Atom was developed before the acquisition. Which brings us to the second proud tradition of the tech titans, acquiring companies to end the products the acquirer doesn't like.
Well yeah, if you have two very similar products (editors/IDEs based on web technology), one of them much more successful than the other, putting a lot of effort into the less-used product sounds a bit hard to justify...
If you look at the contribution activity it dropped off after acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft and it seems that development was redirected to VSCode.
The writing was on the wall for a long while now, and was one of the reasons why the JuliaCommunity stopped advocating Juno/Atom as a platform and instead switched to VSCode
Probably a bit of both if I was to hazard a guess. MS has VS Code, which is definitely the elephant in the room as far as go to IDEs in the environments I’ve been in lately. So right now they’re spending engineering time on both VS Code and Atom, so they may as well focus their resources on the more popular one.
Look at the Atom repo, very few commits in the last year, and it's not like there are loads of open pull requests (serious PRs do get merged), and it's been strongly dropping off for a long time. It's the programming community that abandoned Atom, not Microsoft.
it was dead already, or at least, shown inferior to vscode in feature set. If anything you can accuse MS, it's using its market position and the VS brand name to "steal" adoption, but that completed before the aquisition too.
But Atom isn't, is it? It was started prior to Microsoft, to which Microsoft bought Github, and are now "sunsetting". While i don't think Atom was enough competition to actually warrant any real discussion here, the timeline seems quite fitting to EEE no?
Microsoft doesn't make money from VS Code. Atom was retired due to a lack of activity with the project. I've never even seen anyone use Atom, since the time it was released 8 years ago.
> We should be counting down the days till they sunset VS Code to focus on VS Code "Pro".
I don't think it would serve their interests, so I'm not worried about it, but who knows? This cynicism is directed towards Microsoft because they've earned it.
Had two coworkers at my last job use it when they needed to edit some of our legacy PHP stuff (we were mostly a .NET shop) but even they switched to VS Code eventually because the writing was on the wall for support.
