3 ms·

a moat is any product or feature set so good that you absolutely need to use it or it's just that good. for example, Gmail and google maps was a moat for googl

a moat is any product or feature set so good that you absolutely need to use it or it's just that good. for example, Gmail and google maps was a moat for google in the early days.

saulpw 3y ago
Not quite. A moat is a reason that you can't/won't leave the company/product. An unapproachable feature set might be a moat, but generally a moat is something other than product, that prevents your competitors from succeeding by creating a clone of your product.
- g_p 3y ago
  I guess a good example of a moat in consumer email could be the fact that once you have the user, their email address is forever tied to your service. They can try to forward emails or fetch them, but they can't retain that email address on your domain without still using you (at least to some extent). Sender authentication then means they likely need to use you to send emails. That's a fairly effective barrier to switching for many people, as they won't want to lose their email address now, or need to go through every site they ever signed up with and change it.
andrewla 3y ago
That's not the usual sense of "moat". A moat is usually a structural or regulatory protection that prevents a superior product from competing without first crossing that moat. For example, once upon a time building a superior web browser was hard, because the moat you had to cross was that Microsoft would always prefer their own browser, so Windows created a structural barrier to adoption of new browsers. So the amount by which you had to be better than Internet Explorer back in the day was critical, because if you were just a little better you would never get enough adoption. You had to be much better or convince Microsoft to lower the moat. Bringing up a new stock exchange was another protected industry -- the incumbents had built a huge regulatory apparatus around themselves which meant that to compete with the incumbents, you first had to comply with a lot of regulations which were themselves molded after what the incumbents were doing. Exchanges like BATS took a long time to clear that hurdle, and many exchanges never made it there, even with superior execution technologies, and were consigned to be dark pools instead of lit markets. Theoretically social networks have had the moat of the "network effect" of having a large user base -- Facebook is useless because all your friends are on MySpace so there's no reason to switch, and MySpace is useless because all your friends are on Friendster. The implications here are that incumbents protected by moats are fragile; once the moat is crossed they can no longer compete because they've languished, so get eaten alive (as the two examples here or say traditional taxi services).

a moat is any product or feature set so good that you absolutely need to use it or it's just that good. for example, Gmail and google maps was a moat for google in the early days.

saulpw 3y ago

Not quite. A moat is a reason that you can't/won't leave the company/product. An unapproachable feature set might be a moat, but generally a moat is something other than product, that prevents your competitors from succeeding by creating a clone of your product.

g_p 3y ago
I guess a good example of a moat in consumer email could be the fact that once you have the user, their email address is forever tied to your service. They can try to forward emails or fetch them, but they can't retain that email address on your domain without still using you (at least to some extent). Sender authentication then means they likely need to use you to send emails. That's a fairly effective barrier to switching for many people, as they won't want to lose their email address now, or need to go through every site they ever signed up with and change it.

andrewla 3y ago

That's not the usual sense of "moat". A moat is usually a structural or regulatory protection that prevents a superior product from competing without first crossing that moat. For example, once upon a time building a superior web browser was hard, because the moat you had to cross was that Microsoft would always prefer their own browser, so Windows created a structural barrier to adoption of new browsers. So the amount by which you had to be better than Internet Explorer back in the day was critical, because if you were just a little better you would never get enough adoption. You had to be much better or convince Microsoft to lower the moat. Bringing up a new stock exchange was another protected industry -- the incumbents had built a huge regulatory apparatus around themselves which meant that to compete with the incumbents, you first had to comply with a lot of regulations which were themselves molded after what the incumbents were doing. Exchanges like BATS took a long time to clear that hurdle, and many exchanges never made it there, even with superior execution technologies, and were consigned to be dark pools instead of lit markets. Theoretically social networks have had the moat of the "network effect" of having a large user base -- Facebook is useless because all your friends are on MySpace so there's no reason to switch, and MySpace is useless because all your friends are on Friendster. The implications here are that incumbents protected by moats are fragile; once the moat is crossed they can no longer compete because they've languished, so get eaten alive (as the two examples here or say traditional taxi services).