The AI platform wars will be won on the developer experience

As much as we like to imagine technology repeatedly presents us with something novel, the reality is that tech history usually repeats itself. Whether mobile, cloud, or another technology trend, the platform that wins developers ends up owning the market. Microsoft learned this lesson with Windows and.NET, and AWS with cloud primitives, as detailed by Microsoft exec Scott Guthrie in a fascinating recent interview. Today we’re seeing the same dynamic in AI. Powerful models matter, sure, but the real prize will go to whoever makes AI trivial to build into everyday software.

In other words, the center of AI gravity isn’t research papers or GPUs; it’s the IDE, the API, and the open source repo. Whoever nails that workflow will end up with the largest, most loyal community—and the bank balance that goes with it. Nothing is guaranteed, but for a variety of reasons, Microsoft seems to be in the strongest position.

Microsoft: The accidental front-runner

Microsoft looks like an overnight AI sensation, but its lead has been decades in the making and originally had nothing to do with AI. It is, and was, always a matter of developers.

According to Guthrie, Microsoft’s early dominance didn’t happen because Windows was a superior operating system. Microsoft relentlessly focused on making it easy for developers to build for Windows. “No one buys a platform by itself,” Guthrie notes, “they buy it for the applications that run on top.” Microsoft’s success was built on a foundation of tools such as Quick Basic and Microsoft C, which armed developers to build the ecosystem that made Windows indispensable.

Then came Visual Basic, a tool Guthrie calls “absolutely revolutionary.” At a time when building a graphical user interface was a soul-crushing exercise in writing error-prone code, Visual Basic let developers drag and drop buttons, double-click, write a few lines of code, and run. It “transformed development” by lowering the barrier to entry, enabling a generation of programmers who were more focused on solving business problems than mastering arcane syntax.

This playbook—empower the developer, win the platform—is core to Microsoft’s DNA. It’s why the company faltered in the early 2010s when its developer story grew stale, and it’s precisely how it engineered its stunning comeback.

The masterstroke, of course, was Visual Studio Code, or VS Code.

By 2014, Microsoft was losing the hearts and minds of the next generation of web and cloud developers who lived on Macs and in open source. As Guthrie tells it, Microsoft leadership knew they were on a “slowly melting iceberg.” Their response wasn’t to build a better Azure portal. It was to make a series of bold, developer-first decisions: They open-sourced.NET and made it cross-platform, and, most critically, they launched VS Code.

VS Code was free, fast, open source, and ran everywhere. It wasn’t an explicit on-ramp to Azure; it was just a great tool that developers loved. That love rebuilt Microsoft’s credibility from the ground up and created the bridge that made the GitHub acquisition not just possible but palatable to a skeptical developer community. Today, Microsoft owns the primary editor (VS Code) and the primary collaboration platform (GitHub) preferred by developers. VS Code is used by three quarters of professional developers, and GitHub boasts more than 100 million developers. As Guthrie puts it in his interview with Gergely Orosz, “If you don’t have developers … building … applications [on your platform then] you don’t … have a business.”

It’s safe to say Microsoft now has lots (and lots) of developers building applications on its platforms.

GitHub Copilot also created a virtuous cycle for Azure. Need more model horsepower? One click in VS Code lights up an Azure OpenAI endpoint. Microsoft’s $10 billion bet on OpenAI, which at the time seemed excessive, suddenly looks cheap; the company turned bleeding-edge research into a sticky developer value proposition faster than any rival. Microsoft, weirdly, is cool again.

Is the AI war Microsoft’s to lose?

None of this guarantees Microsoft the winning position in AI, but it does make unseating Microsoft difficult. Again, the winner in AI will not be the company with the best API for a stand-alone model. The winner will be the company that seamlessly integrates AI into the developer’s existing workflow, making them more productive by orders of magnitude. Guthrie sees AI not as a replacement for developers but as the next evolution—a continuum from IntelliSense to today’s AI agents. “It’s really about … giving every developer superpowers,” he says.

Microsoft is clearly ahead with this approach. Guthrie’s vision of evolving Copilot from a code-completing assistant to an autonomous agent that can take a Figma design and build a working microservices architecture is the holy grail of developer enablement. If the tech giant can pull it off, it’ll be tough to beat.

Even so, it’s way too early to declare victory.

Take AWS, for example. AWS has a massive, entrenched developer base, roughly one-third of all cloud spend, and an extensive menu of AI services, such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker. On this last front, AWS has been trying to up its developer tools game. Amazon Q Developer, for example, is an IDE plug-in that promises everything GitHub Copilot does, plus deep knowledge of your AWS bill, identity and access management policies, and Kubernetes manifests. AWS has the distribution and is trying to give developers a reason to keep workloads on AWS.

And yet, AWS has never been a “tools” company. Its strength lies in providing a vast, powerful, and often bewildering array of infrastructure primitives. The developer experience can feel like assembling a car from a million different parts without a manual. AWS Cloud9 has failed to gain any meaningful traction against VS Code. AWS is powerful but has never demonstrated the product savvy to build a cohesive, beloved developer tool.

For AWS to win the AI tools race would require a fundamental shift in its corporate DNA. After all, Microsoft didn’t just integrate GPT-4; it re-thought the whole editing experience. AWS must prove it can match that polish while keeping its hallmark flexibility. If it does, its installed base all but guarantees share. If not, developers may happily write Lambda functions in VS Code—and deploy them on Azure.

What about OpenAI? It has what the others crave: unparalleled mindshare and, for now, the “hottest” models. Developers genuinely love the elegance and power of OpenAI’s APIs. OpenAI has successfully made sophisticated AI accessible to anyone with a credit card and a few lines of Python.

But OpenAI is not a platform company. OpenAI is a feature, albeit a spectacular one. It exists entirely on top of someone else’s platform (Microsoft Azure). OpenAI doesn’t own the editor, the source control, or the CI/CD pipeline. To win, the company must either build out this entire developer ecosystem themselves—a monumental task—or hope that their API-led momentum is so strong that it doesn’t matter. The risk is that OpenAI becomes a commoditized intelligence layer, with the true value accruing to the platform that integrates its APIs most effectively.

Keep an eye on Redmond

History rarely repeats itself exactly, but its lessons are potent. Just as Visual Basic transformed development by simplifying complexity, AI-powered tools will do the same on a much grander scale. For this reason, Microsoft is the clear favorite to win the largest share of the AI market.

Their victory is not guaranteed. It depends on their ability to execute on the VS Code playbook: prioritizing the developer experience above all else, even if it means building tools that help developers deploy to AWS or Google Cloud. The moment VS Code feels like a restrictive on-ramp to Azure, its magic will fade. The same is true of GitHub.

Microsoft, as Guthrie calls out, learned its lesson in the early 2010s and has kept its eye on developers. Today Microsoft starts closer to developers’ keyboards and has shown a willingness to bet the balance sheet to stay there. But AI platform cycles are measured in months not decades. AWS has the cash and OpenAI has the mindshare, and both have huge communities betting on their success. All of this is great for developers, who have never had more leverage.