Have people noticed a network effect after using VS Code? Are you getting sucked into the rest of the MS ecosystem at all?
I also think that they are trying to position .NET Core as a viable competitor to Java, for which they need decent cross-platform tooling.
I have to admit, since I switched from Atom to VSCode, I'm also re-evaluating other Microsoft products. I even bought a copy of Win10 (but it wasn't as good as I hoped, haha).
Also, I worked with a few DevOps people who really hated AWS usability and some of them said Azure should be much better.
The transition of Classic to ARM (Azure Resource Manager) made me drop Azure for AWS. Now ARM is more or less stable so there's no issues, but damn when they started it was complicated.
But in terms of UI...
GCE > AWS > Azure.
As for go, GoSublime is pretty good, I'm hesitant to go to a javascript based editor when Sublime offers such good go support.
Haven't noticed myself buying more microsoft products, but have noticed how much more interested I am in what microsoft is releasing these days (.NET core for example)
And maybe to push the whole editor market to a direction they like. A bit like what Google did with Chrome. Think about for example Typescript language service. Now they have been able to push the idea and demonstrate how useful it is. Probably this generates demand from users for other editors to add same feature.
A strategic tool for a strategic group (to MS's future): developers. It's not a very big team, so even a total failure would be capped at a fairly small downside, but the upside of capturing significant loyalty is not capped. "Loyalty" here is to VSCode, not to Microsoft, but if MS controls a tool that large numbers of developers are committed to, it can make sure that a large number of developers have an easy, reliable way to use technologies MS wants to push.
I'm not saying that MS would capture developers and then force them to use MS technologies. That would kill the goose laying the golden eggs. They can just build their own extensions that work extremely well and make any necessary changes to the base product and extension system to support the extensions so that developers have an easy and reliable way to adopt new MS technologies on all platforms, not just Windows.
This might not end up being of great practical value to them or it could turn out to be huge at some point in the future. Limited downside, unlimited potential upside. It's a speculative bet, but apparently they think it's worth trying.
I don't think this has happened before to me that I "complained" about something and it got actually fixed!
Microsoft also spends a lot of resources on documentation which makes it an easy choice for the frustrated developer who can't get something working on another companies offering.
[1]: more effort than bringing VSCode up to feature parity
All 10 of them? Sorry, but to think it's some kind of ploy for Go developers specifically does not really compute.
It might very well be a "goodwill" project, but Go devs are insignificant compared to the web developer community at large.
One of the most influential open source projects of recent times is Docker. Docker is written in go. MS has gotten behind docker.
Another, kubernetes.
I'm not saying this influenced Visual Studio code. But to say Go devs are insignificant is a little out of touch.
Which is orthogonal to Go, as Docker is a language agnostic container manager.
People using Docker are not, by and large, Go programmers and most don't even care about Go.