[farisjarrah]

A) Visual Studio Code is OSS, so anyone can come help microsoft improve it, which in turn helps out their commercial Visual Studio Project

B) Gaining developer mindshare is very powerful. If you want another example of how powerful this is, just look at the dominance of Windows XP and Windows 7 in the developer market, which in turn, made a huge proliferation of software available for the windows eco system. They are basically getting developers to dogfood the OS and developer tools for them.

3) Microsoft can learn from how people use visual code and make the developer experience overall much more pleasant for their azure integrations. You get enough developers telling the C-Suite how awesome Azure is, pretty soon you are going to have companies switching off AWS to Azure because "it integrates so well with all the developer tooling I am already using"(<--- Which would be VS Code.)

[jullytta]

VSCode was also born cross-platform, which enables developers that didn't consider Visual Studio.