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Surprised more people aren't talking about how Microsoft has a near monopoly on the developer ecosystem. They've got GitHub, OpenAI, and VS Code all working tog
by ren_engineer 3y ago
Surprised more people aren't talking about how Microsoft has a near monopoly on the developer ecosystem. They've got GitHub, OpenAI, and VS Code all working together and collecting data that strengthen each other's products while also using their embrace, extend, extinguish strategy with WSL and all of these steer people towards Azure services whenever possible. Seems like something that verges on an anti-trust situation when you think about the flywheel effect data has for AI
credit to Microsoft for rehabbing their reputation with developers but it seems like a massive trojan horse
- chillel 3y agoI guess Steve Ballmer was right all along...
- misterprime 3y agoAbout developers?
- jansan 3y agoNo, about Playday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7PYQCXdX3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7PYQCXdX3A
- misterprime 3y agoHighly amusing.
- wongarsu 3y agodevelopers, developers, developers, developers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxbJw8PrIkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxbJw8PrIkc
- zzzzzzzza 3y agogitea
- synergy20 3y agogood for small projects, I guess the real competitor is gitlab
- makapuf 3y ago... is nice but needs the social network effects. Maybe adding some federation and stars / comments as a protocol (not just a program) could help. Maybe it exists and lacks coherence/ publicity.
- pydry 3y agoOne of the best things that could be done for open source is to break the monopoly on those damn stars. Open source would be a lot healthier if social proof were portable across platforms.
- evilspammer 3y ago...who has ever cared about stars?
- rad_gruchalski 3y ago„Our product has 5000 stars on GitHub, therefore give us money, it’s a business opportunity”. Seen plenty of those on LinkedIn.
- evilspammer 3y ago[dead]
- arp242 3y ago"Stars" do provide a nice signal about whether something sees wide use or not. I typically check out most dependencies I add to my projects, but I will give a lot more attention to a project with 9 stars than a dependency with 9,000 stars. And it also gives a good indication what common de-facto standards are within an ecosystem.
- manojlds 3y agoMeanwhile CMA: you are leading cloud gaming and hence can't acquire Activision.
- linhns 3y agoI think there was a lot of discussion on this when Microsoft took over GitHub but as time goes people kind of accepted the reality.
- paulddraper 3y agoNow they just need StackOverflow. They already run a .NET stack....
- synergy20 3y agoexcept windows itself is not loved by most developers, microsoft will take over the developer world when it replaces its windows with linux fully(instead of WSL2, which is nice but not great)
- charlieyu1 3y agoCan't see Linux replacing windows, their most profitable products (Windows and MS Office) are both based on closed ecosystem
- Shared404 3y agoIsn't Azure a much higher percentage of profit than Windows or Office for MS at this point?
- tcmart14 3y agoI don't know the numbers by heart. But if it isn't a higher percentage of profit right now.It certainly takes the cake for largest growth percentage with it eclipsing everything else soon (if it hasn't already).
- zamnos 3y agoThey very carefully don't actually tell us in their quarterly report. Microsoft is not new to the stock market, wall street, or making things seem different than they are, so O365 revenue isn't actually broken out from Azure revenue, so we just have to guess, based on our biases, which component is doing better vs GCP, and buy stock based on that analysis.
- rad_gruchalski 3y agoI don’t know. I’m happily using ms office on a mac and in the browser.
- zamnos 3y agoBut are you using Microsoft Edge as your browser?
- JohnFen 3y ago> more people aren't talking about how Microsoft has a near monopoly on the developer ecosystem. But do they? In my day job, outside of the occasional use of Visual Studio and developing on a Windows machine, I use no Microsoft products for development. > credit to Microsoft for rehabbing their reputation with developers With a fair number of younger developers, but certainly not all. Most devs I know don't think of Microsoft any more kindly now than in the past.
- tcmart14 3y agoI don't think they have one today, but it is looking like they could soon have one. Especially since I believe recent reports show that Azure is starting out pace AWS in adoption? So you have .NET, Visual Studio (Code), Azure, Github, OpenAI, Windows, and I am pretty sure more I am forgetting about. I think the big one that wasn't initially mentioned was Azure.
- JohnFen 3y agoAll of that adds up to having a very significant, perhaps majority, of the market locked up. But it's also all centering around a particular sort of product and product development. Microsoft might be able to lock up that segment, but I don't think they're in a position to monopolize the larger software development space in the near or medium future.
- Klonoar 3y agoYour particular individual experience is not representative of the overall reach that Microsoft has, which is what OP is pointing out. GitHub is the defacto "point" of software these days, with most devs jumping to that before anything else. VSCode is the highest ranked editor from the StackOverflow 2023 survey, with (IIRC) something akin to 70%. Azure is the icing on the cake, because now you have an entire generation of developers building on GitHub, from VSCode, and deploying onto Microsoft infrastructure.
- lolinder 3y ago2023 isn't live yet, but 74% of respondents used VSCode in 2022[0]. That said, the numbers are hard to compare because they allow selecting multiple choices and they split the JetBrains products up, while VSCode is considered as one tool. If you add together all the JetBrains products they reach 94%. I expect there's a ton of overlap that brings that number back down, but it's enough to make me suspect that VSCode's lead isn't as high as the numbers in the survey make it look. [0] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popular-technologies https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popula...
- AnonMO 3y agoGithub -> gitlab, vs code -> jetbrains. why use wsl just go to linux. No one forces you to use their products they’re just a better developer experience imo aside from windows. Plenty of competition in the space. The question is does better equal monopoly?
- dahwolf 3y agoI would expect them to purchase StackOverflow too. I guess it's not that essential, seems a low cost acquisition.
- Kuinox 3y agoWhy would they purchase StackOverflow ? They are partnered with the StackOverflow killer: ChatGPT.
- atq2119 3y agoIf StackOverflow dies, surely the developer-relevant quality of training data will suffer? After all, the capabilities of ChatGPT are basically proportional to how well a topic is represented in the training data, which is largely the internet.
- Kuinox 3y agoIf you kill your concurrent, you don't need to make your product better. But it will keep learning from it's users.
- contravariant 3y agoMost of the use I get out of GPT is letting it summarize stackoverflow posts for me.
- Kuinox 3y agoIt can often respond your Google query you used to find the SO page.
- capableweb 3y agoDon't forget TypeScript and npm as well which basically covers 99% of the JavaScript ecosystem if not more. Then Dependabot for large swatches of more developers outside of the earlier mentioned ecosystems. LinkedIn for everyone's career.
- rj1 3y agoi think it extends further than that, since they have: vscode, github, linkedin, npm, typescript, chatgpt. for many, this is almost the entire developer ecosystem. at a high level they pretend to embrace open source but many of the best features of vscode are closed source, such as remote editing and various language servers (pylance, etc.) the lsp saga is particularly unfriendly, since they pushed it as an open standard, tons of people contributed and adopted it, and then they closed the source to their most valuable language servers, making them only compatible with their product (vscode). there are countless similar examples. the way i see microsoft and the way they want to be perceived are entirely different.
- tester756 3y ago"monopoly on developer ecosystem" GitHub? fair OpenAI? how is this a part of dev. ecosystem? Vs Code? wtf? there's a lot of other IDEs/editors and many would argue that they are better >embrace, extend, extinguish strategy with WSL They are EEEing their product - Windows?
- VirusNewbie 3y agoI mean google uses VSCode internally as their officially supported IDE… i’d say they’re doing pretty well.
- garybuk 3y agoNo it's based on theia
- ipaddr 3y agoBecause of products created before VSCode
- VirusNewbie 3y agoWhat do you mean?
- ipaddr 3y agoThey are doing well because of products and market share they held before using vscode. So it's unrelated success.
- VirusNewbie 3y agoI meant, VSCode is pretty successful if it can get Google to switch over to using it.
- capableweb 3y ago> > embrace, extend, extinguish strategy with WSL > They are EEEing their product - Windows? No, Linux obviously. First they like and integrate Linux into their own products. Azure, WSL and others. Then, they provide extensions that are closed-source on top of those. With the goal to extinguish the original project so they have more control over the direction.
- slondr 3y agoCount me in the list of dev teams where that is not remotely true. I use exactly 0 microsoft projects at my software engineering job.
- tiffanyh 3y agoNo one is talking about it because developer tools is literally the core business Microsoft is in and was founded as such, 48-years ago. Yes, they have expanded in many ways - but developer tools/languages/IDEs/libraries is their bread & butter. The famous “Developers Developers Developers” by Steve Ballmer. https://youtu.be/Vhh_GeBPOhs https://youtu.be/Vhh_GeBPOhs
- 29athrowaway 3y agoNow it's helping developers to feed the AI for free.
- oweiler 3y agoDon't forget Teams, which seems to be killing every other Chat/Video platform in the enterprise sector.
- dunk010 3y agoI had the same realisation. Also remember they’ve extended JavaScript with Typescript, and built LSP. It does indeed feel like they are eating the whole of software.
- wickedsickeune 3y agoAren't those FOSS?
- faeriechangling 3y agoHow is WSL an example of EEE? Other than adding a few things like the ability to navigate the Windows filesystem from WSL, they have really done nothing in the way of extending or extinguishing. If anything is classic EEE of what you listed it’s GitHub, given it’s basically a series of extensions on an open standard. Its Linux EEE program is Azure where Microsoft sells you a Linux server running in its datacenter in fancy ways that lock you in. I feel Microsoft’s monopoly around development is not that strong and it’s not terribly hard to completely avoid them.