I think the amount of turmoil around these deals is giving more weight to the possibility that we’re in a massive bubble thats quite divorced from any kind of fundamentals. Sooner or later the bubbles gonna burst.
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Anthropic ARR went $1B -> $4B in the first half of this year. They're getting my $200 a month and it's easily the best money I spend. There's definitely something there.
It makes me perhaps a little sad to say that "I'm showing my age" by bringing up the .com boom/bust, but this feels exactly the same. The late 90s/early 00s were the dawn of the consumer Internet, and all of that tech vastly changed global society and brought you companies like Google and Amazon. It also brought you Pets.com, Webvan, and the bajillion other companies chronicled in "Fucked Company".
You mention Anthropic, which I think is in a good a position as any to be one of the winners. I'm much less convinced about tons of the others. Look at Cursor - they were a first moving leader, but I know tons of people (myself included) who have cancelled their subscription because there are now better options.
It is a lot less trivial than people like yourself make it out to be to get an effective tool chain and especially do it efficiently.
I am old and I remember when you could make a lot of money offering "Get Your Business On The Information Superhighway" (HTML on Apache) and we're in that stage of LLMadness today, but I suspect it will not last.
Don’t be sorry it shows your true colors. The point stands that you continue to step around. Cursor and other tools like it are more than a trivial wrapper but of course you have never used them so you have no idea. At least give yourself some exposure before projecting.
Dropbox is still a $5+bn business. Cursor is still growing, will it work out, I don’t know but lots of folks are seeing the value in these tools and I suspect we have not hit peak yet with the current generation. I am not sure what a service business like a small biz website builder has to do with Cursor or other companies in adjacent spaces.
Your characterization of hosting as "a small biz website builder" is revealing. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GDDY/ is the one that made it and is now a $24B firm, but there were at least dozens of these companies floating around in the early 2000s.
Why are you so sure Cursor is the new GoDaddy and not the new Tripod? https://www.tripod.lycos.com/
The only person being defensive here is you. My point was simple: tools like Cursor are more than just “wrappers.” Whether it becomes a massive business or not, revenue is growing, and clearly many users find enough value to justify the subscription. You don’t have to like it but writing it off without firsthand experience just weakens your argument.
At this point, you’re debating a product you haven’t tried, in a market you’re not tracking. Maybe sit this one out unless you have something constructive to say beyond “it’s just a wrapper”.