If investors think that the acquisition will increase the valuation of the company by 3B (or more), and the acquisition is paid fully or mostly in stock - then one can it basically for free.
The "Windsurf" brand has little value in comparison to OpenAI's, but $3B lets them hit the ground running with a proven developer product (better than Cursor IMHO), the team who created it, and a customer base.
Maybe ChatGPT told them it was a good idea? Considering the proliferation of these tools there's no way it's worth $3B. This functionality is going to be built into every IDE eventually: vscode just got an agent mode, it might not be great yet but it's only a matter of time until Windsurf is essentially just management tools because there won't be much editor value add available.
Precisely. For most users, there is hardly value in moving off of VSCode. Granted, if Windsurf can make itself into a VSCode extension, there may be some competitive value to it.
Isn’t Windsurf a VSCode-based IDE anyway (just like Cursor)? Basing it off the screenshots from their website.
I haven’t tried it, but if it is similar to Cursor (which I tried), then it hardly counts as “moving off VSCode”, which was one of the reasons I found switching to it easy. Cannot even really call it a move, if I can just quickly export-import all of my VSCode settings over (including themes and extensions), and they will all pretty much “just work” the exact same way and autoupdate from the exact same extension hub out of the box. Hell, even the UI is pretty much the same, so everything feels familiar, and i can be at least just as productive as usual immediately.
One of the biggest wins of VSCode (to me personally) is how functionally interoperable it is with other IDEs that are built off it.
If you believe the founders/team is the right group to deliver a core product 3b is nothing to get them onside.