Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throwaway333444 2566 days ago
Not sure how relevant it is but Microsoft’s acquisition of github has kiled atom’s written-in-rust successor xray. This along with what feels like slower updates and less focus on atom feels very much like embrace extend extinguish. So in my books Microsoft is still quite evil.

https://github.com/atom/xray/issues/177#issuecomment-4796313...

4 comments

Are you sure it's not because that segment of the developer ecosystem has migrated to vscode en masse?
I haven’t switched yet but you are correct the general consensus is that vscode is superior to atom. That said Microsoft slowly suffocating vscodes largest competitor still feels like extinguish.

Here’s to hoping Xi does well and delivers on its promises

I'm 100% sure Atom would die even w/o MS acquiring GitHub. VS Code is just better, like it or not.
Evil? I think you might mean "microsofts priorities don't align with my own".
This is probably true. My preference is for multiple choices for lightweight IDEs whereas Microsoft probably prefers that everyone just uses vscode.
> embrace extend extinguish

I don't think this phrase applies for an acquisition. It's more like "(1) buy. (2) do whatever suits my agenda. (3) no step 3."

De-emphasizing atom doesn't sound evil to me, really. Re-licensing it with some crazy terms like "you can't say bad things about MS or sue MS" would be evil. But you can still use Atom and modify and distribute it with relatively few restrictions from MIT license. Just the feature pace sounds like it's slower. Maybe that's natural with an acquisition?

I think Embrace Extend Extinguish applies perfectly here, but with respect to git and not github. Github has already become the way that a vast majority of people interact with git, and it already has lock-in potential with the value-added features it implements: I've worked at companies which use github almost exclusively for project management and issue tracking, and it would be a huge expensive burden for them to change to something else.

Owning GitHub puts Microsoft in an excellent position to advantage their own products, and disadvantage competitors. Given Microsoft's history, I can not see it as anything other than foolish to assume this time they are going to act altruistically.

"To repeat the same experiment and expect a different result is the definition of insanity."