If it acquired those customers in an environment where Microsoft was not enforcing their marketplace terms it very much does matter if they have a plan for supporting plugins in the future.
Are Cursor and Windsurf going to ask plugin devs to push to their own plugin stores in addition to VS Code's? Will they rally jointly behind a single open store? They need to have an answer to Microsoft here, and for the good of the ecosystem I hope they do have an answer, but customers will flee quickly if they lose access to all the proprietary plugins and to the broader ecosystem.
> Are Cursor and Windsurf going to ask plugin devs to push to their own plugin stores in addition to VS Code's?
They should and probably will soon, and if I were them I'd even consider giving plugin devs a cut of their paying customer subs if MS gets competitive about it.
> but customers will flee quickly if they lose access to all the proprietary plugins and to the broader ecosystem.
Agentic AI coding is more important to customers than VSCode's extension ecosystem. VSCode is who has to worry in this equation unless they ship the same tools in the next few months and heavily subsidize them.
VS Code is shipping agentic coding in the form of updates to GitHub Copilot. I haven't used it extensively yet since they added agent mode, but it's obvious that they're gunning for this market hard, and if I were into VS Code I would not personally choose to lose the ecosystem for marginally better agent mode.
But that's a false dichotomy, Cursor is far from the only capable agentic option. Personally I switched back to using VS Code with Cline + Github Copilot (just for autocomplete and included model access to Gemini Pro 2.5/Claude 3.5/7 that I can use with Cline).
Are Cursor and Windsurf going to ask plugin devs to push to their own plugin stores in addition to VS Code's? Will they rally jointly behind a single open store? They need to have an answer to Microsoft here, and for the good of the ecosystem I hope they do have an answer, but customers will flee quickly if they lose access to all the proprietary plugins and to the broader ecosystem.