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> But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode

You just gave an example of 3 unprofitable projects.

That's pretty much my point: great that we got all of this stuff out of it but in any company not propped up by massive amounts of VC money you can't pay tens of millions of dollars in engineering salary for no immediate gain.

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They're projects where there's not a payment page to buy a copy sure, but VSCode especially has I'm sure indirectly led to a ton a of profit - its the natural home of Copilot, integrated with Github (including in their paid product Codespaces), and has I'm sure led to a ton of standardisation and productivity increases across the company.

Indirectly, maybe 8 years after Electron was first started, and not for the company that first invested in Electron.

My point yet again: only companies with money to burn can take that gamble.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the company that invented Electron was Github, and you could argue that Github's technical investments did all pay off very richly.

Greatness cannot be planned.

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