why does cursor have $100m ARR then?
I read the first one when it was posted here too and I don't get their point. It's a lot of words, but what are you trying to say?
I read the first one when it was posted here too and I don't get their point. It's a lot of words, but what are you trying to say?
First mover advantage.
They are not safe against Microsoft, who have the resources to copy every feature that Cursor has into VS code and can afford to offer it for "free" for a very long time and Microsoft also has access to the exact same models as Cursor.
So not only that tells you there is no moat, but offering the best tools and models for free is exactly what Microsoft's modern definition of "Extinguish" is from their EEE strategy.
Cursor was released after Copilot
If you just slap a ChatGPT backend onto your product, your competitors will do it too and you gain nothing without some additional innovation.
(2) On the other hand, Cursor's value is essentially gluing the two things together. If your data is already in the castle (e.g. my codebase and historical context of building it over time is now in Cursor's instance of Claude) then the software is very sticky and I likely wouldn't switch to my own instance of Claude. The author also addresses this noting that "how data flows in and out" has value, which Cursor does.
> The AI Code Editor - Built to make you extraordinarily productive, Cursor is the best way to code with AI.
Cursor is literally a VS Code fork + AI.
> unless you’re building or hosting foundation models, saying that AI is a differentiating factor is sort of like saying that your choice of database is what differentiated your SaaS product: No one cares.
Cursor is doing exactly what they say "no one cares" about.
It's bad writing (and thinking).
It seems cursor did a bunch of things right, from choosing to base it on an already popular editor, to the vision and specific ways they have integrated AI, to the flexibility of which models to use. No doubt there was some "early mover" advantage too.
Certainly the AI isn't their moat since it's mostly using freely available models (although some of their own too I believe), and it remains to be seen how much of a moat of any kind or early-mover advantage they really have. The AI-assisted coding market is going to be huge, and presumably will attract a lot more competition.
I'm old enough to remember when the BRIEF (basic reconfigurable interactive editing facility) editor (by Underware) took the world by storm, but where is it now?
Any other former BRIEF users/fans out there ?!