MS is not making money on dev tools, and roughly never has. They even say that in their reporting. What possible source of data are you using to say that MS is making money at devtools? The only way to do it would be to mix it with cloud stuff or services.

Github is the closest devtool thing that they get the most money from, and

1. It was never profitable prior to MS buying them.

2. MS does not report profit, only ARR. Which is small (1B). That suggests it is not profitable, and at the very least, not profitable to matter (it's revenue is <1% of MS revenue, it's profit is probably an order of magnitude smaller).

Heck - if you talk to the people there, they would tell you the same - for many years their dev tools headcount and budget was stable or declining because it is considered a cost center and not a profit center.

Github changed some of that but they are still not profitable, AFAIK.

Overall, this 'don't try to make money from tools' approach is intentional - as i said, the market is small and they know that. So they really don't try to make direct profit at dev tools anymore (at best, they try to get it to pay for itself), instead using it to generate indirect revenue.

There are a very small number of exceptions to this (attempts at enterprise revenue for github, which, again, are not succeeding yet).

VSCode is a very explicit recent example of this approach - they don't even charge for it.

The only reason they still charge for VS and subscriptions is to defray costs at all.

You are both making a lot of weird assertions with no data, and lots of attacks on people and things. This is not particularly helpful?

You don't need to critique his comment and I don't need to critique your comment. Yet here we are

> MS is doing fine with dev tools (VS Code, GitHub…)

GitHub has a revenue of about a billion. That's less than 0.5% of Microsoft's revenue. And like the comment pointed out, behemoths capture the bulk of the revenue. What exactly is he wrong about?