nelsonic
commented
8 years ago Read their privacy policy: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/EnterpriseDev/default.aspx and decide using the editor is a "good idea"... PFD in case the link/page is unavailable: Microsoft-Enterprise-and-Developer-Privacy-Statement.pdf
Choosing an editor to write our code is not something we have to do often, most people pick an editor early in their "career" and stick with it.
I started out with Notepad, tried FrontPage and Dreamweaver (back when "WYSIWIG" was "the way") then Emacs and Vim for a while then used "Kate for about a year till I discovered SublimeText. Then in 2014 switched to Atom because it was OpenSource (so everyone can use it) and has a plugin system so anyone can fully customise it.
When GitHub made
Electron(on which Atom is based) a separate engine for building cross-platform apps they invited everyone to build using their tool.So perhaps it's a testament to the success of Electron that Microsoft have used it for "VisualStudio Code" ...?
So _why_ has Microsoft spent a bunch of money (paid a team full-time developers in Switzerland) to make a "free" editor? And why are they paying google (Adwords) to get people to use it...?
What I've learned from watching the recent trend is that "developers" are people. They respond to (get suckered in by) marketing like everyone else. Microsoft's Marketing Team is an army and they're on a mission.
Why didn't they just contribute to Atom? https://github.com/atom/atom/ Simple answer: they want to own the ecosystem around creating software.