Comment by CamperBob2
1 day ago
They ultimately want to own everyone's business processes, is my guess. You can only jack up the subscription prices on coding models and chatbots by so much, as everyone has already noted... but if OpenAI runs your "smart" CRM and ERP flows, they can really tighten the screws.
If you have the greatest coding agent under your thumb, eventually you orient it toward eating everything else instead of letting everybody else use your agent to build software & make money. Go forward ten years, it's highly likely GPT, Gemini, maybe Claude - they'll have consumed a very large amount of the software ecosystem. Why should MS Office exist at all as a separate piece of software? The various pieces of Office will be trivial for the GPT (etc) of ten years out to fully recreate & maintain internally for OpenAI. There's no scenario where they don't do what the platforms always do: eat the ecosystem, anything they can. If a platform can consume a thing that touches it, it will.
Office? Dead. Box? Dead. DropBox? Dead. And so on. They'll move on anything that touches users (from productivity software to storage). You're not going to pay $20-$30 for GPT and then pay for DropBox too, OpenAI will just do an Amazon Prime maneuver and stack more onto what you get to try to kill everyone else.
Google of course has a huge lead on this move already with their various prominent apps.
Dropbox is actually a great example of why this isn't likely to happen. Deeper pocketed competition with tons of cloud storage and the ability to build easy upload workflows (including directly into software with massive install base) exists, and showed an active interest in competing with them. Still doing OK
Office's moat is much bigger (and its competition already free). "New vibe coded features every week" isn't an obvious reason for Office users to switch away from the platform their financial models and all their clients rely on to a new upstart software suite