Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 604 posts

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

#361

Post by dughnut »

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,…

“And will deliver them with far greater stability and polish”

Stable and polished are not words that ever came to my mind while using any Microsoft product.

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

#362

Post by absqueued »

blueblimp wrote: post #358
john-h-k wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this written by an LLM? Not accusative but something about the vibe strongly suggests it

I feel it too: - Plenty of em-dashes - "you're absolutely right" - "They're X, not just Y"

Not just that, also notice the curly apostrophe (’) vs the usual keyboard straight apostrophe (') mark.

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

#364

Post by ergocoder »

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…

JetBrains makes $400M in revenue and is 10+ years old. Cursor is 1 year old and makes $300M in revenue.

One is going to be valued at a much higher multiple than the other.

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

#365

Post by op00to »

absqueued wrote: post #362
blueblimp wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel it too: - Plenty of em-dashes - "you're absolutely right" - "They're X, not just Y"

Not just that, also notice the curly apostrophe (’) vs the usual keyboard straight apostrophe (') mark.

The sheer number of AI written message board posts might just make me stop reading the comments on sites like Reddit and HN. I wanted to stop anyway, this seems like a good push to encourage me to wean myself.

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

#366

Post by ergocoder »

bix6 wrote: post #25

~$40M ARR makes this a 75x Cursor yesterday was a 45X for comparison (9B, 200M) https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/openai-is-reportedly-in-ta...

Investment vs. acquisition is going to have different price points.

At $40M ARR, I assume the founders don't really need to make more money and are not in a rush to sell. Therefore, the price would go even higher. This can't be compared with investment where the founders still retain the control.

Cursor is probably the fastest growing company in the history of our modern civilization. Achieving a really high multiple doesn't seem out of line.

I'm skeptical of Cursor but I can see why they achieve that high valuation.

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

#367

Post by horns4lyfe »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #312
gexos wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> If they start walling off features like TypeScript 7.0 from forks, the open source pushback will be fierce—and that could backfire hard. Do they have the man power to compete with Microsoft ? Linux managed to do it but Linux is the biggest, most successful free software project there is. Firefox and its forks are a better example. If Mozilla stopped working on Firefox, the forks would be pretty much dead in the wat…

Microsoft’s army of cheap offshored labor isn’t going to be useful for something like that. And they already have copilot, which is miles behind cursor, where was the manpower on that?

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

#368

Post by horns4lyfe »

Szpadel wrote: post #57
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,…

For someone that never used windsurf, what features does it have that GitHub copilot does not? Reading their webpages I didn't spot any "killer feature" that would convince me to switch. I always felt that cursor and windsurf should be just extension to vscode instead of a fork. Was there some missing functionality is vscode that was missing? Is it still missing? There are some extensions that work in this way and al…

The feature they have over copilot is “not sucking”

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

#369

Post by noncoml »

blueblimp wrote: post #358
john-h-k wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this written by an LLM? Not accusative but something about the vibe strongly suggests it

I feel it too: - Plenty of em-dashes - "you're absolutely right" - "They're X, not just Y"

Post history indicates that user likes em-dashes('--'). Probably written on a phone that converts -- to em-dash.

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

#370

Post by whywhywhywhy »

lolinder wrote: post #157
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 import…

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.

The ecosystem will follow the users. If Cursor or Windsurf has better AI coding that’s where the users will be and the extensions will follow.

You’re in the minority if you favor manual coding + extensions over something doing your job for you.

Post reply on HN