I guess there are two aspects to the the typical process of MSFT enshittification:

a) lack of regular revenue leading to bizarre product management choices (probably not a case, because of GH Copilot subs)

b) initial really talented team members gradually being replaced by bozos because of entropy and/or management (work on something new/important)

I suppose b) is the most obvious risk.

I think option A is actually part of their problem. Not because they lack revenue but because they are successful with it. You mention Copilot but VSC integrates with a lot of Microsoft owned cloud services as the “default” or “first class citizen”. I’m not sure why people would use the Azure extensions over the AZ cli, but they are obviously rather popular. It’s a lot like how Google search became the default search in a lot of products, except here it’s GitHub, Azure and so on.

On top of that they get some wild telemetry. Your privacy data is obviously safe, but the metadata they collect goes right down to your project structure. So Microsoft knows what sort of projects and in what sort of languages everyone uses. They know what you’re putting into your Azure cloud and they know if you’re not using Azure. I imagine these things are rather valuable to the biggest tech company in the world.

Obviously they’re going to focus their development on upselling Microsoft products to you. Which will only get worse as they succeed more and more. Because why wouldn’t an enterprise company do that?

Yup. The prospect of having to someday switch to VSCode unnerves me. It's not because it's technologically inferior to Emacs or because of my habits, muscle memory, dogmas, or childhood traumas. It's because of Microsoft. I just can't blindly trust the good intentions of a mega-corporation. A behemoth that expends huge amount of resources constructing a modern code editor packed with numerous features that they then offer at no cost. When I used IntelliJ and paid for it, I understood precisely what I was buying, I understood their revenue model. Then I switched to Emacs - which is only theoretically free - as it cost a substantial amount of time, dedication, and energy. I still understand who benefits from my choice - the community, me, and the wider industry too. Every time I activate a VSCode instance, I'm unsure of the exact cost that I'm incurring. It already felt like a hostage situation when they took over GitHub. If everyone is now must become a VSCode user, I don't even understand how people don't realize how dystopian that is.

I don’t see why you would ever have to switch to a certain IDE, but I can see from some of the other comments a lot of people seem to be unfortunate enough not to have the choice. One of the reasons I like emacs (again in in doom so it could be Neovim) is that it’s basically an IDE I can use forever and easily get working on any computer by pulling my dot files from my git repo. I say easily but it’s obviously not easy on windows considering you sort of need WSL, C server and to install some LSP support.

I understand why people like VSC, but at the same time I’ve seen people go from other IDEs to VSC and now many are going yo Zed. Mean while I can just trundle along in the same IDE. Some of the emacs purists haven’t had to learn a new IDE for decades and likely never will.

To each their own of course.

> I don’t see why you would ever have to switch to a certain IDE

Alarmingly, basic proficiency in VSCode becoming a must in many software developing teams and I don't like that. People really seem to have zero concerns about Microsoft aggressively pushing their proprietary agenda, neatly wrapped in "open-source" packaging.