Berber Jin, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
OpenAI is planning to unify its ChatGPT app, coding platform Codex
and browser into a desktop “superapp,” a step to simplify the user
experience and continue with efforts to focus on
engineering and business customers.Chief of Applications Fidji Simo will oversee the change and focus
on helping the company’s sales team market the new product. OpenAI
President Greg Brockman, who currently leads the company’s
computing efforts, will help Simo oversee the product revamp and
related organization changes, an OpenAI spokeswoman said.The strategy change marks a major shift from last year, when
OpenAI launched a series of stand-alone products that didn’t
always resonate with users and sometimes created a lack of focus
within the company. OpenAI executives are hoping that unifying its
products under one app will allow it to streamline resources as it
seeks to beat back the success of its rival Anthropic.
This sounds like an utter disaster in the making. Would it make any sense for Apple to merge Safari, Messages, and Xcode into one “superapp”? No, it would not. It makes no more sense for OpenAI to merge ChatGPT, Codex, and especially Atlas together. I use and very much enjoy ChatGPT because its Mac client is such a good Mac app.
Simo came to OpenAI by way of Shopify and Instacart, so it doesn’t surprise me that she sees OpenAI’s existing product-first culture of creating well-crafted native apps as a problem, not a strength to build on. If this “superapp” plan is true, it’s going to tank everything that heretofore has been good about ChatGPT and Codex.
