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0 pointsmattmaroon1y ago0 comments

Maybe. Moats are often surprising. Google’s moat is just that people think of Google when they think of search. Bing could be significantly better than Google, and in fact, a lot of people think it is, and still not get anywhere.

A lot of people said Microsoft’s Windows moat in desktop operating systems was gone when you could do most of the things that a program did inside a browser instead, but it’s been decades now and they still have a 70% market share.

If you establish a lead in a product, it’s usually not that hard to find a moat.

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layer81y ago

Google’s moat is their search index and infrastructure (which is significantly larger-scale than an LLM), and the fact that non-Google/Microsoft web crawlers are being blocked by most websites.

Windows’ moat is enterprise integration, and the sheer amount of software targeting it (despite appearances, the whole world doest’t run on the web), including hardware drivers (which, among other things, makes it the gaming platform that it is).

OpenAI could build a moat on integrations, as I mentioned.

mattmaroonOP1y ago

Eh, Bing’s index and infrastructure are perfectly adequate and they’ve still got a single digit market share. One might argue other people dont have them (others once did) because Google’s brand moat drowned the competition and makes nobody else bother.

OpenAI could build a moat in a lot of different ways including ones that haven’t been thought of yet.

They’ll find several I am sure.

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