Ask HN: What could be the business model of VS Code? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What could be the business model of VS Code?

2 pointsHackbraten8 comments

Visual Studio Code has taken over a huge marketshare. It’s also controversial due to the proprietary marketplace and telemetry. But neither of those drawbacks seems to plausibly explain how Microsoft plans to make profits off VS Code.

I wonder what Microsoft is going to do to VS Code once mass adoption has completed.

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Microsoft has always been focused on developer experience (if you haven’t seen Steve Ballmer’s “Developer Developers Developers” video, it’s a must). VS Code is a result of one of the drastic changes Microsoft went through in the last years. It is open source and extensible to get more developers to like Microsoft’s ecosystem, which translates eventually to revenue on Azure.

Good point! The connection to Azure has never occurred to me.

So MS dev tools (VS studio) were under attack (aka the innovator dilemma) from below by jet brain. The goal of VScode is to disrupt jetbrain from below. This was the correct response to the innovator dilemma, which is really hard to poll off in big org.

The ultimate goal of MS is windows/office usage. Today you can add Azure. MS has a very captive (and somewhat silence) enterprise developer audience which must be protected at all cost (mostly .Net / C# programmers).

However, once Linux attacked windows NT as well as general attack by cloud computing (AWS) which uses Linux, MS needed to create general dev tools which are not NT centric and would assure control on developers even in the area where Linux dominate.

Also note that MS suffered (and still suffering) from the mobile OS failure. This traumatic experience only increase the need to control on developers in the cloud/enterprise.

I don't think they need to... VS Code is somewhat "open source", which means that part of the development is subsidized to the community, and they have other source of profit that allows them to maintain its development.

[I can be wrong :) ...]

Let’s assume you’re right. Now I think of that one product manager at Microsoft who must have approved the budget necessary to bootstrap VS Code years ago.

How did they justify the funding? I can’t imagine them saying, “let’s do a thing and hope the devs are gonna like it.”

Software used to be all closed-source and sold in shrink-wrapped boxes. It was a more honest time. The internet destroyed all that, and new schoolers like Netscape and Yahoo pioneered the portal strategy -- have the world come through your door, and good things will happen (advertising revenue mostly). While vscode does not thus far post ads, the motive is the same: foot traffic.

But to what tangible revenue will that foot traffic ever convert?

Why did Facebook buy Whatsapp, or Google buy Kaggle? Big companies view large userbases as an asset. Information is the new oil as one neophyte politician likes to say. These guys are operating on a level beyond our simple-minded calculus of dollars for doughnuts.

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