> And still Cursor came in and made a better product!
On a long enough timeline Microsoft wins this battle. I don't think you appreciate the inertia of market dominance and a massive existing user base. They can simply copy features and push them to millions of developers overnight. More likely, Cursor either gets acquired or becomes a niche alternative while VSCode maintains its dominance.
Competing with established players when you have zero moat is always tough and I don't think Cursor are even close to winning their category yet. Bureaucracies exist in large companies precisely because they've grown successful enough to need them. While they do create inefficiencies, they also enable consistent execution at massive scale - something startups often underestimate until they try to grow beyond their initial niche. It may be slow, but they win by outlasting, outspending or buying you.
However if you simply mean that Cursor can carve a niche quick enough to become an attractive acquisition target then I might concede that fact.
It seems like it ought to be reasonably restrictive to install some new AI tool on dev machines.
* they don’t know who’s behind it, what’ll it output?
* they don’t know the business model. Is will it be used to exfiltrate code from the company, aka train on the company’s codebase? Other text files you open?
I’m not at all saying I think Cursor is doing that—training on customer data would be a completely unethical business practice, bordering on malware, usually companies whose names get bounced around here are not so bad. But, the hypothetical host company doesn’t know anything about them, so it is prudent to require some checking.
I don't even use copilot (yet) because the process of reviewing it through all the different obstacles (security, legal, budget) is on it's 24th month or something. I think many people in traditional industry can relate.
This basically describes Slack vs Teams as a case study. Teams launches, Slack says "good luck with that," MS basically gives Teams away for free and gains market share, then SAP acquires Slack.
> On a long enough timeline Microsoft wins this battle. I don't think you appreciate the inertia of market dominance and a massive existing user base.
So Cursor shouldn't even have tried? It is pointless what they have achieved? That's what you're saying?
I disagree. Having people who know about your product and have a positive experience with your product can be very sticky. Coca Cola is a famous example. Also look at AWS. Microsoft has many of the benefits you said. Microsoft has scale, many existing relationships with customers, own much of the related software, and many more benefits. Still, AWS has a 31% market share while Azure has only a 20% market share. The gap becomes more narrow each year, but it's still not closed. There is definitely a huge benefit to grabbing market share by having a superior product. Even while you only temporarily have that.
You also talk about the economies of scale, but that was my point. Even while Microsoft had all the economies of scale, still Cursor came in and took a large part of the market!
On a long enough timeline Microsoft wins this battle. I don't think you appreciate the inertia of market dominance and a massive existing user base. They can simply copy features and push them to millions of developers overnight. More likely, Cursor either gets acquired or becomes a niche alternative while VSCode maintains its dominance.
Competing with established players when you have zero moat is always tough and I don't think Cursor are even close to winning their category yet. Bureaucracies exist in large companies precisely because they've grown successful enough to need them. While they do create inefficiencies, they also enable consistent execution at massive scale - something startups often underestimate until they try to grow beyond their initial niche. It may be slow, but they win by outlasting, outspending or buying you.
However if you simply mean that Cursor can carve a niche quick enough to become an attractive acquisition target then I might concede that fact.