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I remember thinking the same about a bunch of friends I know who were working at early GitHub. What are you all doing build a replacement Campfire? Omg, now the
by glenngillen 1mo ago
I remember thinking the same about a bunch of friends I know who were working at early GitHub. What are you all doing build a replacement Campfire? Omg, now there's a team building an IDE because they don't like Textmate? And dozens of similar ones I've forgotten over the years. But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode. Which given they ultimately ended up at MSFT probably didn't hurt when the acquisition conversations started.
- ajmurmann 1mo agoWell, some of these exact people are who built Zed.
- dlisboa 1mo ago> But both of those lead to Electron, and Atom, and ultimately VSCode You just gave an example of 3 unprofitable projects. That's pretty much my point: great that we got all of this stuff out of it but in any company not propped up by massive amounts of VC money you can't pay tens of millions of dollars in engineering salary for no immediate gain.
- jon-wood 1mo agoThey're projects where there's not a payment page to buy a copy sure, but VSCode especially has I'm sure indirectly led to a ton a of profit - its the natural home of Copilot, integrated with Github (including in their paid product Codespaces), and has I'm sure led to a ton of standardisation and productivity increases across the company.
- dlisboa 1mo agoIndirectly, maybe 8 years after Electron was first started, and not for the company that first invested in Electron. My point yet again: only companies with money to burn can take that gamble.
- conartist6 1mo agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but the company that invented Electron was Github, and you could argue that Github's technical investments did all pay off very richly.
- worldthruword 1mo agoGreatness cannot be planned.