They couldn’t care less about the tech. This was entirely about corporate accounts and user data. Windsurf caught the first wave of enterprise adoption to agentic coding IDEs, and they have tons of big customers now.
No disagreement, I think developer augmentation is an amazing productization of LLMs, and will likely be better at converting enterprises so paying customers.
But OpenAI has the best brand recognition and the largest user base, and they have the core tech powering all of this. Whats the number on “tons” of customers, given that these VSCode-spinoff/plugin GPT wrappers are sprouting around like mushrooms after a rain?
If this is a build-vs-buy decision, $3 billion? Is that worth 1/3rd of the money in the bank when they’re burning cash at insane rates just running servers, and the rest of the $30b fundraise is tenuous and there may not be a followup? I’m skeptical of the financial decision here.
OpenAI has massive B2C brand value, but their enterprise offerings are scant. The era of consumer chatbot AI is coming to a close, and the winner will be the one who captures the B2B mindshare for real applications.
It’s about buying time as well. Could they put out a competitive product in less than six months? Maybe, but even that would leave them light years behind the market by the time it was ready.
Interesting since OpenAI and Anthropic both still mostly refuse to talk to anyone with "corporate" (information security, AAA, audit log) needs for under 150 seats even if they're willing to pay.
