IMHO Microsoft has been doing a very good job of turning everything they touch into SaaS. The thing I don't get is why they're able to do it so easily. I can understand the idea of accepting a "pay forever" model for a lot of stuff because the ongoing development and maintenance is going to cost money no matter what.
The thing I don't understand is why everyone is so willing to hand control of everything to a handful of big companies. I thought Apple's app store would be a complete flop because I couldn't imagine any developers being willing to allow someone else to being an arbiter over their ability to distribute a product that (often) has a significant cost of creation. However, I didn't consider the massive amounts of money that first movers could make by taking advantage of the free promotion that was used as a lure. I think the tactic should be illegal since it's used everywhere these days, but maybe that's just me.
Back to dev tools, I absolutely don't understand it. In the above situation, the risk created by giving up control can be justified by the potential of becoming a fart app millionaire. Where's the payoff in letting someone like Microsoft control your entire dev stack from the editor to the build system to the deployment (on Azure)? Are the productivity gains and cost savings from letting someone else deal with it really worth it? How long will those cost savings last and how will anyone know when they've exceeded what's reasonable? What happens when things break or you get unfairly banned and you aren't a big enough customer to get to talk to a real human that can help you?
> I thought Apple's app store would be a complete flop because I couldn't imagine any developers being willing to allow someone else to being an arbite
I used to think the same way in my younger days, but I realize over time that it's easier to just focus on your core business / competencies, and "outsource" what isn't directly relevant to your work to someone else who can handle it better. Even if it means paying for a service. Basically the exact opposite of NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome.
I'm guessing this is why developers are happy with using the Apple App Store and Google Play Store for hosting apps, Stripe etc for payments, GSuite or hosted SaaS for most of their daily work etc.
I wholeheartedly agree in principle but the App Store can sometimes be unpredictable enough with its approval rules and timelines (and changing rules on pre approved apps) that it can be time intensive to get something approved.
Apple doesn't give you a choice to not distribute on their app store on iOS/iPadOS. On Mac plenty of people still aren't distributing through the App Store, for now.
I can't speak for anyone else but Windows does not "control" my text editor anymore than JetBrains or Apple could. I don't use any Azure services in any stack regularly so I can't comment. It's not like they're requiring I run CMake on Azure to use VS Code.
But a lot of takes seem to miss the actual problems that MS's cloud offerings solve. Reproducible and stable dev environments are a massive productivity and time sink. I don't use their offerings but at least I get why they exist for different folks.
What I'm more worried about are legions of developers who don't seem to know how to use command line tools. I hate to gatekeep but watching people fumble through GUIs and web menus just to run some code is infuriating to watch, and it seems to be becoming more acceptable.
> The thing I don't understand is why everyone is so willing to hand control of everything to a handful of big companies.
It's mostly greed. Greed for more profit. That in the end this will prove fataly for them (your trade secrets stored on another companie's computers with access from 3 letter agencies) they don't know or don't care.
There's a difference between having to navigate your local system/filing cabinet and having all the data neatly categorized and tagged ready for a global search followed by being able to remotely prevent access by the original creator.
Hardly surprising. The writing was on the wall for Atom as soon as Microsoft acquired Github.
It's a pity. Atom has some notable features that, to my mind, are improvements compared to vscode. Using Tree Sitter [0] instead of inscrutable TextMate regexes [1] for grammar specification is a case in point.
As much as I dislike most electron apps, I do have a degree of respect toward Atom for bringing it to the community due to how many projects it enabled to have a gui that otherwise wouldn't have had one, or wouldn't have been made as accessible.
Personally, I've tried most of the popular free text editors in the past, and I gave up on Atom after using it a few times. It wasn't a bad product, but there was too much competition at that point already, it was just a bit too late. Atom took a while to load, didn't have as many plugins as other editors and finally didn't seem to offer that much of a differential compared to other text editors.
I now use Notepad++ for basic editing (and some Python coding) and VS Code for most of my real coding work.
That small bit of load time is what got me to stop using it. I briefly considered trying it again to see if that got fixed, but MS bought github and the writing was on the wall for me.
The thing I don't understand is why everyone is so willing to hand control of everything to a handful of big companies. I thought Apple's app store would be a complete flop because I couldn't imagine any developers being willing to allow someone else to being an arbiter over their ability to distribute a product that (often) has a significant cost of creation. However, I didn't consider the massive amounts of money that first movers could make by taking advantage of the free promotion that was used as a lure. I think the tactic should be illegal since it's used everywhere these days, but maybe that's just me.
Back to dev tools, I absolutely don't understand it. In the above situation, the risk created by giving up control can be justified by the potential of becoming a fart app millionaire. Where's the payoff in letting someone like Microsoft control your entire dev stack from the editor to the build system to the deployment (on Azure)? Are the productivity gains and cost savings from letting someone else deal with it really worth it? How long will those cost savings last and how will anyone know when they've exceeded what's reasonable? What happens when things break or you get unfairly banned and you aren't a big enough customer to get to talk to a real human that can help you?