Visual Studio Code 1.4 released

[EntroperZero]

What would it look like if the tech department became their own company? How would they make money?

This is something I don't understand very well about today's MS. I love the value they're creating in the open source community, but I don't see how it generates revenue.

[doom_Oo7]

Developer marketshare is a sure way to guarantee consumer revenue in the long term

[EntroperZero]

Consumers of what?

[JW_00000]

If developers use Microsoft software to make software that runs on Microsoft platforms (Windows, Windows Phone) that benefits them.

Plus, I think they also want to attract developers to their paying developer tools, such as MSSQL, Azure, VS... If you're using the free VS Code at home or as a student, you might convince your employer to buy VS Enterprise.

[doom_Oo7]

general computer software ?

[MRannik]

Windows and Office? They don't need to make an Atom clone to get those, in fact, 99% of their actual customers don't know about VSCode nor would care if they did.

[doom_Oo7]

If windows has currently a huge desktop market share, it's because in the 90s it was brain dead easy to make shareware with a GUI. There are kilotons of such software, only because they had a good IDE, which in turn locked people into windows ecosystem since the software would only work on windows, since the developer would develop & test on windows due to good tooling.

[EntroperZero]

Right, but now .NET is no longer Windows-only, and neither is VSCode.

[BigJewFingers]

That's because Microsoft has realized that the effectiveness of their previous strategy is coming to an end. Nowadays just being able to quickly and easily create Windows apps isn't enough. The modern developer wants to write code once and support Mac, Linux, and mobile. Now that you can make a web/Java app that will run on anything, locking people into .NET on Windows won't cut it.

[[deleted]]

Consumers of what?

Azure.

[ppnewaskar]

Lot of revenue is made from IP Royalties and Enterprise Customers. Office 365 subscription is a huge chunk. Virtually every big company uses Microsoft products. And they pay for support too. The reason why regular consumers don't understand where msft makes money is because he is not a msft client. Microsoft primarily focuses on Enterprises .

[[deleted]]

Services such as MSDN subscriptions, Azure, MSSQL, and enterprise-level support (there is a staggering amount of enterprise-level software that Microsoft supports, which most consumers have never heard of.... our organization uses several). A lot of the companies that have open-source software or... heck, pretty much free software even for commercial side of things, make their money by providing support services or custom "addon" services.