[DaiPlusPlus]

I was in DevDiv at the time of the launch of VS Code (but on a different team): The pressure was on to ship a cross-platform editor ASAP to support the new cross-platform .NET infrastructure. This was very much an "IBM PC"-project with the Directors tasking a small team to get something done and to disregard the NIH culture. Atom was chosen as the platform because it was already close to what they needed with the right license. Heck, the rush to ship was so intense that they screwed up the name (I forget the story exactly, but "VS Code" was not the name the MSFT naming department came up with, but the name they initially chose turned out to be used elsewhere and they didn't have the time to come up with something trademarkable so they just sighed and shipped as "Visual Studio Code").

Anyway - I think the VS Code experience helped with Microsoft's institutional "fear" of pushing ahead with a JavaScript ecosystem elsewhere - I think the knock-on effects contributed towards the Office org's recent announcement to add JS as a first-class macro language in Excel, I just wish it was TypeScript instead.