[rektide]

Money/time. Microsoft dumped a ton of effort into doing a good job.

Web platform is a great tool, that allows rapid development with very fast results.

Extensibility. With JS under the hood & a plugin system, people were able to create tons and tons of value ontop of the base system very quickly. This was the promise of tools like Eclipse for a long time, but development was cumbersome & heavyweight. Some of the win here is again that the web platform is already extremely well known and popular. Some of it is more refined architectural tastes. But creating new value in vscode was easy, in a way it's never been before. The existing capabilities are themselves great examples. There's many more examples too. https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/overview

Lack of competition. VSCode aside the market hasn't changed much in a decade. Not a lot had changed.

Light & fast. Starts stupid quick, runs stupid quick.

Targets the important stuff. Fantastic for webdev, great debugging, linting experiences. Well integrated & capable IDE.

Liveshare. Holy shit, liveshare. I've spent dozens of hours trying to figure out how to collaborate with coworkers & friends in the past. Floobits, a random assortment of odd other projects... nothing compares to how quick & easy & simple it was connecting to someone else. And being able to then just navigate the project, or follow them, or follow someone else. By compare, Atom's TeleType offered... almost nothing. Barely better than coding over zoom.

I was going to make a guess & say that a huge advantage was that VSCode won because it was a late mover, because we got way better at tech, & much more is within reach. I was doing some searching around to understand what tech (beyond Electron) it's built with, and found this neat interview[1] with longtime dev Benjamin Pasero that goes deep into the history. Evidently it's from 2011?! Holy shit; didn't know that. One of the first TypeScript projects out there. This mainly reinforces that it's just been a product of a lot of time & money. VSCode itself has a number of other vscode sub-dependencies, but off the bat, I'm not seeing a ton of other high-value big-ticket libraries they've leveraged to do their thing.

One other win is just having a well-defined UI architecture, that provides a reasonable backbone/structure to develop around: https://code.visualstudio.com/api/ux-guidelines/overview

Language Server Protocol sealed the deal, as a way to "interface" with any given language.

[1] https://www.git-tower.com/blog/developing-for-the-desktop-vs...

[busymom0]

I am curious why Microsoft did it? What’s the benefit to them having this IDE? How do they make money from VSCode?

[rektide]

It's basically the same reason Google pays for Chrome. Giving a free/good/open (mostly open, natch: liveshare, remote plugins) product hedges against the worst most dangerous form of existential risk, takeover of the world by controlled/proprietary (or just other people's) products.

Microsoft was losing badly. Windows was the only (slight exaggeration) development platform that mattered for a long time, but that relevance has shrank enormously. Microsoft needed to stay relevant, needed to maintain relevance. Less and less people were thinking of Microsoft as relevant or interesting or important. Building & giving away good product keeps them dealt in to the great game. That it wasn't just their home turf, but actively in the fray? Just as important a factor, expanding their realm of influence. And it gives them optionality into the future. They can use & adjust this best-of-breed technology to whatever possible ends suit them, as time goes on. It's a huge, longrunning, long bet: they developed anew their talent for code development.

It's worked. They have become the go-to editor, again, after many years. They reserve some of the best capabilities with proprietary ownership- so far still reasonably free though. But we're seeing, just now, the breakthrough game, the real payouts, as projects like Github Codespaces bloom into fruition, become viable, powerful, compelling places to get work done, for folks of all level. Ultra-accessible, no minimum requirements to get started, everything works out of box, best-of-breed-capabilities. By being good at a core-talent of the world (coding), one that is powered by the most important platform on the planet (the web), Microsoft has the ability to adapt & grow into & make good any product that touches code/coding.

[animesh]

I doubt they make any money. But think of how many people soften their stances on Microsoft and buy into their developer ecosystem eventually. It is a success in that sense.