Hacker News Reader

Comment by theonemind | Hacker News Reader

The Visual Studio Code thing is kind of a shame. It seems like a variant of "embrace, extend, extinguish" inasmuch as things like Atom exist (which microsoft also owns, womp womp, but didn't for 3 years after Atom started). It competes in the space, keeps competitors weak by being the best so that it gets all of the users and mind-share and resources, but doesn't go all of the way with them because it could compete with their proprietary products...so while being the best is a good thing, it's not a good thing when it creates a monopoly-like product in a space good enough to suck up landscape resources so that no viable competitors not under Microsoft's thumb could ever start approaching parity with their proprietary products.

Definitely dents Microsoft's nascent open-source credit with me and, like so much of Microsoft's history, seems actively damaging in a monumental way to the history of computing itself for Microsoft's benefit.

View on HN

> keeps competitors weak by being the best

Not "the best" per se.. Rather "good enough" and part of other tools the customers already use, while keeping them free so it becomes a matter of having to spend extra $$$ for another product.

Take Teams for example. It's a pig of an app IMO. Slow (takes almost a minute to start on my otherwise-fast M1 Mac), extremely high memory use, constant errors "Oops something went wrong + cute pic of ice cream", a mess visually and not dense enough UI. They focus all their time on adding new features rather than optimising. They also focus very strongly on the "for everyone", trying to be a jack of all trades, master of none.

Slack does a much better job at team collaboration IMO. Especially for tech users, it's fast, shows a lot in small screen space and isn't as heavy (though I really miss the IRC bridge!). But Teams comes for free with O365 and integrates fully with that ecosystem. So no hassle with integrating with your ID Provider etc, it's just plug and play. So if you'd want to have slack at work you'd have to make an unreasonably strong business case for all the extra cost and work.

Another example: Sharepoint. I doubt you could find anyone who would consider Sharepoint best at anything. Yet it's still used heavily in favour of other options, because it's again free if you're already in the MS ecosystem, and it integrates with all the other tools like OneDrive and Teams (both basically just layers on top of Sharepoint). So even if you're not using sharepoint, you're using sharepoint :P

I do agree they are the best at the VS Code niche. But usually this is not their game, they go for 'good enough'. Maybe it's because their developers dogfood VS Code so they couldn't stand it being slow :)

For example, VS Code is highly optimised and doesn't suffer the performance drawbacks that usually come with electron. They have optimised the hell out of it. However they never bothered to do the same with Teams, probably because they own that space anyway.

Yeah when I think of MS products, they're never the best. They're usually just good enough, and then adoption is driven by some sort of leverage.

It’s tricky though, because they will compete hard on some things if they sense it’s vital. Look at SQL Server, 2005 was probably the most improvement I have ever seen in a single ms release. But once they establish a lead they crank down the dial and cruise.

Indeed, IE was a typical example too. And WinXP. Once they have the lead, innovation goes on the slow burner.

This is true of any company large enough to have multiple core revenue drivers, with their own orgs.

At the end of the day, you only employ so many top-tier folks, and you have a current corporate focus.

Excel, in particular, was famously a force of greatness to be reckoned with.

Decisions at large enterprises is large driven by compliance considerations. I once asked why we were picking a specific Microsoft product when it was inferior to the alternative and the answer i got was "The Microsoft platform is approved". So because we had some random Microsoft product we have already paved the way for the dump truck in the future. That's the magic of Microsoft.

To be completely clear, I don't blame the guy. The approval process sucks, so if you get to bypass that, it's a huge win for your own sanity.

> "So if you'd want to have slack at work you'd have to make an unreasonably strong business case for all the extra cost and work."

Why is having to demonstrate that something is worth the cost and effort of doing it "unreasonable"? Isn't that simply "a business case"?

I think they're arguing that you'd need to make a much better business case for Microsoft competitor products than you would something else, because you're up against the "we already have this at home" response.

Visual Studio Code has also some official extensions that are not open source and the official build contains a few proprietary features by default.

The only thing I like with Visual Studio Code is that they were able to promote a cross text editor way to have auto-completion and other IDE-like features, thanks to the Language Server Protocol. Now I can use these features in Vim and Kate.

> Visual Studio Code has also some official extensions that are not open source and the official build contains a few proprietary features by default.

I don't understand how that is remotely ok. VSCode's main binary links statically against Blink (as it uses Electron) which is under LGPL, at the very minimum they should provide a way to relink that binary as per LGPL requirements.

I don't think there s a static linking going on there, else it would be impossible to use Electron for closed source software. Though it is used for things like Discord.

> I don't think there s a static linking going on there, else it would be impossible to use Electron for closed source software.

no, the closed source part can stay closed source but relinking against a custom version of Blink must be allowed.

Just run "strings" on the code binary: you'll see symbols coming straight from Blink like this one: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/72ceeed2ebcd505b8d...

    $ strings code-insiders | grep HTMLFormControls
    HTMLFormControlsCollection

Are those symbols defined in that file, or is that an import reference from a library? What does (your platform's equivalent of) nm or ldd say?

it only links against basic Linux / X11 / GTK stuff (and, I mean, at 123 megabytes, there's not much doubt that there's chromium inside that binary)

    $ objdump -p  /opt/visual-studio-code-insiders/code-insiders | grep NEEDED
     NEEDED               libffmpeg.so
     NEEDED               libdl.so.2
     NEEDED               libpthread.so.0
     NEEDED               librt.so.1
     NEEDED               libgobject-2.0.so.0
     NEEDED               libglib-2.0.so.0
     NEEDED               libxshmfence.so.1
     NEEDED               libgio-2.0.so.0
     NEEDED               libnss3.so
     NEEDED               libnssutil3.so
     NEEDED               libsmime3.so
     NEEDED               libnspr4.so
     NEEDED               libatk-1.0.so.0
     NEEDED               libatk-bridge-2.0.so.0
     NEEDED               libdbus-1.so.3
     NEEDED               libdrm.so.2
     NEEDED               libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0
     NEEDED               libgtk-3.so.0
     NEEDED               libgdk-3.so.0
     NEEDED               libpango-1.0.so.0
     NEEDED               libcairo.so.2
     NEEDED               libm.so.6
     NEEDED               libX11.so.6
     NEEDED               libXcomposite.so.1
     NEEDED               libXdamage.so.1
     NEEDED               libXext.so.6
     NEEDED               libXfixes.so.3
     NEEDED               libXrandr.so.2
     NEEDED               libexpat.so.1
     NEEDED               libxcb.so.1
     NEEDED               libxkbcommon.so.0
     NEEDED               libgbm.so.1
     NEEDED               libasound.so.2
     NEEDED               libatspi.so.0
     NEEDED               libgcc_s.so.1
     NEEDED               libc.so.6
     NEEDED               ld-linux-x86-64.so.2

Interesting, thanks for checking.

VSCodium is a build that does not include any of the proprietary bits: https://vscodium.com/

Unfortunately there are extensions & features that (last I checked) only work in VSCode but not VSCodium. 'Remote Development' extension was the one I found out was apparently closed source.

That one is based on "proper" VisualStudio's remote development features, so it originated from a closed source product. Having observed that multiple times, I assume that open sourcing it is a major effort as this probably includes some third party code or patent licenses or something which prevent open sourcing. At least I don't see the business case Microsoft would play there in keeping it closed but freely available.

But who knows.

And: That aside the role Microsoft nowadays plays in the open source world is reason for concern, while their current actions are mostly positive.

The business case is a combination of Discretionary Pricing, and Moat - those are the business school names for the strategies you can look up if you like..

The Discretionary pricing comes in the Tiers, while the Moat is provided by VS Code reducing the chance of real competition against Tier 1 or 2.

The removal of hot reload from VS Code is to provide differentiation between Tier 2 & 3, to drive customers to paid versions.

Tier 1 .. Visual Studio Enterprise - expensive

Tier 2 .. Visual Studio - low medium cost for a business

Tier 3 .. Visual Studio Code - 'free' in exchange for your info (via telemetry) and reduces the chance of a truly open competitor challenging the above tiers. This one must walk a line between being less useful than above tiers so there's value to buy them, while being more useful than other 'free' competition in the short term so they attract mindshare away from other OSS that might otherwise grow to challenge the higher Tiers

VSC being marketed as open source is certainly a grey area (there are arguments both in favor and against), but it's not a bad situation as it seems.

IntelliJ IDEA is a competitive "open source based" product, with a significant market share (which qualifies as "viable competitor not under Microsoft's thumb").

VSC's "base open source" product is actually equally or more capable than IDEA - see VSCodium; its existence is proof that in worst-case scenario, a capable open source editor would still exist. Although there are some omissions, I think that given the MIT license, in theory a competitor could also build a series of commercial plugins - if I'm correct, this would actually be an interesting scenario.

I definitely had a good laugh at "keeps competitors weak by being the best"

I think the idea here is "dumping". By subsidizing a free, best-in-class editor Microsoft prevents any competing paid options from gaining a foothold. This is not too different from their old strategy with IE.

Making a paid product for something that's a choice of the individual user is a non-starter these days.

What I mean by that is something without network effects. If your company uses Google Docs, you don't have much choice because that's where everything is (modulo apps that can sync to it so you can use a different editor).

For something like VSCode, at the end of the day it's still just a text editor. My use of VSCode doesn't stop my teammate from using vim.

For something like that, do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is at most companies to get them to buy something? The issue isn't even if it's $5 or $500. It's just going through the process of figuring out how to buy something, getting approvals, figuring out how to deal with the invoice, etc. Unless I'm already super committed to it, there's no chance when I can simply download any number of free options out there.

Even if it's explicit policy at a company that employees can expense a text editor or IDE, a large proportion of people will still never bother. I saw the "Please buy Sublime Text!" pop-up all the time at my last job, and that was at a small startup where everyone knew the company was happy to pay for it.

I understand what you mean, of course. I am not sure if anti-dumping was ever applied to products given away for free with zero unit cost economics. If applied incorrectly, Apple and Microsoft could argue that Linux and Linux-based OSes being free is illegal!

Dumping operates by selling below cost. If you sell below cost and your competitors don't, nobody buys from them but they still have to pay rent and the salaries of their factory workers if they want to maintain the ability to resume production, which drives them out of business. If you sell below cost and your competitors match you, they lose money on every sale, which drives them out of business.

Then you have no competitors and can start charging the monopoly price, and no one tries to enter the market for fear you'll start dumping again.

Charging nothing for a product with no unit cost doesn't work like that. You're not forcing anyone to sell at a loss and the intent isn't to raise prices after they're gone.

The concern there is that you could come to dominate the market (even if the price remains zero) and then leverage that into other markets. If one IDE has more users than any of the others (market dominance) and it integrates with the vendor's hosting service and their proprietary APIs for their proprietary operating system and their app store and payment systems, that's more like tying than dumping.

Doesn't this describe a lot of significant software in the present?

IE and Skype were criticized for being terrible pieces of software, and people were desperate for something to come and disrupt their target markets. Now Chrome and Discord are being criticized for being so functionally superior to their predecessors - as well as every other option - that nobody is left with a choice anymore.

Developers don't want to choose anything besides Chrome because nearly everyone has been convinced to use it from the quality of the product, so sites are broken on other browsers, causing more people to move to Chrome. Critical information found nowhere else on the internet is locked within Discord, because almost everyone wants to use Discord, so you have no choice but to also use Discord to communicate with those people and view that information.

In the process, Discord becomes the sole owner of that crucial information, and Chrome becomes the single deciding factor in how web standards are developed.

Visual Studio Code was the baby from Erich Gamma, being yet another take on IDEs after his experience on Visual Age and Eclipse, actually.

Here is his keynote at VSCode day, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hilznKQij7A

Just pay the $13 a month for a premium license and get over it already.

What is this reference to?

JetBrains Rider has the HotReload implementation for its Linux IDE. Their premium license is like $13 a month.

Ok, I pay for Jet Brains all product pack because it's good. Though I feel the need to use VSCode because LiveShare is so much better than CodeWithMe

Reply on news.ycombinator.com