My formative years in tech were in the era of Slashdot and Linux becoming mainstream. Being a Microsoft hater (aka Micro$oft) was very popular at the time. Bill Gates was on the way out, handing the reins to Steve Ballmer and the company motto, at least externally, was Embrace, Extend and Extinguish. The company prioritized lock-in and leveraging their dominance, and open-source was not part of their culture.
Satya Nadella’s era ushered in a new age for Microsoft. Microsoft embraced openness. In 2014, they released their office suite for iPad, a long-time product to lock people into the Windows ecosystem. They brought Linux to Windows as WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).
With JavaScript becoming more of a mainstream, general-purpose language, lightweight code editors like Sublime Text became popular. Atom, a lightweight, electron-based code editor from GitHub was also gaining popularity.
In 2015, Microsoft launched VS Code, an open-sourced, lightweight IDE. They used the Visual Studio branding, but unlike their other dev tools, offered it free of charge. This was their platform play. A significant advancement was allowing extensions to add new languages via the language server extensions. The product was highly successful, gaining significant market share over the coming years.
I have seen recent discourse citing how Microsoft only has VS Code to prop up GitHub Copilot, and its motivation is to lock developers into its AI tools. This narrative is not supported by history. Microsoft’s coding platform predated the GitHub acquisition in 2018, and GitHub Copilot did not enter the scene until 2021.
Somehow, Microsoft lost its vision of the platform play with VS Code.
GitHub Copilot was an early leader in the AI code assistant market. Copilot launched as a proprietary plugin for VS Code and other IDEs. When other AI code assistants started coming on the scene, Microsoft returned to its old habits of protecting its market dominance. VS Code could have embraced the language server extension model and turned it into the premium platform for AI-based editors. This would have been the logical direction for VS Code. Microsoft could have worked with third parties to support full plugin support with any AI tool. Instead, they looked to protect GitHub Copilot by giving it preferential treatment.
The result was that alternatives like Cursor and Windsurf emerged, which forked the open-source VS Code. In a further step to protect its AI assistant, Microsoft took steps to prevent forks from using its open-source plugins.
Recently, Microsoft announced that it will open-source its AI Code Editor and move parts into VS Code. This step is in the right direction, but it is coming too late. Microsoft squandered its goodwill as a coding platform and created a fragmented ecosystem. We will likely never see things like Cursor as a VS Code plugin. It could have all happened differently if Microsoft had kept their vision on VS Code as a platform.