> more people aren't talking about how Microsoft has a near monopoly on the developer ecosystem.
But do they? In my day job, outside of the occasional use of Visual Studio and developing on a Windows machine, I use no Microsoft products for development.
> credit to Microsoft for rehabbing their reputation with developers
With a fair number of younger developers, but certainly not all. Most devs I know don't think of Microsoft any more kindly now than in the past.
Your particular individual experience is not representative of the overall reach that Microsoft has, which is what OP is pointing out.
GitHub is the defacto "point" of software these days, with most devs jumping to that before anything else.
VSCode is the highest ranked editor from the StackOverflow 2023 survey, with (IIRC) something akin to 70%.
Azure is the icing on the cake, because now you have an entire generation of developers building on GitHub, from VSCode, and deploying onto Microsoft infrastructure.
2023 isn't live yet, but 74% of respondents used VSCode in 2022[0].
That said, the numbers are hard to compare because they allow selecting multiple choices and they split the JetBrains products up, while VSCode is considered as one tool.
If you add together all the JetBrains products they reach 94%. I expect there's a ton of overlap that brings that number back down, but it's enough to make me suspect that VSCode's lead isn't as high as the numbers in the survey make it look.
> But do they? In my day job, outside of the occasional use of Visual Studio and developing on a Windows machine, I use no Microsoft products for development.
According to your comment history, you are using JavaScript or used it in the past at least, which usually means you've used npm, which is owned by Microsoft.
And since lots of "young" developers use JavaScript and TypeScript, most of them are also interacting with npm.
Microsoft has captured maybe a larger part of the developer market than you realize. Not by being amazing or with "Microsoft <3 FOSS", but by buying up lots of the market.
I don't think they have one today, but it is looking like they could soon have one. Especially since I believe recent reports show that Azure is starting out pace AWS in adoption? So you have .NET, Visual Studio (Code), Azure, Github, OpenAI, Windows, and I am pretty sure more I am forgetting about. I think the big one that wasn't initially mentioned was Azure.
All of that adds up to having a very significant, perhaps majority, of the market locked up. But it's also all centering around a particular sort of product and product development. Microsoft might be able to lock up that segment, but I don't think they're in a position to monopolize the larger software development space in the near or medium future.
But do they? In my day job, outside of the occasional use of Visual Studio and developing on a Windows machine, I use no Microsoft products for development.
> credit to Microsoft for rehabbing their reputation with developers
With a fair number of younger developers, but certainly not all. Most devs I know don't think of Microsoft any more kindly now than in the past.