Why don't they just make their own in-house development environment? Cursor's codebase is maybe 5,000-50,000$ worth of actual code, even just $10M (compared to the $60B) could knock Cursor out of the park with a completely custom code editor, and even with a smaller budget they could fork VSCode. Maybe for the social value? I feel like a $10B advertising budget for a bespoke AI development environment is more than enough to become an actual competitor.
Concepts like this make me think about precision in products. When you spend 40,000$ on a computer chip you get a commodity piece of nm-scale precision. When you spend 40,000$ on a pink ivory coffee table you get a pile of wood with a maximum precision of 0.1-1mm. I'm just wondering what it would be like if atom-level precision was the main focus of every single premium product.
The 40,000$ of a bespoke coffee table comes from the uniqueness of the manufacturing process. No piece of wood is the same, and the way it is prepared from start to finish differs based on numerous factors.
The price of a computer chip has been lowered so significantly because of the standard process that is used across millions of chips with materials that are 99.999999999% pure.
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