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OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

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

#481

Post by senko »

elevatortrim wrote: post #185
dontlikeyoueith wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. Probably. > And deliver them with far greater stability and polish That seems ... overly optimistic given MS's history.

Microsoft is owing its bad reputation to Windows, Office, Sharepoint!!!, Teams (and more?). The quality of developer tools and languages (C#, Visual Studio, Code and .NET Ecosystem, Azure UI is also great) from Microsoft has been flawless (with some exceptions like webforms, or ui code generation tools of the past).

Putting "Azure" and "flawless" into the same sentence shows we might have very different expectations for "flawless".

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

#482

Post by sofixa »

no_wizard wrote: post #189
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).

GitLab UI is inferior IMO, and I've used both quite extensively. I don't like that GitLab lets you nest organizations and such, it makes it so painful to find things over time. I appreciate GitHub doesn't do this, I view it as a plus I also disagree about GitLab CI, not that it wasn't smart for them to include alot sooner than GitHub, but Actions is really good and really easy to get up and moving with. I find they r…

> I don't like that GitLab lets you nest organizations and such, it makes it so painful to find things over time. I appreciate GitHub doesn't do this, I view it as a plus

Nah, I hate that. At my job we have a few different orgs, with terrible SSO boundaries (having to auth multiple times to GitHub because I work on repositories from different GitHub orgs). Allowing you to have a proper structure with nestedness, while still having good search, is great. You can also easily move projects and namespaces around, so if the structure doesn't work, it can evolve.

Why would you have the 50 library repositories you've had to fork as top level projects polluting your org? You also can't really do shared variable, environment, CI configs between repos of the same project/type.

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

#483

Post by pantulis »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #461
johntarter wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are acquired for customer base, ARPU, and growth. Same criteria as when when raising funding.

I don't think that's the case here. Windsurf wasn't leading the agentic coding market. They were doing a decent job but others are bigger. Cursor has the brand recognition and Claude is getting a lot of recognition too. MS has github copilot which is still a good brand and Google has been catching up with Gemini. OpenAI has a new thing called codex but it isn't very good yet. I tried it and it's super flaky. Lot's of…

> OpenAI has a new thing called codex but it isn't very good yet. I tried it and it's super flaky. Lot's of errors and it gets stuck when that happens.

I agree with this, not sure the experience of everyone else but I felt like Claude Code is more useful.

Meanwhile, I'm keeping tabs on Aider and open-codex, what other options are there?

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

#484

Post by justanything »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #461
johntarter wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are acquired for customer base, ARPU, and growth. Same criteria as when when raising funding.

I don't think that's the case here. Windsurf wasn't leading the agentic coding market. They were doing a decent job but others are bigger. Cursor has the brand recognition and Claude is getting a lot of recognition too. MS has github copilot which is still a good brand and Google has been catching up with Gemini. OpenAI has a new thing called codex but it isn't very good yet. I tried it and it's super flaky. Lot's of…

I wanna pick your brain a lil. Are you saying agentic AI has helped you replace devs that you would otherwise need for your startup?

In your opinion, what should one do/learn to get a SDE/related gig now? What do you/other companies look for?

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

#485

Post by madduci »

rpgbr wrote: post #268
bko wrote: post #29

Incredible timeline to a $3B exit > Windsurf began in 2021 as Exafunction, founded by MIT graduates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen. The company initially focused on GPU optimization before pivoting to AI-assisted coding tools, launching Codeium, which later evolved into Windsurf. > Series B (January 2024): $65 million at a $500 million valuation. > Series C (September 2024): $150 million, led by General Catalyst, at a…

It's a bubble about to pop. That's where the value is coming from.

It's all about stocks

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

#488

Post by Iolaum »

bko wrote: post #29

Incredible timeline to a $3B exit > Windsurf began in 2021 as Exafunction, founded by MIT graduates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen. The company initially focused on GPU optimization before pivoting to AI-assisted coding tools, launching Codeium, which later evolved into Windsurf. > Series B (January 2024): $65 million at a $500 million valuation. > Series C (September 2024): $150 million, led by General Catalyst, at a…

I think part of the value is customer acquisition rather than product.

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

#489

Post by frabcus »

casey2 wrote: post #285
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.

There's an in between case, where LLMs are useful and give coders a (say) 20% speedup, and everyone has to use them. They don't have to be perfect to be a big industry!
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