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They'll probably open source Unity someday. There's not much money in selling dev tools, just ask Borland, Sun, or Microsoft.
by BryanLegend 3y ago
They'll probably open source Unity someday. There's not much money in selling dev tools, just ask Borland, Sun, or Microsoft.
- CodeCompost 3y agoAre Visual Studio Professional and Enterprise not profitable? Not bashing just curious. They do give away VS Code and VS Community is free so I guess tgat must cut into profits...
- BryanLegend 3y agoI don't think the dev tools division has ever been profitable. It's always been done to support their platforms & operating systems.
- yodon 3y agoMicrosoft's DevDiv has been a billion dollar a year business for the past 20 years (I know, revenue != profit, but that's a big number to work with)
- whaleofatw2022 3y agoVS community came out right about when small businesses started really jumping onto LAMP/WAMP for LOB apps. Not hard to draw the line from there to 'keeping people on IIS and MSSQL'
- hotnfresh 3y agoNot sure if it was the original plan, but vscode is now a sales vector for SaaS.
- internet101010 3y agoYep. Doing Azure-related things is way easier in VS Code than other IDEs because so much deployment functionality is built in. It's still needlessly convoluted though.
- hotnfresh 3y agoNot just that, but “cloud” dev instances in the browser. Push a button, get your dev env set up in a container on Someone Else’s Server, presented through in-browser vscode (though I assume you can connect with regular vscode, too), is the promise.
- thenakulchawla 3y agoI think jetbrains is doing a good job making and selling dev tools. But yes, very few in the world have been successful at it.
- BryanLegend 3y agoJetbrains has been doing fantastic work for a long time now. I hope they stay private and profitable.
- hashtag-til 3y agoJetBrains have fantastic tools/products and a very pragmatic business model that is easy to understand. They spot real developer issues and solve the basics, that's why they are successful. You won't find startup-y inflated delusions and useless-crap features there. (disclaimer: I use their paid tools but I'm not associated the JetBrains in any way)
- munk-a 3y agoSublime and Microsoft also are making it work - as are a number of smaller IDEs. Editors and dev tools tend to be pretty profitable as long as you remember the golden rule - let the small fish pirate freely, charge nothing for college students... and go after any of the large corporations using it - those are the people who subsidize the entire tool.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoThere's a lot of money selling dev tools, but not necessarily Microsoft levels of money. Also, Sun was actually a hardware company if you looked at where their revenue came from. Cadence, Synopsys, MATLAB, Mathematica, JetBrains, Windriver, and many others make a ton of money selling specialized dev tools. The key in that market seems to be specialization, though, so most devs don't see their work.
- munk-a 3y agoOn the other hand - ask Epic. Yes, their fortnite income dwarfs everything else - but the engine is still highly profitable.
- dazzawazza 3y agoHi, do you have a source for the "engine is highly profitable"?
- s_dev 3y ago>There's not much money in selling dev tools, just ask Borland, Sun, or Microsoft. I think that's not the case for Microsoft -- GitHub, Azure, OpenAI, Visual Studio etc. The make lots of money selling Dev Tools.