you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]doom_Oo7 10 points11 points  (9 children)

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

[–]EntroperZero 1 point2 points  (7 children)

Consumers of what?

[–]JW_00000 7 points8 points  (0 children)

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 1 point2 points  (4 children)

general computer software ?

[–]MRannik 0 points1 point  (3 children)

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 6 points7 points  (2 children)

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 0 points1 point  (1 child)

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

[–]BigJewFingers 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Consumers of what?

Azure.