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OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

bloomberg.com

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Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#241

Post by bix6 »

conartist6 wrote: post #213
bix6 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like the openAI team is overburdened (I guess they aren’t AI super users yet) so this may be their only option. Easy entry into a key segment, at least for now, and locks out competitors.

As a competitor in that key segment I don't feel locked out. I could almost jump for joy that this very weak-tea move is the most they can do with that much money . They're just quintupling down on the technology of 50 years ago. There's no threat to me at all here as a creator of from-first-principles IDE technology.

What are you working on?

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#244

Post by mirekrusin »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #232
lnenad wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've got users (which I don't doubt that OpenAI's fork of VSC would have as well but I assume that's their thought process)

Yup. Even a small market share is market share. Plus they are paying to acquire a team of folks who are already in this space and who will, until golden handcuffs come off, keep working in this space. Still an insane number though.

But openai is stronger brand with free publicity - whatever they say/do will instantly show up the same day on all news across the world.

The "space" exists for months, there are no people with 10y expertise here, with their brand they can attract any talent they can wish for in this "space", no?

You can probably vibe code 80% of it in a week or two?

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#245

Post by filmgirlcw »

twodave wrote: post #177
sofixa wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, they have been behind the competition for many years. Gitlab had extremely good CI, security scanning, organisational concepts, etc. for years before GitHub introduced their ones (and Actions still has a worse UX, and GitHub still doesn't have anything below an organisation).

Well you’re right (especially wrt things like security scanning), but you sort of have to include Azure DevOps in the conversation nowadays. I think the end goal for Microsoft is to get the larger organizations into ADO, either cross-pollinate pipelines and actions or just replace actions with pipelines at some point, and leave GitHub for simpler project structures and public codebases. That’s why you won’t see a ton…

I can say with a high level of confidence that the goal is definitely not to push larger orgs to ADO over GitHub. ADO is and will continue to be supported and you’re right that its project management features are much more advanced than GitHub, but the mission is not to push people off of ADO and into GitHub.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#246

Post by lolinder »

retornam wrote: post #240

I'm skeptical about this VSCode fork commanding a $3 billion valuation when it depends on API services it doesn't own. What's their moat here? For comparison, JetBrains generates over $400 million in annual revenue and is valued around $7 billion. They've built proprietary technology and deep expertise in that market over decades. If AI (terminology aside) replaces many professional software engineers and programmers…

Part of what you're missing is that OpenAI needs to justify its own overinflated valuation. They raise money on the premise that an AI-native company can and will outcompete giant established players, so lowballing Windsurf would run counter to the narrative they're selling to their own investors.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#247

Post by skydhash »

no_wizard wrote: post #182
Onavo wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their devtools team is surprisingly competent when they choose to be. Pre-2015, people used Sublime Text, Atom, Textmate, Notepad++, Light Table, Brackets, Emacs/Vim, Intellij. VS code single handedly crushed all of them with code completion and language servers that require zero configuration. Emacs/Vim lost share, Jetbrains (and also Eclipse) were forced to release their own "lightweight" code editors, and everybod…

I would contend that JetBrains has only grown even with VS Code around. They're still more than viable, support things on a near similar cadence (and even in some cases, faster and/or better) than VS Code gets support for it. I agree with the rest, they've all mostly lost market share or completely no longer exist due to VS Code, but not IntelliJ, that platform is going really strong. Though no doubt, VS Code has pus…

It’s hard to compete with free when free is backed by lot of money.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#248

Post by arthur-st »

crsv wrote: post #219

Man why did these guys do that OpenAI couldn’t replicate for less than 3Bn on reasonable timeline? This seems insane.

They have an old-school enterprise sales operation that is doing superb work. Apart from that, ChatGPT's projects are useless crap (can't read other convos in a project; can't generate project documents from a convo), and so clearly they would get value out of just getting some developers who have built anything of use to a poweruser.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#249

Post by cheema33 »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #231
Androider wrote: post #28

Windsurf and Cursor feel like temporary stopgaps, products of a narrow window in time before the landscape shifts again. Microsoft has clearly taken notice. They're already starting to lock down the upstream VSCode codebase, as seen with recent changes to the C/C++ extension [0]. It's not hard to imagine that future features like TypeScript 7.0 might be limited or even withheld from forks entirely. At the same time,…

I was a little late to jump on the cursor bandwagon but finally downloaded it because i liked the LLM chat interface in the sidebar. By the time my free trial ran out, VSCode had added a LLM chat interface in the sidebar. Yes Cursor had a bit better auto complete and maybe a few other things but it wasnt good enough that it was worth paying for. But I'm glad OpenAI is getting into the tooling space in this way. I can…

> By the time my free trial ran out, VSCode had added a LLM chat interface in the sidebar.

I am guessing you are talking about GitHub Copilot when you say VSCode. GitHub Copilot is far far inferior product when compared to Cursor, Windsurf or Augment Code. Most people who try almost any Copilot alternative for a reasonable amount of time end up canceling their Copilot subscription. I did, after two months of using both.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#250

Post by goodluckchuck »

retornam wrote: post #240

I'm skeptical about this VSCode fork commanding a $3 billion valuation when it depends on API services it doesn't own. What's their moat here? For comparison, JetBrains generates over $400 million in annual revenue and is valued around $7 billion. They've built proprietary technology and deep expertise in that market over decades. If AI (terminology aside) replaces many professional software engineers and programmers…

If OpenAI just provides AI, then the various IDEs development wrappers / IDEs / low-code etc. can collectively bargain against OpenAI for low rates. If OpenAI has an alternative, then they can charge higher rates for all plugins/ etc. and give the market an alternative.
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