley has forgotten what it looks like when they don’t have a horrible CEO. When Microsoft executes well, they’re a scary force. They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are again. There’s a massive paradigm shift we’re just at the beginning of and Microsoft has been putting pieces in place for the last couple of years. Nadella has really turned things around for them. Google and meta are scrambling. Things should get interesting.
- bredren 4y ago
  If it were not for the impending headset, Apple would look a wee bit caught out as well. I suspect once Apple turns toward gen ai, all of its other advantages (infra, hw, instal base, services, etc) will propel it to forefront.
  - gonehome 4y ago
    Apple has always had its own hardware based silo to some extent (excellent products and design, fully integrated). Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They were first to market with Siri and it’s still trash 13yrs(?!) later. It’s always been what they’re weakest at, I’m not sure LLMs will be different for them. The headset could still give them a nice hardware platform advantage though if that UX becomes the main new interface.
    - zer00eyz 4y ago
      > Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They bought Siri! What stops them from buying someone for "ai"
      - gonehome 4y ago
        Siri still sucks?
        shagie 4y ago
        Siri isn't supposed to be great - its a voice interface to a few standardized interfaces that applications can hook into. The system provided intents ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit ) are rather limited. While we can say "it should be more" the architecture for it doesn't appear to be something that easily extensible by anyone (Apple included). However, for those intents - it does quite well and most processing is done on device rather than in the cloud and that fundamentally changes the economics and capability. It is much less expensive than Alexa to run (where nearly everything is in the cloud), but it is also something that can't do as much. Try this - turn on airplane mode and do "hey Siri what time is it?" or "hey Siri open notes" And while those are indeed a very limited examples (there are other examples such as interacting with HomeKit where it needs the lan), it shows that much of the work is done on the phone. This also means that its capabilities are limited to what you can run on the phone.
        gonehome 4y ago
        That feels like a retroactive explanation of the current status quo to me. I doubt Apple would agree "Siri isn't supposed to be great" - they just failed to live up to what they wanted. We'll see if that changes.
        shagie 4y ago
        The "what they hoped" is a question of "what who hoped?" When you look at SiriKit when compared to Google and Alexa, it is an entirely different approach that isn't designed for general tooling of a voice assistant but rather the intents show that it is designed for specific functionality of specific types of applications. Asking Siri for things outside of those intents was always delegated out to some other service (Wolfram Alpha was the choice for a while). Siri was never designed to try to monetize the voice interface (compare Alexa and Google) and thus wasn't trying to do everything and SikiKit shows that it can't do quite a bit. So that it can't do everything shouldn't be a surprise to Apple. Comparing Siri to Alexa, they are very different architectures with different goals and support costs. If you look at https://www.apple.com/siri/ https://www.apple.com/siri/ you should get the idea that this is interface to common tasks - not a general "do everything and chat about it" assistant. What's more, it limits what goes off device (whereas Alexa and Google do all speech to text on the cloud).
  - endtime 4y ago
    I don't get the impression Apple ever caught up with Alexa or Google Assistant. That said, this is a bit different, since the AI tech is a bit more commoditized than with those voice assistants, and the product problem is the hard part. On the other hand, Apple has positioned themselves as extremely privacy-respecting - I wonder if that will affect their ability to use their users' data to train models. It'll be interesting to see, anyway.
  - newaccount2023 4y ago
    for now, Apple is in a different league if Tim Cook wants $10 bln in new profits, he can simply pass some arbitrary judgement like "the next iPhone will only be compatible with new AirPods we will introduce at the same time" and everyone will comply
    - DeathArrow 4y ago
      And that's why I don't use their products.
  - pxoe 4y ago
    a headset is not a suit of AI products. it's kinda...irrelevant. meta has a headset, and that's working out great for them, isn't it. so far, there's nothing. there's only vague rumors, or not even - just assumptions that "surely apple will do something about this", "they'll turn to ai eventually". well, they have siri. which doesn't exactly inspire hope for much.
    - DeathArrow 4y ago
      > meta has a headset, and that's working out great for them, isn't it. A previous VR wave failed in the '90s. If this one fails, too, we' ll see another in 20 years.
  - listless 4y ago
    I'm curious on this as well - although a VR headset at this point feels like a foul ball straight backwards and into the net. Apple is good at a lot of things but it is AWFUL at AI. Siri is still the worst experience you can have with a language model. That said, all they need to do is integrate some OpenAI API's. In which case, Microsoft STILL wins because of its investment there and where OpenAI's enormous compute happens - which is likely in Azure.
    - chipotle_coyote 4y ago
      Siri isn't a language model, AFAIK. I'm sure it's using machine learning on the back end, but it's doing something very different. The thing is, a voice assistant needs to actually perform Natural Language Understanding -- it has to understand the intent of what's being said to it. That's actually a very different AI problem than what LLMs are doing at this point. Samsung's Bixby -- yes, the one everyone turns off -- can handle a "conversation" like this: (This is run using the "Space Resorts" sample capsule, a fictitious hotel booking system) --- User: Show me hotels near Mars Bixby: I found these space resorts on Mars. (Shows two, “Martian Oasis” and “Space Y”) User: [taps Martian Oasis] make a reservation for Christmas week Bixby: Which habitat pod would you like? (Shows two) User: Honeymoon Bixby: Are you sure you want to book this trip? (Shows the hotel, “Number of astronauts: 2”, and the dates for Christmas week) User: change the astronauts to 4 Bixby: (Shows the sam confirmation screen, with the number changed) User: Yes Bixby: I hope you have a great time at Martian Oasis. (Shows booking info) --- Now, in some ways this is no great shakes, but I don't think "all [Apple] needs to do is integrate some OpenAI APIs," because they don't have an API for NLU and deriving intent. GPT4 et. al. aren't currently designed for this kind of problem space. You could use them to make Siri (and Bixby and Alexa) better at answering general questions, but you can't use them to make the voice assistant do something, just respond to something. Bixby 2 (the current version) is, incidentally, what came out of Viv, the voice AI startup that the Siri folks made after they left Apple.
- passion__desire 4y ago
  As a young developer, I always wondered why Google didn't buy Java from Sun. Wouldn't it be a strategic buy?
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    google is literally the next generation Sun, many of the same people were involved.. the Sun Micro company was scrapped for (valuable) parts, with a lot of internal competitive moments
  - airstrike 4y ago
    Not sure what to make of that, but I'm just glad we don't live in a world in which Google + Java is the winning horse
    - nunobrito 4y ago
      cough Android coughh +2.5 billion Google Android devices running their apps overwhelmingly in Java. Wasn't a coincidence this was chosen that way.
  - letsdothisagain 4y ago
    Google wasn't a big player when Oracle bought sun. Don't ever underestimate them. There is a reason Oracle of all companies is the government's pick to annex Tiktoc.
- hbn 4y ago
  I wouldn't go so far as to say they're exceptional. They're gaining good graces for developers by offering a bunch of free (for now) tools that people like. But most of their big breadwinner software is still abysmal to use. I just tried cold starting Word and getting into a blank document on my i9 MacBook Pro and it took about 15 seconds. Windows is increasingly a dystopian user tracking and ad serving platform that happens to run the applications you need, and they still constantly break basic system functions. For a while I couldn't open jpegs in the built-in photo preview app. I gave Edge a shot for a good 6 months or so and eventually gave up because they kept breaking basic functionality that I never saw broken in Chrome (there was literally a month or two point in time where if you grabbed the scrollbar and dragged it, the bar would disappear, jutting the entire page sideways and breaking scrolling until you closed the tab and reopened it. This is on the default, built-in OS browser!) Also, my god, their SSO experience is so clunky and prone to breaking.
  - gonehome 4y ago
    They’re strategically exceptional, but beyond that a lot of their products (or subsidiaries) are also dominant for good reason (vscode, GitHub). O365 and the product integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack despite slack’s headstart. Slack sold out to languish at salesforce while Microsoft will now just own that space. Cherry picking a Microsoft app for macOS is like looking at iTunes on windows, it’s not really representative. Even Windows itself isn’t that important (that was one of the big strategic changes after Ballmer left and Nadella took over). You’re right about edge though (which is why Microsoft abandoned it for WebKit). Microsoft also ships (something Google can’t do very well). I think their current trajectory is probably undervalued because people have not properly updated from outdated historical sentiment.
    - adzm 4y ago
      Unfortunate about slack. It really seems to have stagnated. At least we have discord; I'm really glad they turned down Microsoft's 12 billion offer.
      - gonehome 4y ago
- daydream 4y ago
  > When Microsoft executes well, they’re a scary force. They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are again. I agree with this. And what I think is so fascinating is how much they left on the table during this very same time. Steven Sinofsky's Hardcore Software substack is an amazing read[1]. And it really shows how much they got wrong as well as how much they got right. MS is firing on all cylinders. Both the OpenAI partnership and the GitHub acquisition are looking like genius moves right now. Google in particular should be very afraid. [1] Though quite long. Very, very long. But it's well worth reading all of it. There's untold numbers gems in there.
  - ignoramous 4y ago
    > GitHub acquisition are looking like genius moves right now Surprising that AWS didn't compete for its acquisition. They stand to lose a bunch too. That said, except for OS and Browsers, it is all coming together for Microsoft, including their XBox division.
    - siva7 4y ago
      Google competed but they weren't willing to pay the price tag. Microsoft understood better how powerful Githubs potential was at the time. Github was likely Microsofts best acquisition in the last two decades.
    - DeathArrow 4y ago
      > That said, except for OS and Browsers Windows is not negligible.
  - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
    I agree that MS is executing well, but why would Google be afraid? There's no AI moat keeping anyone from replicating what MS is doing. They can train on everything on GitHub just like MS can. If anything, this is where they should both be afraid because an upstart with a browser extension could replace them.
    - daydream 4y ago
- neom 4y ago
  Spot on. Microsoft are a joke when they're losing and a joke when they're winning. I'm old enough to have seen the full circle and I'm super curious to see what happens when M$ is back on top.
  - dathinab 4y ago
    - lock down of PC software to the Microsoft app store, probably roughly at the same time apple also tightens a lock down on macOS - more anti competitive steps to make installing desktop Linux on consumer hardware hard while arguing you could just use WSL and it's "for your security" and they are not anti Linux because they embrace Linux on servers - trying to kill Valve, there should only be Windows games and only through the Windows app store - maybe retrying mobile if Google doesn't do that well - probably even more anticompetive email nonsense in the sense of "who needs emails providers beside a few giants (like gmail)" - probably trying to make proper (by then) modern 2FA not work on linux due patend or drm issues, trying to make it hard to log in anywhere in the web with a native linux system
    - DeathArrow 4y ago
      Do you honestly think that Microsoft is scared of Linux taking over the desktop?
      - dathinab 4y ago
        It never was about emotional things like being scared. It's about eliminating competition and especially preventing potential future competition, it's about maximizing control and power to the most you can without losing otherwise (due to e.g. law regulations lost consumer trust etc.). It's just a game of numbers and future prospect. Just the fact alone that Valve has Linux as a form of "escape hatch" if Microsoft locks things down more. With a bit of "future potential" (Valve Gaming console which is more then "just" the Steam Deck) is enough for Microsoft to take actions like that from a purely calculative perspective. And Linux Desktop _has_ future prospect, maybe not in context of how currently most Linux desktops are but prospect anyway. I mean Linux desktop has a lot of additional challenges: - like _massive_ fragmentation through every layer of components and users, often with a lot of more emotional then technical opinions - much smaller financial resources etc. (the companies which invest are either small (e.g. System76) or are not focused on desktop Linux (e.g. Canonical, Red Hat, Valve)) - a lot of money is flowing into server Linux hence all decisions tend to be focused on the server aspect thing things which are negative for desktop Linux and can not be configured away. (Through also a lot of "accidental" improvements and maintenance.) but even with all this challenges Desktop Linux is quite usable, actually for some people _more_ usable then Windows. The main problem is normally not missing functionality or hardware support but fragmentation. Fragmentation making it a bad deal to support Linux as a software vendor (getting better through Valve, Flatpack and Snap), fragmentation wasting dev resources, fragmentation making system management/hardware support harder, etc. As well as there not currently being too much monetary reason to invest into 1st party desktop Linux support (Valve is a special case, System76 is small). But non of the reasons which make people not use Desktop Linux are fundamental, and under the right conditions _one specific_ Linux Desktop could become highly successful. It's very unlikely but it's still possible, hence there is reason to make sure it's not possible.
- quijoteuniv 4y ago
  Masterstroke is that they are including Linux, in WSL also in windows server. They are 1 step away from being a Linux distribution that runs legacy windows software within containers :D
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    If only they could get ipv6 working in WSL so that shenanigans[1] aren't required. [1]: https://github.com/withinboredom/ipv6-wsl https://github.com/withinboredom/ipv6-wsl
    - quijoteuniv 4y ago
      Shenanigans?! Do not get me started, i have for a year remember to close any WSL session before put pc to sleep, command line or VSC because on waking VMEM process will eat up the CPU. So had to restart or do a weird workaround, but Linux session was gone anyway. There is a github case 2-3 years old
  - wankle 4y ago
    I'm a long time Ubuntu user but, if Microsoft went Linux, and it wasn't an anti-VM (explained: try to upgrade Win 10 in a VM to see what I'm talking about), Ad infested, user tracking machine then I might have to get back in bed with Microsoft.
    - ajolly 4y ago
      That's no longer the case for Windows 11, or if I remember correctly later versions for Windows 10.
      - wankle 4y ago
        I just checked, Windows 10 in a VM (running on KVM on Linux), refuses to upgrade to Windows 11. I only keep it around in case a contract requires something regarding Windows. 10 goes out of support next year, I will delete the VM. I can reject any clients that would need me to touch windows.
- dathinab 4y ago
  [flagged]
- boringuser1 4y ago
  [dead]
- intelVISA 4y ago
  I'm first to crap on MS but they've really pulled it together recently with a lot of big plays coming to fruition. I don't use any of their tech but I can respect what they've done as a business.
- mattferderer 4y ago
  Not saying Ballmer was great or bad but it could be argued that the US Government handicapped Microsoft more than Ballmer was a bad CEO. To my understanding Gates was also very active with the company during those years as well. Ballmer inherited a company at the top with everyone wanting to crush it & make it dissolve. Nadella inherited an underdog. I think this should be considered when thinking about the legacy of the CEO.
  - gonehome 4y ago
    I don't buy these excuses for Ballmer. - Massive miss on mobile - Delayed cloud stuff because of obsession with windows - Delayed cross platform apps because of obsession with windows for same reason https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ > "That memo prompted me to write a post entitled Services, Not Devices that argued that Ballmer’s strategic priorities were exactly backwards: Microsoft’s services should be businesses in their own right, not Windows’ differentiators. Ballmer, though, followed-through on his memo by buying Nokia; it speaks to Microsoft’s dysfunction that he was allowed to spend billions on a deal that allegedly played a large role in his ouster." I think he ultimately held them back actively with bad strategy and things only started getting better when he was finally gone. Nadella inherited an underdog because the previous decade's decisions caused them to become one.
- computerex 4y ago
  No one is talking about how they quietly acquired Nuance. If it weren't for Google, Microsoft would have a complete monopoly on AI.
moneywoes 4y ago
Reminds me of the IE days
eterps 4y ago
It sure looks like they're setting themselves up to (again) be in a position where no one can get around them.
- popcorncowboy 4y ago
  The irony of this comment is absolutely wonderful.
tarruda 4y ago
When you use copilot integrated in the editor, does microsoft collect all source code data on your project or only context used to perform the completions?
- jghn 4y ago
  Concern over this is the #1 reason I have not yet tried to use Copilot. For my hobby projects I don't care enough to pay for it. And if it's phoning home proprietary code, I can't allow that to happen.
  - madisp 4y ago
    I use GitHub so not really a concern for me, they have my code already.
    - mplanchard 4y ago
      IIRC they didn’t train on private repos though, so using copilot in a private (github) repo will potentially open up your proprietary code to being used in that way.
      - insane_dreamer 4y ago
        No, the model doesn't train on your private code (which is good but also somewhat limiting as in my experience it doesn't provide useful answers that are very specific to your codebase); it's good for generic code though and saves time looking stuff up.
  - vintermann 4y ago
    Eh, as long as my employers don't care (they don't), I don't care. I have no illusions that my code/our code will give Microsoft any valuable training data it couldn't trivially get elsewhere.
    - jghn 4y ago
mike_hearn 4y ago
I hope that Copilot X will be brought to other IDEs as well, not just Visual Studio [Code].
- efields 4y ago
  The sublime plugin for Copilot works well enough already. I'm sure Copilot X will be something you can fold into any editor. I don't understand how so many folks seem to tolerate the UX lag in VSCode
  - epolanski 4y ago
    Maybe they have a better machine than you so they don't notice it.
    - jlkuester7 4y ago
      My dev machine is sufficiently beefy (32G of RAM). I recently tried https://lapce.dev/ https://lapce.dev/ and was very surprised that it was noticeably more snappy than VSC. (I am not super sensitive to that kind of thing after years spent in Eclipse/IDEA.). Made me realize how I can just become accustomed to a certain amount of lagging....
      - pzo 4y ago
        I recently tried lapce on my Mac and just empty editor with just one new tab was eating 70% of my CPU. I'd better IDE eat 1-2GB of ram than eat my CPU cycles. Also on their github lapce has more than 50% of open issues labeled as C-Bug - that's not very reassuring
  - joshmanders 4y ago
    > I don't understand how so many folks seem to tolerate the UX lag in VSCode A lot of us don't experience any issues. To me, VSCode is just as performant as Sublime is.
    - 4y ago
PaulWaldman 4y ago
Does anyone have a prediction for how this translates into Microsoft's bottom line? I'd imagine it is mostly increased Azure sales with a few Visual Studio licenses.
- epolanski 4y ago
  Bingo, exactly what I'm thinking. Sure, they get more developers to use their software, but to how much money does that translate considering the tens of billions they have spent? Not sure how does that helps Azure by the way. It helps GH more than anything.
- toyg 4y ago
  Azure/subscription sales is what they care about anyway. Everything else is a commodity.
- ren_engineer 4y ago
  I could see them selling an absurdly expensive enterprise on-prem copilot that is tuned for a company's codebase and able to be customized to some extent. If they can show how much it improves productivity it would be an easy sell. Plus tightly integrate everything with Azure like you said Bill Gates was also talking about company AI's that "attend every meeting" and are involved even in non-technical areas via Office. Microsoft seems all in on this
  - arlcode 4y ago
    They have some great products in there (probably) but most likely they expect some of their attempts to fail (it's to be expected). It's a "bet the retirement fund but not the farm" situation where they invest a lot of money to see what stick. They are in a great position to do that and burning a few millions in the process might be worth it.
knodi123 4y ago
half our team is really entrenched with jetbrains. but aside from a couple of curmudgeons who are formally married to vim, I think VSCode and JetBrains has pretty much sewed up the market.
- mempko 4y ago
  Listen, if I divorce vim, it will take half my stuff.
  - airstrike 4y ago
    How about using vim mode in VS Code or is that like being in an open relationship?
    - notpachet 4y ago
      It's more like marrying a sex doll.
bredren 4y ago
The waiting list signup does not allow you to pick Pycharm, which previously has had a GitHub copilot plug-in.
rvz 4y ago
[flagged]
- _piif 4y ago
  Aren't lock-ins into their own respective ecosystem what every tech giant is striving for? Don't see how that behavior is Microsoft-exclusive necessarily.
ilovetux 4y ago
> have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-developer Microsoft used to be Microsoft has historically been anti-opensource, but not anti-developer. Their first product was a BASIC interpreter and in my experience throughout the 90s and early 2000s their developer ecosystem (aka Visual Studio) has really been first-class. I am not a fan of Microsoft because they have been openly hostile to open source, but I don't think it's fair to say they have been anti-developer.
- erikstarck 4y ago
  "Developers! Developers! Developers!" He wasn't kidding.
  - oefrha 4y ago
    Brings back the fond memories of Ballmer and his sweaty shirt.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  the economic contracts offered to developers by Microsoft were very different than in other development ecosystems. Microsoft always represented a different economic culture than many others, developers chose their allies based on multiple criteria.
- PurpleRamen 4y ago
  Microsoft was also a long time anti-commandline and against scripting, they tried to made everything clickable, with wizards and s**, and remove text and keyboard-input as much as possible for admins and devs. Thinking about, Copilot is in it's own way, a continuation of this, just more dev-friendly.
  - bradford 4y ago
    > Microsoft was also a long time anti-commandline and against scripting, they tried to made everything clickable, with wizards and s*, I'd categorize this as incompetence, not malice towards developers. Specifically: Microsoft thought that code-creation wizards and UI would offer a better story than command line and text. Those attempts were misguided, and MS adjusted. The command line culture at MS has been pervasive for a long time, despite the quirkiness of DOS, so I must object to your categorization of MS being anti command-line and anti-scripting. [disclaimer, MS employee, my opinion only.]
tootie 4y ago
I'm a fanboy of heavy IDEs with big fat debuggers like JetBrains tools. It's ironic that Microsoft who used to dominate that niche, is now dominating with a glorified text editor.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  There are still lots of people using Visual Studio.
kmlx 4y ago
this just tells me it’s only a matter of time before they will be forced to split. windows, office, xbox, devices, github, azure, zenimax, activision blizzard and so many others i’m forgetting.
piokoch 4y ago
Who will verify that those data are correct? What if majority of the code sucks, what if majority code uses "best practices" that are no longer valid - think of many GoF Java "patterns" that are now considered to be code smell? AI will not invent anything, it will effectively reproduce mistakes made by others. The process of code writing is such a small part of the whole IT project, that shortening of time spent on writing code does not matter in practice.
- nixarn 4y ago
  Have you tried co-pilot? I don't want to code without it. Saves so much time and produces good results, instead of searching for answers online, which isn't easy as you get into ad filled sites, find shitty Stack Overflow answers and webpages with outdated docs and examples. Two examples from this week. Formatting dates in javascript, I had a datetime string and I wanted to show it as YY-MM-DD HH:MM for our internal tool. I don't know by heart exactly what to in this case although it's far from rocket science, so now I could write a comment what I wanted done and copilot coded it for me. Same when I wanted a request to become a file download for the user, not something I've done many times before, and I could kinda reason that it probably needs the header to be set to something. And googling for this didn't give good results, yo need the right language, framework etc. With copilot I just wrote the comment // return file as download, and co-pilot wrote the code to set the header and send the bytes. Amazing!
  - chatmasta 4y ago
    > Have you tried co-pilot? I wanted to try co-pilot, but noped out when I saw it required a subscription. I thought it was in some kind of beta and would still be free. Is there a way to try it without signing up for a subscription? My general worry is about becoming personally dependent on a paid tool just to do basic programming work.
    - pantulis 4y ago
      Your worry is going to become obsolete pronto, just like you are not worried about depending on a paid CPU to perform basic computations. The meaning of "basic programming work" will be redefined by these tools. The entry barrier of the subscription is a shame, that's for sure. But before open models are avilable, the field is proprietary today: we are going to witness a battle of AIs that will be as bloody as the Unix Wars of lore.
soiler 4y ago
> have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-developer Microsoft used to be and potentially move away from their ecosystem I mean, any company can become hostile to a large portion of its userbase. Most are. Microsoft already is with Windows OS being spyware. Are you saying that you think all of this is a trap to bring developers in to VSCode etc. and then transform it into a terrible experience? People will leave then. SWEs are not generally an audience that is unwilling to replace bad tools.
_the_inflator 4y ago
MS was smart enough to use the existing brands to somewhat whitewash their previously not so well perceived reputation in the developer community. I guess some folks at Google will regret not buying Github. On the other hand, Google is in my opinion not the best choice in regards to product development and integration. Their business model centers around ads, while Microsoft has the better stance here with a subscription model.
brundolf 4y ago
Public companies aren't people. It doesn't make sense to trust them, but it also doesn't make sense to hold a grudge against them. They act in a way that fits the moment. Right now, Microsoft seems to be in a "build good tools" moment. If they get too dominant they could re-enter an "abuse power" moment. But that would be because it's what they think is in their best interest, not because "Microsoft is [uniquely] untrustworthy"
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Yep. But also this kind of essentialist thinking doesn't work for people, either, so :-) Nobody is just one thing or another. And neither are companies. They act on various levers, in response to various interests, and it's about looking at the tendencies and patterns. Holding grudges against people makes little sense, either.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    Fair, although even on a sliding-scale I think trust mechanisms are less-inaccurate when it comes to a single person (who can change, but usually in gradual/limited ways) vs a company (which is a revolving door of thousands of people who come and go over the decades)
- chatmasta 4y ago
  That may be true, but for many of Microsoft's flagship open source projects, it is very much about the people. For example, TypeScript has been created and maintained by a relatively stable team of highly proficient developers who have become the face of the project and in many ways the driving force behind its success. It's important that Microsoft backed them, because it provides a stable environment for the developers to keep working on the project and gives confidence to the community that it's a stable language to adopt. But fundamentally it's the people who are important. In recent years, Microsoft has shown there can be real upside to corporate-driven open source, especially when it has proper buy-in from management and usage throughout the organization (e.g. VSCode is developed in relative lockstep with TypeScript, and both projects benefit from that relationship).
bob1029 4y ago
> have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-developer Microsoft used to be and potentially move away from their ecosystem. At a certain point you may find that you've got your hand so far in the Microsoft cookie jar that it would make more sense to just accept that you are a MS shop and go for the rest of the cookies as shamelessly as possible. We've embraced our fate. Almost everything is Microsoft branded in our workplace now. It's really easy to hate on Microsoft through the lens of programming tooling and other nerd abstractions. It's super hard to hate on them from the perspective of IT administrators and business owners wanting to enjoy their weekends. [Azure] Active Directory and the modern Windows/Office suite are a competitive advantage for enjoying your free time. I have never seen a better overall experience for managing a small startup.
nonethewiser 4y ago
Microsoft is far more open than it used to be. It’s not simply marketing.
ThorsBane 4y ago
I think enterprise offerings will be more feature rich and advanced for some time, but eventually open source alternatives will catch up especially with how Nvidia is doing amazing work to reduce the compute costs for training and deploying these models over time. I consider it similar to how a few major cloud providers are more feature rich and can scale more effectively than smaller ones, but the smaller options still exist and get better all the time.
boppo1 4y ago
If I'm using VS Code, am I opting in to sharing my code as training data?
btbuildem 4y ago
> Credit to Microsoft's PR team for somehow managing to turn around public opinion about them, it's an all timer To be fair, it's been almost two decades. I feel like since Ballmer's departure, MS began to turn things around.
ModernMech 4y ago
Funniest thing for me is how Ms has been left out of the FAANG acronym for all these years, as if they somehow haven’t been relevant in the developer ecosystem for the past 10 or so years.
DeathArrow 4y ago
> Microsoft really seems to have wrapped up the developer ecosystem with VS Code and the Github acquisition combined with OpenAI. They are going to have an absurd amount of data to optimize their models thanks to that, not sure how other AI focused companies can overcome that Other companies can focus on other areas where AI can be used. There's room for everybody.

gonehome 4y ago

Microsoft is a so well positioned on this I think Silicon Valley has forgotten what it looks like when they don’t have a horrible CEO. When Microsoft executes well, they’re a scary force. They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are again. There’s a massive paradigm shift we’re just at the beginning of and Microsoft has been putting pieces in place for the last couple of years. Nadella has really turned things around for them. Google and meta are scrambling. Things should get interesting.

bredren 4y ago
If it were not for the impending headset, Apple would look a wee bit caught out as well. I suspect once Apple turns toward gen ai, all of its other advantages (infra, hw, instal base, services, etc) will propel it to forefront.
- gonehome 4y ago
  Apple has always had its own hardware based silo to some extent (excellent products and design, fully integrated). Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They were first to market with Siri and it’s still trash 13yrs(?!) later. It’s always been what they’re weakest at, I’m not sure LLMs will be different for them. The headset could still give them a nice hardware platform advantage though if that UX becomes the main new interface.
  - zer00eyz 4y ago
    > Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They bought Siri! What stops them from buying someone for "ai"
    - gonehome 4y ago
      Siri still sucks?
      - shagie 4y ago
        Siri isn't supposed to be great - its a voice interface to a few standardized interfaces that applications can hook into. The system provided intents ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit ) are rather limited. While we can say "it should be more" the architecture for it doesn't appear to be something that easily extensible by anyone (Apple included). However, for those intents - it does quite well and most processing is done on device rather than in the cloud and that fundamentally changes the economics and capability. It is much less expensive than Alexa to run (where nearly everything is in the cloud), but it is also something that can't do as much. Try this - turn on airplane mode and do "hey Siri what time is it?" or "hey Siri open notes" And while those are indeed a very limited examples (there are other examples such as interacting with HomeKit where it needs the lan), it shows that much of the work is done on the phone. This also means that its capabilities are limited to what you can run on the phone.
        gonehome 4y ago
        That feels like a retroactive explanation of the current status quo to me. I doubt Apple would agree "Siri isn't supposed to be great" - they just failed to live up to what they wanted. We'll see if that changes.
        shagie 4y ago
        The "what they hoped" is a question of "what who hoped?" When you look at SiriKit when compared to Google and Alexa, it is an entirely different approach that isn't designed for general tooling of a voice assistant but rather the intents show that it is designed for specific functionality of specific types of applications. Asking Siri for things outside of those intents was always delegated out to some other service (Wolfram Alpha was the choice for a while). Siri was never designed to try to monetize the voice interface (compare Alexa and Google) and thus wasn't trying to do everything and SikiKit shows that it can't do quite a bit. So that it can't do everything shouldn't be a surprise to Apple. Comparing Siri to Alexa, they are very different architectures with different goals and support costs. If you look at https://www.apple.com/siri/ https://www.apple.com/siri/ you should get the idea that this is interface to common tasks - not a general "do everything and chat about it" assistant. What's more, it limits what goes off device (whereas Alexa and Google do all speech to text on the cloud).
- endtime 4y ago
  I don't get the impression Apple ever caught up with Alexa or Google Assistant. That said, this is a bit different, since the AI tech is a bit more commoditized than with those voice assistants, and the product problem is the hard part. On the other hand, Apple has positioned themselves as extremely privacy-respecting - I wonder if that will affect their ability to use their users' data to train models. It'll be interesting to see, anyway.
- newaccount2023 4y ago
  for now, Apple is in a different league if Tim Cook wants $10 bln in new profits, he can simply pass some arbitrary judgement like "the next iPhone will only be compatible with new AirPods we will introduce at the same time" and everyone will comply
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    And that's why I don't use their products.
- pxoe 4y ago
  a headset is not a suit of AI products. it's kinda...irrelevant. meta has a headset, and that's working out great for them, isn't it. so far, there's nothing. there's only vague rumors, or not even - just assumptions that "surely apple will do something about this", "they'll turn to ai eventually". well, they have siri. which doesn't exactly inspire hope for much.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    > meta has a headset, and that's working out great for them, isn't it. A previous VR wave failed in the '90s. If this one fails, too, we' ll see another in 20 years.
- listless 4y ago
  I'm curious on this as well - although a VR headset at this point feels like a foul ball straight backwards and into the net. Apple is good at a lot of things but it is AWFUL at AI. Siri is still the worst experience you can have with a language model. That said, all they need to do is integrate some OpenAI API's. In which case, Microsoft STILL wins because of its investment there and where OpenAI's enormous compute happens - which is likely in Azure.
  - chipotle_coyote 4y ago
    Siri isn't a language model, AFAIK. I'm sure it's using machine learning on the back end, but it's doing something very different. The thing is, a voice assistant needs to actually perform Natural Language Understanding -- it has to understand the intent of what's being said to it. That's actually a very different AI problem than what LLMs are doing at this point. Samsung's Bixby -- yes, the one everyone turns off -- can handle a "conversation" like this: (This is run using the "Space Resorts" sample capsule, a fictitious hotel booking system) --- User: Show me hotels near Mars Bixby: I found these space resorts on Mars. (Shows two, “Martian Oasis” and “Space Y”) User: [taps Martian Oasis] make a reservation for Christmas week Bixby: Which habitat pod would you like? (Shows two) User: Honeymoon Bixby: Are you sure you want to book this trip? (Shows the hotel, “Number of astronauts: 2”, and the dates for Christmas week) User: change the astronauts to 4 Bixby: (Shows the sam confirmation screen, with the number changed) User: Yes Bixby: I hope you have a great time at Martian Oasis. (Shows booking info) --- Now, in some ways this is no great shakes, but I don't think "all [Apple] needs to do is integrate some OpenAI APIs," because they don't have an API for NLU and deriving intent. GPT4 et. al. aren't currently designed for this kind of problem space. You could use them to make Siri (and Bixby and Alexa) better at answering general questions, but you can't use them to make the voice assistant do something, just respond to something. Bixby 2 (the current version) is, incidentally, what came out of Viv, the voice AI startup that the Siri folks made after they left Apple.
passion__desire 4y ago
As a young developer, I always wondered why Google didn't buy Java from Sun. Wouldn't it be a strategic buy?
- mistrial9 4y ago
  google is literally the next generation Sun, many of the same people were involved.. the Sun Micro company was scrapped for (valuable) parts, with a lot of internal competitive moments
- airstrike 4y ago
  Not sure what to make of that, but I'm just glad we don't live in a world in which Google + Java is the winning horse
  - nunobrito 4y ago
    cough Android coughh +2.5 billion Google Android devices running their apps overwhelmingly in Java. Wasn't a coincidence this was chosen that way.
- letsdothisagain 4y ago
  Google wasn't a big player when Oracle bought sun. Don't ever underestimate them. There is a reason Oracle of all companies is the government's pick to annex Tiktoc.
hbn 4y ago
I wouldn't go so far as to say they're exceptional. They're gaining good graces for developers by offering a bunch of free (for now) tools that people like. But most of their big breadwinner software is still abysmal to use. I just tried cold starting Word and getting into a blank document on my i9 MacBook Pro and it took about 15 seconds. Windows is increasingly a dystopian user tracking and ad serving platform that happens to run the applications you need, and they still constantly break basic system functions. For a while I couldn't open jpegs in the built-in photo preview app. I gave Edge a shot for a good 6 months or so and eventually gave up because they kept breaking basic functionality that I never saw broken in Chrome (there was literally a month or two point in time where if you grabbed the scrollbar and dragged it, the bar would disappear, jutting the entire page sideways and breaking scrolling until you closed the tab and reopened it. This is on the default, built-in OS browser!) Also, my god, their SSO experience is so clunky and prone to breaking.
- gonehome 4y ago
  They’re strategically exceptional, but beyond that a lot of their products (or subsidiaries) are also dominant for good reason (vscode, GitHub). O365 and the product integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack despite slack’s headstart. Slack sold out to languish at salesforce while Microsoft will now just own that space. Cherry picking a Microsoft app for macOS is like looking at iTunes on windows, it’s not really representative. Even Windows itself isn’t that important (that was one of the big strategic changes after Ballmer left and Nadella took over). You’re right about edge though (which is why Microsoft abandoned it for WebKit). Microsoft also ships (something Google can’t do very well). I think their current trajectory is probably undervalued because people have not properly updated from outdated historical sentiment.
  - adzm 4y ago
    Unfortunate about slack. It really seems to have stagnated. At least we have discord; I'm really glad they turned down Microsoft's 12 billion offer.
    - gonehome 4y ago
daydream 4y ago
> When Microsoft executes well, they’re a scary force. They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are again. I agree with this. And what I think is so fascinating is how much they left on the table during this very same time. Steven Sinofsky's Hardcore Software substack is an amazing read[1]. And it really shows how much they got wrong as well as how much they got right. MS is firing on all cylinders. Both the OpenAI partnership and the GitHub acquisition are looking like genius moves right now. Google in particular should be very afraid. [1] Though quite long. Very, very long. But it's well worth reading all of it. There's untold numbers gems in there.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  > GitHub acquisition are looking like genius moves right now Surprising that AWS didn't compete for its acquisition. They stand to lose a bunch too. That said, except for OS and Browsers, it is all coming together for Microsoft, including their XBox division.
  - siva7 4y ago
    Google competed but they weren't willing to pay the price tag. Microsoft understood better how powerful Githubs potential was at the time. Github was likely Microsofts best acquisition in the last two decades.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    > That said, except for OS and Browsers Windows is not negligible.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  I agree that MS is executing well, but why would Google be afraid? There's no AI moat keeping anyone from replicating what MS is doing. They can train on everything on GitHub just like MS can. If anything, this is where they should both be afraid because an upstart with a browser extension could replace them.
  - daydream 4y ago
neom 4y ago
Spot on. Microsoft are a joke when they're losing and a joke when they're winning. I'm old enough to have seen the full circle and I'm super curious to see what happens when M$ is back on top.
- dathinab 4y ago
  - lock down of PC software to the Microsoft app store, probably roughly at the same time apple also tightens a lock down on macOS - more anti competitive steps to make installing desktop Linux on consumer hardware hard while arguing you could just use WSL and it's "for your security" and they are not anti Linux because they embrace Linux on servers - trying to kill Valve, there should only be Windows games and only through the Windows app store - maybe retrying mobile if Google doesn't do that well - probably even more anticompetive email nonsense in the sense of "who needs emails providers beside a few giants (like gmail)" - probably trying to make proper (by then) modern 2FA not work on linux due patend or drm issues, trying to make it hard to log in anywhere in the web with a native linux system
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    Do you honestly think that Microsoft is scared of Linux taking over the desktop?
    - dathinab 4y ago
      It never was about emotional things like being scared. It's about eliminating competition and especially preventing potential future competition, it's about maximizing control and power to the most you can without losing otherwise (due to e.g. law regulations lost consumer trust etc.). It's just a game of numbers and future prospect. Just the fact alone that Valve has Linux as a form of "escape hatch" if Microsoft locks things down more. With a bit of "future potential" (Valve Gaming console which is more then "just" the Steam Deck) is enough for Microsoft to take actions like that from a purely calculative perspective. And Linux Desktop _has_ future prospect, maybe not in context of how currently most Linux desktops are but prospect anyway. I mean Linux desktop has a lot of additional challenges: - like _massive_ fragmentation through every layer of components and users, often with a lot of more emotional then technical opinions - much smaller financial resources etc. (the companies which invest are either small (e.g. System76) or are not focused on desktop Linux (e.g. Canonical, Red Hat, Valve)) - a lot of money is flowing into server Linux hence all decisions tend to be focused on the server aspect thing things which are negative for desktop Linux and can not be configured away. (Through also a lot of "accidental" improvements and maintenance.) but even with all this challenges Desktop Linux is quite usable, actually for some people _more_ usable then Windows. The main problem is normally not missing functionality or hardware support but fragmentation. Fragmentation making it a bad deal to support Linux as a software vendor (getting better through Valve, Flatpack and Snap), fragmentation wasting dev resources, fragmentation making system management/hardware support harder, etc. As well as there not currently being too much monetary reason to invest into 1st party desktop Linux support (Valve is a special case, System76 is small). But non of the reasons which make people not use Desktop Linux are fundamental, and under the right conditions _one specific_ Linux Desktop could become highly successful. It's very unlikely but it's still possible, hence there is reason to make sure it's not possible.
quijoteuniv 4y ago
Masterstroke is that they are including Linux, in WSL also in windows server. They are 1 step away from being a Linux distribution that runs legacy windows software within containers :D
- withinboredom 4y ago
  If only they could get ipv6 working in WSL so that shenanigans[1] aren't required. [1]: https://github.com/withinboredom/ipv6-wsl https://github.com/withinboredom/ipv6-wsl
  - quijoteuniv 4y ago
    Shenanigans?! Do not get me started, i have for a year remember to close any WSL session before put pc to sleep, command line or VSC because on waking VMEM process will eat up the CPU. So had to restart or do a weird workaround, but Linux session was gone anyway. There is a github case 2-3 years old
- wankle 4y ago
  I'm a long time Ubuntu user but, if Microsoft went Linux, and it wasn't an anti-VM (explained: try to upgrade Win 10 in a VM to see what I'm talking about), Ad infested, user tracking machine then I might have to get back in bed with Microsoft.
  - ajolly 4y ago
    That's no longer the case for Windows 11, or if I remember correctly later versions for Windows 10.
    - wankle 4y ago
      I just checked, Windows 10 in a VM (running on KVM on Linux), refuses to upgrade to Windows 11. I only keep it around in case a contract requires something regarding Windows. 10 goes out of support next year, I will delete the VM. I can reject any clients that would need me to touch windows.
dathinab 4y ago
[flagged]
boringuser1 4y ago
[dead]
intelVISA 4y ago
I'm first to crap on MS but they've really pulled it together recently with a lot of big plays coming to fruition. I don't use any of their tech but I can respect what they've done as a business.
mattferderer 4y ago
Not saying Ballmer was great or bad but it could be argued that the US Government handicapped Microsoft more than Ballmer was a bad CEO. To my understanding Gates was also very active with the company during those years as well. Ballmer inherited a company at the top with everyone wanting to crush it & make it dissolve. Nadella inherited an underdog. I think this should be considered when thinking about the legacy of the CEO.
- gonehome 4y ago
  I don't buy these excuses for Ballmer. - Massive miss on mobile - Delayed cloud stuff because of obsession with windows - Delayed cross platform apps because of obsession with windows for same reason https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ > "That memo prompted me to write a post entitled Services, Not Devices that argued that Ballmer’s strategic priorities were exactly backwards: Microsoft’s services should be businesses in their own right, not Windows’ differentiators. Ballmer, though, followed-through on his memo by buying Nokia; it speaks to Microsoft’s dysfunction that he was allowed to spend billions on a deal that allegedly played a large role in his ouster." I think he ultimately held them back actively with bad strategy and things only started getting better when he was finally gone. Nadella inherited an underdog because the previous decade's decisions caused them to become one.
computerex 4y ago
No one is talking about how they quietly acquired Nuance. If it weren't for Google, Microsoft would have a complete monopoly on AI.

moneywoes 4y ago

Reminds me of the IE days

eterps 4y ago

It sure looks like they're setting themselves up to (again) be in a position where no one can get around them.

popcorncowboy 4y ago
The irony of this comment is absolutely wonderful.

tarruda 4y ago

When you use copilot integrated in the editor, does microsoft collect all source code data on your project or only context used to perform the completions?

jghn 4y ago
Concern over this is the #1 reason I have not yet tried to use Copilot. For my hobby projects I don't care enough to pay for it. And if it's phoning home proprietary code, I can't allow that to happen.
- madisp 4y ago
  I use GitHub so not really a concern for me, they have my code already.
  - mplanchard 4y ago
    IIRC they didn’t train on private repos though, so using copilot in a private (github) repo will potentially open up your proprietary code to being used in that way.
    - insane_dreamer 4y ago
      No, the model doesn't train on your private code (which is good but also somewhat limiting as in my experience it doesn't provide useful answers that are very specific to your codebase); it's good for generic code though and saves time looking stuff up.
- vintermann 4y ago
  Eh, as long as my employers don't care (they don't), I don't care. I have no illusions that my code/our code will give Microsoft any valuable training data it couldn't trivially get elsewhere.
  - jghn 4y ago

mike_hearn 4y ago

I hope that Copilot X will be brought to other IDEs as well, not just Visual Studio [Code].

efields 4y ago
The sublime plugin for Copilot works well enough already. I'm sure Copilot X will be something you can fold into any editor. I don't understand how so many folks seem to tolerate the UX lag in VSCode
- epolanski 4y ago
  Maybe they have a better machine than you so they don't notice it.
  - jlkuester7 4y ago
    My dev machine is sufficiently beefy (32G of RAM). I recently tried https://lapce.dev/ https://lapce.dev/ and was very surprised that it was noticeably more snappy than VSC. (I am not super sensitive to that kind of thing after years spent in Eclipse/IDEA.). Made me realize how I can just become accustomed to a certain amount of lagging....
    - pzo 4y ago
      I recently tried lapce on my Mac and just empty editor with just one new tab was eating 70% of my CPU. I'd better IDE eat 1-2GB of ram than eat my CPU cycles. Also on their github lapce has more than 50% of open issues labeled as C-Bug - that's not very reassuring
- joshmanders 4y ago
  > I don't understand how so many folks seem to tolerate the UX lag in VSCode A lot of us don't experience any issues. To me, VSCode is just as performant as Sublime is.
  - 4y ago

PaulWaldman 4y ago

Does anyone have a prediction for how this translates into Microsoft's bottom line? I'd imagine it is mostly increased Azure sales with a few Visual Studio licenses.

epolanski 4y ago
Bingo, exactly what I'm thinking. Sure, they get more developers to use their software, but to how much money does that translate considering the tens of billions they have spent? Not sure how does that helps Azure by the way. It helps GH more than anything.
toyg 4y ago
Azure/subscription sales is what they care about anyway. Everything else is a commodity.
ren_engineer 4y ago
I could see them selling an absurdly expensive enterprise on-prem copilot that is tuned for a company's codebase and able to be customized to some extent. If they can show how much it improves productivity it would be an easy sell. Plus tightly integrate everything with Azure like you said Bill Gates was also talking about company AI's that "attend every meeting" and are involved even in non-technical areas via Office. Microsoft seems all in on this
- arlcode 4y ago
  They have some great products in there (probably) but most likely they expect some of their attempts to fail (it's to be expected). It's a "bet the retirement fund but not the farm" situation where they invest a lot of money to see what stick. They are in a great position to do that and burning a few millions in the process might be worth it.

knodi123 4y ago

half our team is really entrenched with jetbrains. but aside from a couple of curmudgeons who are formally married to vim, I think VSCode and JetBrains has pretty much sewed up the market.

mempko 4y ago
Listen, if I divorce vim, it will take half my stuff.
- airstrike 4y ago
  How about using vim mode in VS Code or is that like being in an open relationship?
  - notpachet 4y ago
    It's more like marrying a sex doll.

bredren 4y ago

The waiting list signup does not allow you to pick Pycharm, which previously has had a GitHub copilot plug-in.

rvz 4y ago

[flagged]

_piif 4y ago
Aren't lock-ins into their own respective ecosystem what every tech giant is striving for? Don't see how that behavior is Microsoft-exclusive necessarily.

ilovetux 4y ago

> have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-developer Microsoft used to be Microsoft has historically been anti-opensource, but not anti-developer. Their first product was a BASIC interpreter and in my experience throughout the 90s and early 2000s their developer ecosystem (aka Visual Studio) has really been first-class. I am not a fan of Microsoft because they have been openly hostile to open source, but I don't think it's fair to say they have been anti-developer.

erikstarck 4y ago
"Developers! Developers! Developers!" He wasn't kidding.
- oefrha 4y ago
  Brings back the fond memories of Ballmer and his sweaty shirt.
mistrial9 4y ago
the economic contracts offered to developers by Microsoft were very different than in other development ecosystems. Microsoft always represented a different economic culture than many others, developers chose their allies based on multiple criteria.
PurpleRamen 4y ago
Microsoft was also a long time anti-commandline and against scripting, they tried to made everything clickable, with wizards and s**, and remove text and keyboard-input as much as possible for admins and devs. Thinking about, Copilot is in it's own way, a continuation of this, just more dev-friendly.
- bradford 4y ago
  > Microsoft was also a long time anti-commandline and against scripting, they tried to made everything clickable, with wizards and s*, I'd categorize this as incompetence, not malice towards developers. Specifically: Microsoft thought that code-creation wizards and UI would offer a better story than command line and text. Those attempts were misguided, and MS adjusted. The command line culture at MS has been pervasive for a long time, despite the quirkiness of DOS, so I must object to your categorization of MS being anti command-line and anti-scripting. [disclaimer, MS employee, my opinion only.]

tootie 4y ago

I'm a fanboy of heavy IDEs with big fat debuggers like JetBrains tools. It's ironic that Microsoft who used to dominate that niche, is now dominating with a glorified text editor.

DeathArrow 4y ago
There are still lots of people using Visual Studio.

kmlx 4y ago

this just tells me it’s only a matter of time before they will be forced to split. windows, office, xbox, devices, github, azure, zenimax, activision blizzard and so many others i’m forgetting.

piokoch 4y ago

Who will verify that those data are correct? What if majority of the code sucks, what if majority code uses "best practices" that are no longer valid - think of many GoF Java "patterns" that are now considered to be code smell? AI will not invent anything, it will effectively reproduce mistakes made by others. The process of code writing is such a small part of the whole IT project, that shortening of time spent on writing code does not matter in practice.

nixarn 4y ago
Have you tried co-pilot? I don't want to code without it. Saves so much time and produces good results, instead of searching for answers online, which isn't easy as you get into ad filled sites, find shitty Stack Overflow answers and webpages with outdated docs and examples. Two examples from this week. Formatting dates in javascript, I had a datetime string and I wanted to show it as YY-MM-DD HH:MM for our internal tool. I don't know by heart exactly what to in this case although it's far from rocket science, so now I could write a comment what I wanted done and copilot coded it for me. Same when I wanted a request to become a file download for the user, not something I've done many times before, and I could kinda reason that it probably needs the header to be set to something. And googling for this didn't give good results, yo need the right language, framework etc. With copilot I just wrote the comment // return file as download, and co-pilot wrote the code to set the header and send the bytes. Amazing!
- chatmasta 4y ago
  > Have you tried co-pilot? I wanted to try co-pilot, but noped out when I saw it required a subscription. I thought it was in some kind of beta and would still be free. Is there a way to try it without signing up for a subscription? My general worry is about becoming personally dependent on a paid tool just to do basic programming work.
  - pantulis 4y ago
    Your worry is going to become obsolete pronto, just like you are not worried about depending on a paid CPU to perform basic computations. The meaning of "basic programming work" will be redefined by these tools. The entry barrier of the subscription is a shame, that's for sure. But before open models are avilable, the field is proprietary today: we are going to witness a battle of AIs that will be as bloody as the Unix Wars of lore.

soiler 4y ago

> have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-developer Microsoft used to be and potentially move away from their ecosystem I mean, any company can become hostile to a large portion of its userbase. Most are. Microsoft already is with Windows OS being spyware. Are you saying that you think all of this is a trap to bring developers in to VSCode etc. and then transform it into a terrible experience? People will leave then. SWEs are not generally an audience that is unwilling to replace bad tools.

_the_inflator 4y ago

MS was smart enough to use the existing brands to somewhat whitewash their previously not so well perceived reputation in the developer community. I guess some folks at Google will regret not buying Github. On the other hand, Google is in my opinion not the best choice in regards to product development and integration. Their business model centers around ads, while Microsoft has the better stance here with a subscription model.

brundolf 4y ago

Public companies aren't people. It doesn't make sense to trust them, but it also doesn't make sense to hold a grudge against them. They act in a way that fits the moment. Right now, Microsoft seems to be in a "build good tools" moment. If they get too dominant they could re-enter an "abuse power" moment. But that would be because it's what they think is in their best interest, not because "Microsoft is [uniquely] untrustworthy"

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
Yep. But also this kind of essentialist thinking doesn't work for people, either, so :-) Nobody is just one thing or another. And neither are companies. They act on various levers, in response to various interests, and it's about looking at the tendencies and patterns. Holding grudges against people makes little sense, either.
- brundolf 4y ago
  Fair, although even on a sliding-scale I think trust mechanisms are less-inaccurate when it comes to a single person (who can change, but usually in gradual/limited ways) vs a company (which is a revolving door of thousands of people who come and go over the decades)
chatmasta 4y ago
That may be true, but for many of Microsoft's flagship open source projects, it is very much about the people. For example, TypeScript has been created and maintained by a relatively stable team of highly proficient developers who have become the face of the project and in many ways the driving force behind its success. It's important that Microsoft backed them, because it provides a stable environment for the developers to keep working on the project and gives confidence to the community that it's a stable language to adopt. But fundamentally it's the people who are important. In recent years, Microsoft has shown there can be real upside to corporate-driven open source, especially when it has proper buy-in from management and usage throughout the organization (e.g. VSCode is developed in relative lockstep with TypeScript, and both projects benefit from that relationship).

bob1029 4y ago

> have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-developer Microsoft used to be and potentially move away from their ecosystem. At a certain point you may find that you've got your hand so far in the Microsoft cookie jar that it would make more sense to just accept that you are a MS shop and go for the rest of the cookies as shamelessly as possible. We've embraced our fate. Almost everything is Microsoft branded in our workplace now. It's really easy to hate on Microsoft through the lens of programming tooling and other nerd abstractions. It's super hard to hate on them from the perspective of IT administrators and business owners wanting to enjoy their weekends. [Azure] Active Directory and the modern Windows/Office suite are a competitive advantage for enjoying your free time. I have never seen a better overall experience for managing a small startup.

nonethewiser 4y ago

Microsoft is far more open than it used to be. It’s not simply marketing.

ThorsBane 4y ago

I think enterprise offerings will be more feature rich and advanced for some time, but eventually open source alternatives will catch up especially with how Nvidia is doing amazing work to reduce the compute costs for training and deploying these models over time. I consider it similar to how a few major cloud providers are more feature rich and can scale more effectively than smaller ones, but the smaller options still exist and get better all the time.

boppo1 4y ago

If I'm using VS Code, am I opting in to sharing my code as training data?

btbuildem 4y ago

> Credit to Microsoft's PR team for somehow managing to turn around public opinion about them, it's an all timer To be fair, it's been almost two decades. I feel like since Ballmer's departure, MS began to turn things around.

ModernMech 4y ago

Funniest thing for me is how Ms has been left out of the FAANG acronym for all these years, as if they somehow haven’t been relevant in the developer ecosystem for the past 10 or so years.

DeathArrow 4y ago

> Microsoft really seems to have wrapped up the developer ecosystem with VS Code and the Github acquisition combined with OpenAI. They are going to have an absurd amount of data to optimize their models thanks to that, not sure how other AI focused companies can overcome that Other companies can focus on other areas where AI can be used. There's room for everybody.