1. Opportunity cost of shifting their team to work on a cursor/ firebase studio/ windsurf clone while they are locked into a model arms race might be worth much more than $3 billion if risk losing supremacy
2. They get a million users day one of the deal getting done and instantly own the team + the number 2 best IDE which gives them a massive boost over all their other model competitors like Google and Anthropic. Personally, I still think we are early enough that building makes more sense, so reason 1 still feels the strongest.
3. You get the dedicated windsurf team that can focus 100% on this product while your main model teams can keep cranking
IMO people underestimate effort of hiring people with domain expertise for this. Maybe they can try to buy one person from these teams and then have it help build the core IDE team but this will take much longer than just buying a very strong team.
1. Opportunity cost of shifting their team to work on a cursor/ firebase studio/ windsurf clone while they are locked into a model arms race might be worth much more than $3 billion if risk losing supremacy
2. They get a million users day one of the deal getting done and instantly own the team + the number 2 best IDE which gives them a massive boost over all their other model competitors like Google and Anthropic. Personally, I still think we are early enough that building makes more sense, so reason 1 still feels the strongest.
3. You get the dedicated windsurf team that can focus 100% on this product while your main model teams can keep cranking