Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 11:35 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Making Emacs popular again by thumperward
Parent article: Making Emacs popular again

> It's absolutely natural that the most popular IDE is essentially a reimagination of Emacs for the 21st century. It's ironic of course that it's a Microsoft product, but it demonstrates that Microsoft are far bolder and more willing to experiment (by creating, and giving away, a free competitor to their own IDE, which was a former market leader) than the infamously hidebound Emacs development community.

You entirely missed one crucial difference:

Microsoft has a legion of programmers they can (and do) order to work on things, and the budget to make that happen, as well as an enormous captive developer audience due to platform lock-in. Not to mention a couple of decades of questionably-legal shenanigans.

Emacs has never had any of that.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 12:30 UTC (Thu) by burki99 (subscriber, #17149) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not convinced by your argument. Your observation

while completely true could be stated exactly the same for the comparison for Linux and Windows. But there the outcome is rather different than what we observe in Emacs vs. VSC. So you can't only focus on Microsoft, you also have to take a look at the development community of Emacs.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 13:06 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> while completely true could be stated exactly the same for the comparison for Linux and Windows.

So, how has "Linux" used its desktop-monopoly-funded profits to enter new markets with loss-leaders, many times over?

Microsoft has probably spent more money on payroll for VS Code in the past year alone than emacs has seen in the form of paid contributions over its entire lifespan, and the pocket change of VS Code's marketing budget likely exceeds the FSF's annual operating costs.

> So you can't only focus on Microsoft, you also have to take a look at the development community of Emacs.

Of course! But let's not pretend that the structure of a well-funded top-down commercial project's community (or the goals that foster that community) will be similar to the community that comes out of a volunteer-driven charity.