> If I'm not the customer, then I'm the product.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, care to expand? Aren't you also the product for JetBrains, since you're one of the customers that's keeping them afloat?
I'm not sure what you mean by this, care to expand? Aren't you also the product for JetBrains, since you're one of the customers that's keeping them afloat?
When some commercial effort departs from that, it's good to be suspicious. The bills are getting paid somehow. E.g., look at network television from 1960-2000 or so. The viewers were not customers. The viewers were the product being sold to people who wanted to manipulate them. Advertisers were the customers, so the programs were generally about getting maximum influenceable wallet-connected eyeballs; quality was at best secondary.
In contrast, look at what's happened to TV since then. We're in a golden age. [1] Why? Many reasons, but a key one is that people are now paying for TV directly. To Netflix and Hulu and HBO and all the other paid streaming efforts, you're the customer, not the product being sold to somebody else. Now they have a strong incentive to make things that you don't just tolerate but love.
Microsoft in particular has a history of monopolistic behavior that has been harmful to the industry (e.g., [2], [3]). Are these developer tools awesome just because Microsoft is run by nice, generous people? I'd say instead they correctly recognize that if they want to regain some of their lost market power, they're going to have to compete with the existing tools, many of which are quite good. Why are they good? I'd say it's partly because smart people have built a strong business [4] making those tools. If Microsoft manages to eliminate the competition, they'll lose the incentive to build good stuff, just like they have in the past.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Television_(2000...
[2] https://eev.ee/blog/2020/02/01/old-css-new-css/
[3] http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepape...
I can definitely see where you're coming from. In fact, for VS Code, I believe they collect quite a bit of metrics on your usage of the product through telemetry, so it's definitely not "free" in the sense of "nothing given" - essentially, your programming and usage habits of the program are being sent to MS every second.
Re: the case of VS Code eliminating competition and MS losing the inventive to build good stuff, I think the core editor engine being open source gives me hope that this won't happen like in the olden days of MS. But of course, still a risk.
> If Microsoft manages to eliminate the competition, they'll lose the incentive to build good stuff, just like they have in the past.
Typical strategy. You provide a good and cheap product until you reach a relative majority of a market and customer lock-in, then quietly slow down on the free improvements and start extracting money from the users.
This is an insignificant reason. People paid for cable TV and were soon shown ads. Even people who pay to see movies are shown ads before the movie and during movies via product placement. Hulu makes great shows but sells ads more highly targeted than any broadcast channels.
The biggest reason for the current golden age is that streaming services don't have to try to create the most broadly appealing content to fill the most valuable timeslots and can instead cater to each viewer's tastes directly. Breaking Bad was a great show before it got on Netflix, but it wasn't a hit until wide on-demand streaming availability helped it find its audience. Tiger King is the kind of hot garbage that would normally get an afternoon time slot on a second tier cable channel, but making it available on demand turned it into a megahit.
I agree with you that oligopolies like big movie-theater chains will try to exploit that power by doing anti-consumer things like showing ads. But that's just more proof we should be suspicious of free products that may increase oligopoly power.