What are they embracing, how are they extending it, and how do they plan to extinguish it?
My understanding of EEE is that it involves taking some competitive product/standard, making a cool MS version of it, and then killing off the standard version - e.g. implementing a barely sufficient POSIX layer on Windows, getting customers who have "POSIX" as a purchasing requirement to switch, and then getting them onto the NT API.
Most of the examples on that wiki page have been unsuccessful (IE trying to EEE HTML, Outlook trying to EEE SMTP, etc.), because they weren't able to get enough people to rely on the extended version and stop using the standard thing.
What is the analogy here? Microsoft wants to embrace and extend... compiling software? and will kill off... existing ways of compiling software? How will this work?
It's a slightly different flavor of the same thing.
VS Code is an amazing tool that's getting huge adoption because of how awesome it is, and how open source and community centric it is, etc. They've gotten a lot of mindshare and dev love, that's the embrace bit.
The next step is the set of closed source addons. Have you noticed that a lot of the new VS Code features are now in addons that are under a different license. This includes the new remote dev and python tooling. Still free to use and awesome tools, of course, but fully under MS exclusive and controlled. That's the extend.
I don't know what the longer-term plan is. I'm hoping that it won't lead to an extinguish. But if that's what they want, then they could e.g. cripple the open source version, moving all their dev effort into a closed-source, Azure/Github only web environment. Who knows?
I don't see what post was moved, this is exactly EEE, adopt an open strategy, extend it with proprietary extensions, don't let competition use those extensions, extinguish competition by not being able to interface with your proprietary extensions while having created an expectation from the user for them to be available.
>> What is the analogy here? Microsoft wants to embrace and extend... compiling software? and will kill off... existing ways of compiling software? How will this work?
Microsoft is embracing free development tools that compete with purchased tools they sold. SourceSafe vs Git, Eclipse vs Visual Studio.. those are terrible examples but you get what I mean. So you make a free tier of VS, you buy git hub etc.
Extend.. you try to make your tools as ubiquitous as possible. You convince hobbyists and students that they should use your platform because it is more powerful /useful.. it will help you get a job later. This part of the strategy seems really hard because there are so many development tools that are open source, and lots of companies like IBM, Oracle, Google want to keep one of their own safely under their control.
Extinguish. You add features that only really work on your platform, or work better. Think about trying to develop for Android not on Android Studio. I haven't used VS for a Windows project in a long time but I assume it has similar advantages. Or Intel's compilers used to be the first to work with new instructions.
Ideally people would "have" to use your platform and you can start taxing them for that, either with fees or requirements that they implement your initiatives. Think about Google pushing Kotlin.. Android Studio kind of defaults to that now. Of how it supports Firebase, or defaults new projects in segments. I am not mad about that it or anything, it may just be a good idea. But it shows how if you control the dominant tech platform you can support your initiatives.
This isn't something that keeps me awake at night because a number of tech companies are working to promote their own semi-proprietary or open development platforms. But the fact that so many go to the trouble to do that shows it is a concern.
I understand how EEE is supposed to work. My claim is that it doesn't actually work, at least not for this use case.
So for my argument, SourceSafe vs. Git is a great example. :-) You simply can't keep up with a proprietary tool that does its own stuff. You have to use Git. Microsoft tried having a custom version of Git for Windows OS development, and decided that they weren't even able to get themselves to fall for the trap - they ended up getting involved in upstream Git development and turning all their extensions into standard features.
There are definitely cases where if you control the platform you can control what people are doing. I'm arguing that Microsoft has no actual effective control of the platform here.
EEE doesn't have to work to be considered anti-competitive. The intent is nefarious, it's trying to attract people by offering a veneer of good grace and good intentions, only to capitalize on it once you've attracted a strong enough user base that you can get away with closing things down, squeezing things in, and calling the shots.
So it be great if their proprietary remote extensions fail and they are forced to open-source them and make them a standard, but clearly the intent right now is that they don't fail and it gives them a leverage over their competitors.
They first embraced web standards by building a web based open source IDE called VSCode to get people to convert to it over using Visual Studio.
Now that they attracted people to use it, they embraced Linux containers and offered managed dev containers as a service over it called Codespaces running all on Azure.
At this point, it's all good, this is how a company profits on open source and standards.
But other competitors will not be allowed to use them to compete, and they can't be bundled in anything else, so Sublime wouldn't be able to bundle them in or make use of the remoting features.
The remote extensions are key to the attractiveness of VSCode for use with cloud managed containers, so it's a pretty big differentiator.
On top of that, they purchased GitHub, where most open source software lives, and are now trying to move development on those open source projects to adopt their own proprietary extensions to offer contributors a way to quickly contribute using VSCode and GitHub Codespaces.
Sounds like EEE to me. Maybe it will fail to extinguish, but my guess is we will see a lot of people slowly relying more and more on proprietary extensions owned by Microsoft to the point where if you work for certain companies you might not have a choice but to use VSCode.
I think the 3rd E is more likely "extort" these days. They won't extinguish it, but you'll be paying per user per month forever and the prices will always go up, up, up.
As someone not following this closely, what would that strategy be?