If Microsoft can sustain so many teams working on To-Do apps https://twitter.com/4Lou/status/1265723231396417536?s=20 that they need a chart to illustrate how your To-Dos will move between apps, I think Microsoft can afford to put a small team towards maintaining Atom while a larger team works on VS Code and separately Visual Studio. There are different target audiences, and unless Atom and VS Code end up borrowing architecture ideas from each other, and introduce API compatibility, I don’t see that changing in the near future. Generally speaking, Microsoft cares enough about existing customers and backwards-compatibility that I could see them maintaining it until there’s more overlap in UI. There’s another option too, that GitHub is large enough they might prefer using Atom internally over VS Code by enough developers to support the project in the spare time of the developers using Atom instead. So I’d say Atom is only discontinued if it breaks due to lack of developer use and interest, like just about any open source project. I mean, has Bower been discontinued? https://bower.io/ No, but yes? ;-)
Like with Bower, they're probably waiting for enough interest in Atom to drop off before they tell people to migrate to VS Code. With the example of Bower, there are still way too many projects using it in the wild. I predict it's going to be another 8 years or so before they decide to actually put Bower to sleep.
