[aloe_falsa]

> What does Microsoft really get? Maybe in the beginning, telemetry was the real answer, from whichever developers didn’t opt out.

This is beside the main point of the article, but: as a developer, it's true telemetry is critical for building a good product. Knowing which parts of your app are underutilized or need improvement is extremely important - without hard data, you're basing your project on a hunch. However, telemetry is worth zero in and of itself.

If the article author thinks Microsoft is magically turning their VSCode latency data and error stacktraces into metric tons of cash money, they're probably mistaken.

[fragmede]

Or even more crucially, when and where your app crashes.