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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

#281

Post by lolinder »

samdjstephens wrote: post #274
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…

Just consider what it fundamentally is: a company at the leading edge of a product category that has found absurdly strong technology/use-case fit, and is growing insanely fast. Looking for a moat in the technology is always a bit of a trap - it’s in the traction, the brand awareness, the user data etc.

> Looking for a moat in the technology is always a bit of a trap - it’s in the traction, the brand awareness, the user data etc.

Traction, brand awareness, and user data do not favor Windsurf over GitHub Copilot. The few of us who follow all the new developments are aware that Windsurf has been roughly leading the pack in terms of capabilities, but do not underestimate the power of being bundled into both VS Code and GitHub by default. Everyone else is an upstart by comparison and needs some form of edge to make up for it, and without a moat it will be very hard for them to maintain their edge long enough to beat GitHub's dominance.

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

#282

Post by fcanesin »

xnx wrote: post #144
fcanesin wrote: post #119

OpenAI knows that everyday someone uses Gemini their ChatGPT brand dies a bit faster. Wonder what Google has in storage for I/O now in May, would be a death sentence to just steamroll with Gemini-3.

> Wonder what Google has in storage for I/O now in May "Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (I/O edition)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43906018

LMAO, like one hour after. And guess what, it is a coding upgrade .

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

#283

Post by bix6 »

conartist6 wrote: post #272
bix6 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you working on?

It's not too hard to find out, but I'm going to make a big announcement in a few days so my official message at the moment is "stay tuned"

It’s one of your GitHub projects?

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

#284

Post by scarface_74 »

cheema33 wrote: post #257
no_wizard wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Jetbrains products are used primarily by Java devs. Everybody else is slowly moving away. I did.

I don’t know a single C# developer who knows about ReSharper and doesn’t swear by it.

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

#285

Post by casey2 »

fcanesin wrote: post #119

OpenAI knows that everyday someone uses Gemini their ChatGPT brand dies a bit faster. Wonder what Google has in storage for I/O now in May, would be a death sentence to just steamroll with Gemini-3.

Open AI needed to spend $3B pivoting away from bigdata based AI. But instead they went for the most shorted sighted move possible of snapping up the "trendiest" company nobody has ever heard outside the Ycombinator echo chamber.

Typical VI-fallacy BS. If LLMs were actually good they would replace IDEs completely not be integrated.

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

#286

Post by jsheard »

serverlessmania wrote: post #276

GitHub acquired for 7b, Windsurf a VScode fork + Agentic LLM… 3b$. I should be missing something.

> Windsurf a VScode fork + Agentic LLM… 3b$.

They don't have their own LLMs either, they've glued a 3rd party editor to 3rd party models. That's some expensive glue.

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

#287

Post by rvz »

rvz wrote: post #35

Very surprising outcome, since OpenAI went after Cursor (twice) [0] And I originally thought that Cursor would be bought instead a day before the rumour [1]. It was smart for Windsurf to take the offer and to get greedy in this hype cycle. Unless Cursor is thinking that Anthropic or someone else will buy them for a lot more, its going to get extremely competitive as the switching cost for Cursor is zero and that ARR…

*not get greedy.

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

#289

Post by 3abiton »

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,…

This is the right take, but long term. Short term, it's just about investor hype. Cursor is becoming more mainstream and if OpenAI falls behind on this, they'll be losing momentum. But yes, the fields moves so fast, it'll be totally different in a year or 2. Does anyone recall langchain?

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

#290

Post by TiredOfLife »

jsheard wrote: post #286
serverlessmania wrote: post #276

GitHub acquired for 7b, Windsurf a VScode fork + Agentic LLM… 3b$. I should be missing something.

> Windsurf a VScode fork + Agentic LLM… 3b$. They don't have their own LLMs either, they've glued a 3rd party editor to 3rd party models. That's some expensive glue.

They have their own autocomplete model.
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