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Comment by sephoric | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to think Microsoft's strategy with things like VS Code, Monaco editor, and Typescript is "blow the developer away with how amazingly productive they are so that they will want to use more of our products". Because it's just so high quality yet also gratis/libre (MIT license), that I can't see what else they could be trying to do.

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Honestly I also think its a recruiting tool for Microsoft. Developers watch the meaningful and useful open source contributions made by Microsoft, and some of the highbrow disinterest in Microsoft due to choices made in the past will fade.

Never forget "Embrace, extend, extinguish". Microsoft has a history of adopting open standards, adding value to them to gain market share, then leveraging that to destroy their competition.

Microsoft might seem to be an "open source champion" now, but remember that it is a publicly traded corporation with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits for its shareholders and a history of anti-competitive, anti-consumer practices.

Right now they are being warm and fuzzy to regain the developer mind-share they have lost over the past couple decades to open-source software. If they get a large percentage of developers using their tools and services (looking at you GitHub) I would not trust that they will continue to be so warm and fuzzy.

I know how "Embrace, extend, extinguish" works when the product people are "locked" into is closed source and propriety. But explain to me how this works when the product is open source and can be forked by anyone?

They may not be able to do "Embrace, extend, extinguish" in the exact same way with their open-source efforts, but that doesn't mean they would not be able to apply leverage given sufficient market share.

Imagine if VSCode becomes the defacto code editor. Then they add seamless integration with GitHub, including value-added features which are not available from other providers like gitlab. Developers accept it because everyone uses GitHub anyway. Then they add features to GitHub to integrate seamlessly with Azure, and bug tickets related to GitHub plugins for interop with AWS start to take longer and longer to be resolved. Then maybe one day they change the terms of service, and it's no longer allowed to develop GitHub plugins which compete with Azure. Then they release an update to VSCode which uses deep learning for code completion. On Windows it uses a new DX12-powered subsystem which makes it fast and responsive, while on Mac and Linux it falls back to a single-threaded solution which makes the whole application feel laggy.

In a scenario like that, it would be in principal possible to fork VSCode and make a more platorm-agnostic version, but how realistic is it that an individual, or even a small team will be able to keep up with a large corporation which seeks to make such an effort less successful.

Open source software is great, but if Microsoft owns the governance of those projects, and the up-streams and down-streams, they still have a lot of power over them.

One assumes Amazon & Google both see that possibility and are developing some in-house expertise on those projects.

Tooling is commodity now. If they don't make tools that run well on other platforms then other vendors step in to fill the demand, or they just wont have the demand in the first place and they lose mindshare anyway.

This is what happened with Java, Go and Javascript growing rapidly while .NET took a long time to get out of legacy/desktop phase, partly because the tooling was fantastic but isolated to their own Windows platform. They've learned their lesson and have realized there are better businesses by providing the compute and making it easy to use with free and plentiful tools.

Your scenario sounds not only plausible but highly likely. Especially the point about individuals or other principle-driven organizations being relatively unable to reproduce the closed-source advantages that they could tie into open source projects to make them significantly more useful on MS-blessed platforms and systems. This is all a very real possibility.

But maybe that history is also a strength. The typescript developers never extend the capabilites of the language, just add types. The only exception being decorators, that was a deal with angular so they don't have to invent their own language for angular2 and can build dependency injection on it by typescript exposing the types to the runtime. But decorators are stil buried behind an experimental flag.

TypeScript has other features such as Enums that don't exist in JavaScript but aren't pure type annotations either. It transforms into very clever bidirectional map tables.

You've explained some of the strengths of TypeScript, but I fail to see the argument for how this is evidence that it's somehow a good thing that Microsoft has a history of being quite a bad actor in the software industry.

Yes, and I will start looking into azure because of this same amazing feeling I'm having with VS code and typescript.

If it's as cheap and powerful as AWS then I'm on board too. But I doubt it is, Amazon's got it down to an intricate science that seems like it can't be beat.

Depending on specifics (obviously), Azure is quite competitive with Amazon on pricing, and extremely competitive on "power". Your mileage will of course vary, but the interesting thing about Azure versus AWS is (surprising to some) Azure tends to use more "open standards" versus AWS' proprietary solutions. (Two examples off the top of my head: Azure supports Docker and Kubernetes directly rather than the Elastic TLAs' own in house container models and container orchestrators. Azure's most used in-memory cache is Redis.)

Definitely look into it, but it isn't nearly as robust as AWS. Automation/DevOps and data streaming/processing are some lacking areas.

Fine if you just need PaaS app + RDB though.

The interface is astonishingly Windows'ish with millions of knobs to turn and not as stable as you want. (Resource usage metrics returned errors for a while on me.)

You will need time to get used to it. I even use AWS for a Windows instance.

This is not new -- Steve Ballmer understood this viscerally (ahem) over 10 years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

Granted, they weren't releasing much open source then, but it was all free to use, and the quality was far above open source alternatives (e.g. think the Visual Studio debugger vs. GDB wrappers).

I think they just naturally figured out that there's zero advantage to keeping developer tools closed source.

MS has long been about "Developers! Developers! Developers!" But these days they're about more than just Windows developers shipping native closed source applications.

Yet Visual Studio (not the Code) is still a payware with multiple editions.

You can build anything with the free community edition and they keep down-shifting previously enterprise features with every major version.

It's probably multi-faceted. Part of me thinks it's just something they use internally extensively and that branching out to the public means they can easily hire talent to work on their own projects. It's also probably an effort to stay relevant and make amends with web developers, who have long held them in low regard.

And yeah, Azure is a booming business for them. VSCode has a bunch of first-party extensions that reduce friction for working on their platform.

Microsoft's tooling is fantastic

Trying to work with other databases after using SQL Studio is incredibly frustrating

>I can't see what else they could be trying to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B

Microsoft does the same thing over and over - "embrace" a technology, "extend" it by adding some extra stuff to it that happens to work best on Windows then "extinguish" the tech once people are locked in.

Also see: Internet Explorer or Kerberos or Office document interoperability or AIM (messenger) or half a dozen other things.

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