[mrpopo]

I am quite confident that the bandwidth cost is absolutely not a concern for Microsoft, and that the obvious goal is for them to capture the market.

The "C/C++" extension github repository is 4MB. Probably the download size for the extension itself is a fraction of that, but I won't bother measuring. It was downloaded 400 times over the last minute (there is a live counter on the extension page [0]).

[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...

That's a 25MB/s or 200Mb/s bandwidth, for one of the most popular extensions. Multiply by the top 10 extensions and you get the bandwidth of an average home optic fiber connection...

[infecto]

I am glad you have insider knowledge to be so confident. I would rather those costs go towards furthering VS Code than helping out Cursor. This comes from someone who uses Cursor and not the biggest fan of MSFT.

Pure speculation but I would see the more logical argument being Cursor is a for pay product, why should they have access to the marketplace?

[malwrar]

> why should they have access to the marketplace

Because MS didn’t write most of the extensions yet engineered things conveniently such that you have to use their service to get them. Other text editors somehow manage to not lock people into similar dilemmas. They’re not profiting from running the marketplace or providing VS Code for free, it’s about locking people into a product. Cursor should be allowed access because interoperability is a societal net-benefit.

> those costs

…are likely minescule. I run similar services at my day job, just at a much larger scale than a text editor app marketplace, and know the precise cost to run everything. I am often disturbed that people might actually think cost:revenue is tight enough that they should defend a behemoth about callously gating access to it.

[LexiMax]

> I am often disturbed that people might actually think cost:revenue is tight enough that they should defend a behemoth about callously gating access to it.

I think it's more likely that they imagine themselves in Microsoft's shoes. After all, it's a very popular editor and the mechanism of vendor lock-in is clever - give away the editor under the noble banner of open source, while jealously gate access to the plugin ecosystem that makes the editor as useful as it is.

So no, I don't think they earnestly believe that the egress costs are anything more than pocket change. But it's almost certainly what they would argue if they were in Microsoft's position.

[fireant]

People on HN are conditioned by massively inflated cloud egress prices

[infecto]

Ehhh everything is purely speculation on everyone’s part. Again I don’t think your argument holds up to much.

[bionhoward]

Couldn’t it wind up being easy for Cursor and other variants of VS Code to be long run beneficial for VS Code itself? Seems like having a different third party team extending your stuff and testing it, could be hugely valuable, they take risks and move fast, the upstream project gradually learns from what works for the forks, people contribute various other new extensions.

In the age of LLMs, community is worth its weight in platinum, cutting off Cursor just incentivizes them to develop some new better thing with better technology (cough Zed, Ghostty) to compete with VS Code which won’t benefit Microsoft because it’ll be separate. What’s the use in not just open sourcing the C extension? With more people moving off C anyway, might as well get the free community contributions

[r0b05]

MSFT want to build their own Cursor aka Copilot Agent.

They can build a better product with their resources effectively extinguishing Cursor, who will then need to find a way to differentiate.

If Cursor was smart, they would have decoupled from the beginning as they had first mover advantage. They will now have to adapt while fending off competition from MSFT and the other players.

MSFT meanwhile, have discovered that this market is too profitable to be left untouched. They have probably been building their agent for a while and have now decided to launch while simultaneously blocking direct competition. They already have an ecosystem with users who have switching inertia. It's a brilliant yet ruthless move.

[SR2Z]

Cursor is a small team, MS is a titanic enterprise. I highly doubt that Cursor could exceed MS when their entire product is built on VSCode in the first place and they can't even seem to describe their usage policies to their paying users.

[BearOso]

Aren't you curious how 4MB of typescript can parse and understand C++ code? It doesn't. It downloads an additional 200MB binary language server that does all the work.