I don’t quite understand why OpenAI would pay so much when there’s a solid open-source alternative like Cline. I tried both, and feel that Cline with DeepSeek v3 is comparable to Cursor and more cost-effective.
People do this exact thing all the time. Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram whenever Facebook's cash and marketable securities was only $9-10 billion, even though Facebook already had a mobile social media app.
I couldn't remember, thanks for raising that point. So, I searched and found this CNET article[0] which states Facebook ended up only paying $715 million: "Although Instagram's original price tag was $1 billion, Facebook ends up paying $521 million in cash and $194 million in stock for the popular photo-sharing network."
I guess not mostly stock, but still half a billion cash, although not $1 billion. I guess my original point still stands, though it isn't quite as impactful an example. :)
WhatsApp is not profitable yet. At least not as October 2024.
YouTube had the advantage of being able to post pirated videos something that I'm not sure Google would have been able to do. YouTube gained traction in ways Google couldn't duplicate.
People clearly want the subscription model where they don’t have to worry about API keys and such. I bet a huge chunk of this market is non technical people who can’t code and don’t realize how bad the code they’re writing is when Windsurf and Cursor chop off the context to make it cheaper to run.
