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The Network effect, and cultural mind share are two pretty effective moats. Meta and X proven surprisingly resilient in the face of pretty overwhelming negativ

The Network effect, and cultural mind share are two pretty effective moats. Meta and X proven surprisingly resilient in the face of pretty overwhelming negative sentiment. Google maintains monopoly status on Web Search and in Browsers despite not being remarkably better than competition. Microsoft remains overwhelmingly dominant in the OS market despite having a deeply flawed product. Amazon sells well despite a proliferation of fake reviews and products. Netflix thrives even while cutting back sharply on product quality. Valve has a near-stranglehold on PC games distribution despite their tech stack being trivially replicable. The list goes on.

skydhash 2y ago
Almost all of these are either free or a marketplace (which is free to access). Only Windows is technically not free, but it comes free with the hardware you buy. And they came at a time when there was not a real competition. It's very hard to beat a free product.
- cloverich 2y ago
  Good point. Thinking... Facebook's infrastructure is enormously expensive to run. But they manage that for free. And chatgpt can place ads as easily as google. So openai needs to make it cheap to run, then ads, then victory. People citing their current high prices would be right. But human brains are smarter than chatgpt, and vastly more energy efficient. So we know it's possible. Does this oversimplify?
nemomarx 2y ago
To be fair despite Valve's tech stack being easy to replicate, their actual competition mostly hasn't replicated their feature set in full? Epic took a while to ramp up to "shopping carts" despite having a pretty large funding model, still doesn't have little gimmicks like trading cards and chat stickers, w/e. That's not really moat but it seems like the competition doesn't want to invest to exact parity. (And a lot of stores like Ubisofts or EA's were very feature lite tbh.)
- MoreMoore 2y ago
  I have no idea how the other commenter could come to the conclusion that Steam is trivially replaceable.
- jay_kyburz 2y ago
  Yeah, on face value, Epic looks like they want to compete with Steam, but the developers of the Epic Game store are really phoning it in. They have had years and still not even close, from both the consumer side and the developer side.
MoreMoore 2y ago
Steam isn't trivially replaceable. What are you talking about? No other platform matches them on feature set. Amazon also has a significant advantage in its logistics that underpin their entire business across the globe and that nobody else can match. You're also wrong about how Google maintains its monopoly, or Microsoft. All I see is bias and an unwillingness to understand, well, any of the relevant topics.

skydhash 2y ago

Almost all of these are either free or a marketplace (which is free to access). Only Windows is technically not free, but it comes free with the hardware you buy. And they came at a time when there was not a real competition. It's very hard to beat a free product.

cloverich 2y ago
Good point. Thinking... Facebook's infrastructure is enormously expensive to run. But they manage that for free. And chatgpt can place ads as easily as google. So openai needs to make it cheap to run, then ads, then victory. People citing their current high prices would be right. But human brains are smarter than chatgpt, and vastly more energy efficient. So we know it's possible. Does this oversimplify?

nemomarx 2y ago

To be fair despite Valve's tech stack being easy to replicate, their actual competition mostly hasn't replicated their feature set in full? Epic took a while to ramp up to "shopping carts" despite having a pretty large funding model, still doesn't have little gimmicks like trading cards and chat stickers, w/e. That's not really moat but it seems like the competition doesn't want to invest to exact parity. (And a lot of stores like Ubisofts or EA's were very feature lite tbh.)

MoreMoore 2y ago
I have no idea how the other commenter could come to the conclusion that Steam is trivially replaceable.
jay_kyburz 2y ago
Yeah, on face value, Epic looks like they want to compete with Steam, but the developers of the Epic Game store are really phoning it in. They have had years and still not even close, from both the consumer side and the developer side.

MoreMoore 2y ago

Steam isn't trivially replaceable. What are you talking about? No other platform matches them on feature set. Amazon also has a significant advantage in its logistics that underpin their entire business across the globe and that nobody else can match. You're also wrong about how Google maintains its monopoly, or Microsoft. All I see is bias and an unwillingness to understand, well, any of the relevant topics.