Our 1st interaction with the awesome Jupyter team was enabling it in Visual Studio / Python:
https://github.com/Microsoft/PTVS/wiki/Using-IPython-with-PT...
After that we loved the project (and the team) so much that we donated a $100,000 for furthering development. They used the funds to hire a dev & help improve the Jupyter for all platforms.
Since then we've put Jupyter in Azure ML studio which combines a drag/drop ML canvas with that of a notebook. You can use it to analyze your data / build models /deploy to Azure.
As an offshoot of the above project, we wanted to give something back to the community, so we figured we'd instantiate it as a separate notebook-centric offering for dabblers, students, faculty, demoers, webinar/seminar speakers, etc.
And by "we", I mean a small group in Microsoft who cooked up the idea - if it turns out to be useful, we'll keep it going. If it's not, we'll shut it off. So far thought it looks like it's hit a chord - thousands of notebooks have been created just in the past month. Various schools are using it to teach cs101, eng101 courses, people are using it to demo their products/services (an executable doc page vs a static one), ...
Beyond this initial offering, we hope to add a suite of features both around and inside Jupyter. For example, we hope to be working w the core team to add debugging/profiling support soon. We also hope that the VSCode editor will be integrated for the JupyterLab environment. We'd love to hear your ideas!