Hacker News Reader

Comment by phillipcarter | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't use the word destroyed - Visual Studio (Windows) has been a billion-dollar ARR business for a long time, and likely still is. The trajectory is certainly not in favor of it, but there's an utterly massive number of enterprise .NET and C++ devs on Windows who will be using it for a long time.

View on HN

Indeed. To use the new C# devkit in Visual Studio Code you need a Visual Studio/MSDN subscription too.

JetBrains Rider's a bigger competitor but even then (at least at my org.) most devs have a Visual Studio Professional/Enterprise subscription as a backup.

There are alternatives though. I've heard somebody hooked up Samsung's open source C# debugger, for example.

The crazy thing is that - I worked on VS 10 years before you did - and it was at a (near) billion $ ARR back then. So, it looks like it has been a flat business for a long time.

That's what happens to mature products. Not everything is a brand new startup that grows 1000% every quarter.

It's more that Microsoft lost the cross platform war. .NET lost and electron won. They even use it (or their own WebView knockoff) for their own products now. So there's no more need to give .NET away. They just milk the niche market that still depends on it.

>> the niche market that still depends on it.

That "niche market" likely pulls in billions of dollars from enterprises.

It does yes but it's no longer a mainstream dev tool really. Which means there is no longer any point in giving it away for free to try and gain more mainstream application marketshare.

They tried to displace Java but failed.

>> yes but it's no longer a mainstream dev tool really.

C# is currently #5 on Tiobe right behind Java:

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

It is just as mainstream as Java and everything else in the top ten.

>> They tried to displace Java but failed.

Enterprises used to be either Linux / Java shops or Windows / C# / VB shops.

Now both Java and C# are being slowly displaced by Containers, Go, and Rust.

Oh, undoubtedly. When I was there the writing was on the wall -- it's got a decade or two more life to it, but it's long peaked on the ARR curve.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com