October 5th, 2017 is a day I will always remember. It was the day I became cynical, bitter, and distraught. You may call it an overreaction for me to feel this way simply because of the business practices of a single software company, but let me explain what all of this means to me.

My life was thrown off balance and I never regained my footing after that day, because I lost my ability to respect. An essential part of being human is to feel respect for those who may or may not be deserving of it. But it is equally human to feel painful disillusionment when someone or something you respected turns out to be much less than you thought. But the level of betrayal I felt when Microsoft announced their new VSCode icon tore something from me that I'll never be able to recover. They tore away my ability to respect anything, and they tore away my ability to feel human.

Microsoft was a company I respected, and their employees were people I looked up to. Visual Studio, SQL Server, MS Office were all quality software products that combined user friendliness with powerful features. These programs may have been mass-market-oriented at times, but deep down they were always sophisticated and crafted with a level of detail and skill that won appreciation from power users all across the internet. VSCode was their newest release, and the internet was in unanimous agreement that it was of unparallelled quality. Following it's long awaited release, Microsoft began releasing quality updates that raised the bar ever higher for text editors.

Then 1.17 was announced. This was not just an announcement of an update, it was announcement of Microsoft's suicide. It was an update intended to completely disregard any design principle, and instead shock the entire world with its lunacy. Microsoft had gone off the deep end and raised the middle finger to everybody who stayed loyal to them. They had announced that they didn't care anymore, that they didn't care for their community, and they were going to go out of their way to sabotage everything they had spent years creating.

The pain I felt from this betrayal has destroyed me on an emotional level, and has deprived me of my primary source of entertainment. No longer can I use text editors without remembering the day I ceased mattering to people I devoted myself to. Microsoft had not just destroyed me or their company, they had destroyed the one force of stability in the world: Trust.