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by ibdknox 4273 days ago
Microsoft is an irrational actor: they will sink billions of dollars into VS without regard for direct return in order to secure Windows as a platform. Using them as an example is useless. Moreover, VS is "purchased" almost exclusively as part of the entire Microsoft stack. When I was there a tiny, tiny fraction of revenue came from anyone actually just buying VS.
2 comments

I've heard rumors that VS is a $1b/year business, which is definitely nothing to sneeze at.

How does Eve compare to something like Autodesk's design script?

Okay then sublime text. Hundreds of thousands of people have paid for that.
Out of curiosity, do you have real numbers there? I'd be quite surprised if it was really hundreds of thousands.
Why? It's probably one of the most popular editors for PHP/HTML/CSS/Javascript/Ruby/Python.

According to https://sublime.wbond.net/stats there are roughly 2.5M sublime text users. If even 10% of them paid for it, that would be 250,000. Assuming 10% is a little high, let's do 1% would would be 25,000.

Even if those numbers are wrong (which they may be I have no idea how he gets those numbers, and if everyone is using Package Control) there can very easily be hundreds of thousands of paid licenses.