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From Microsoft's perspective, what's the advantage to them or their users to pay for two somewhat similar free offerings to be worked on in parallel? Given that one was gaining in popularity by leaps and bounds while the other was rapidly losing market share and relevance, what course would you recommend? "Fund both indefinitely, to keep the handful of atom users that want new features happy"? Be reasonable.

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I don't think anybody's expecting them to fund both indefinitely, but given that their soon-to-be new CEO went on the record to say that they would actually keep funding Atom development, I feel it's fairly reasonable to expect that they wouldn't pull funding from Atom almost completely as soon as the acquisition went through. That's a really shitty move no matter how you look at it.

I agree it was stupid of them to placate people by making promises they don't intend to keep.

He said "we will continue to develop and support both Atom and VS Code going forward," which at least of right now is still happening -- Atom 1.45 was released last week, along with 1.46 beta 0. The conjecture that they've effectively defunded it is reasonable, but it's still conjecture, and even if they have it doesn't actually break Friedman's (possibly quite deliberately worded) statement.

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