Give it a decade and you'll have Microsoft specific developers and organizations who are locked in beyond rescue.
It's always a fragmentation vs defragmentation battle.
1. Create a popular, locally run dev editor.
2. Shift it to the cloud.
3. Build all new features into the cloud version only.
4. Ignore the locally run version until it's obsolete.
5. Developers rent the cloud version forever.
The GitHub integration is going to be amazing for Microsoft because the allure of clicking a button and getting an instant development environment will be huge. Watch for a big campaign where popular frameworks start providing "Launch in Codespaces" or similar buttons.
We'll get to a point where new developers won't even know how to set up a local development environment. I'd bet a lot that Microsoft is envisioning a world where developers pay $1000+ per year for a combination of GitHub, Codespaces, Actions, Pipelines, etc..
The idea of paying cloud compute rates for things like build agents is crazy to me, but here we are.
In the end, it will come down to latency, usability and pricing. I do agree with you though - I'm not paying $2K+ for a macbook pro and then pay to run VSCode in the cloud -- something doesn't add up.
As for the pricing, it will likely be in the same ballpark as the non-github branded version of this exact same service (modulo any included time with a paid github subscription): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/visual-stu...
The estimated costs for full time development for one user with only one environment is ~$23.30/month.
Each environment you leave in a suspended state for a whole month would cost $6.40. OF course, if you are willing to have your filesystem wiped and rebuild each time you start and stop coding, you can destroy the environments when not in use, in which case you will probably want to create a custom dockerfile to customize the environment.
I think we're already there. I think system administration is the current biggest stumbling block that new programmers have. Tools like repl.it, google colab, etc. remove these (stumbling blocks | learning opportunities).
At many universities, a lot of code is now written in online editors that compile, run, and check against public and hidden unit tests (sort of like codewars but lower quality).
I personally love learning systems administration but there is very real demand for services that abstract it all away.
That said, you enumerated an effective roadmap for this kind of transition. I suspect it will generate an increased annual cost similar in magnitude to the Office 365 migration.
Don’t need to give it a decade, you can find plenty now, or two decades ago. It’s not like Microsoft is a new entrant to the IDE market with VSCode or GiHub Codespaces (hint: the VS part of VSCode).