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0 pointssangnoir1y ago0 comments

> ...like saying Microsoft has no moat for spreadsheets

Which would be very inaccurate as network-effects are Excel's (and Word's) moat. Excel being bundled with Office and Windows helped, but it beat Lotus-123 by being a superior product at a time the computing landscape was changing. OpenAI has no such advantage yet: a text-based API is about as commoditized as a technology can get and OpenAI is furiously launching interfaces with lower interoperability (where one can't replace GPT-4o with Claude 3.5 via a drop-down)

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sumedh1y ago· 2 in thread

> OpenAI has no such advantage yet: a text-based API is about as commoditized as a technology

It has branding, for most people AI is ChatGpt. Once you reach critical mass, getting people to switch becomes difficult if your product is good enough and most people are happy.

tsimionescu1y ago

Branding is a very weak moat outside fashion industry and similar places - outside visible status symbols. It's a relatively strong moat for clothes, watches, even things like the iPhone.

But for things you do alone at home, this quickly goes away. Uber is a strong brand, everyone associated non-taxi taxis with Uber. When Bolt came around in much of Europe, and offered the same service with better wait times (they were paying drivers more, so lots of drivers switched), people moved over to Bolt in droves.

sebastiennight1y ago

> Branding is a very weak moat outside fashion industry and similar places - outside visible status symbols.

Have you tried getting someone to switch from Chrome to Firefox?

UI is basically the same, the product is more performant (faster load, easy to disable all ads, etc). But the moat is how resistant a normal user is to switch from the thing they've used without having to think about it, to the new thing.

I can definitely see the ChatGPT app becoming as "sticky" as Chrome.

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