> There is no reason we should expect Microsoft to invest tens of millions of dollars into a product development and give it free for competitors like Cursor. That's not just rational, even for companies that are not Microsoft.It's an "open source" IDE. It costs nothing. All of the money they make from it is on top of the integrations like Azure Devops and Github that would make just as much money (if not even more thanks to vibe coding increasing accessibility) in Cursor, Windsurf, and VSCodium. Microsoft isn't a charity and they've been investing those tens of millions of dollars for a reason: to get a return. That's fine, that's what capitalism is (like it or not).
What's not fine is their schizophrenic approach to open source that looks very much like the classic Micro$oft embrace, extend, extinguish*. They're literally trying to extinguish competitors that are doing better than them by restricting the ecosystem after supposedly and ostensibly embracing open source. I lived through the IE6 era and this doesn't feel much different. Same player, slightly different game.
It's probably driven by some politically powerful PM or VP who perfectly resembles the Dilbert principle. Just like the degradation happening in the Windows OS front, it's just Conway's law happening all over again.
* Which if I may remind everyone, is a phrase straight out of the DOJ's discovery. Microsoft came up with the term.