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> defensible moat … investors mistakenly thought investing in Netscape was a good way to bet on the future Yet Chrome for Google did help create a moat. A moa

> defensible moat … investors mistakenly thought investing in Netscape was a good way to bet on the future Yet Chrome for Google did help create a moat. A moat that’s is so strong the DoJ is investigating if Chrome should be a forced divesture from Google/Aplhabet. Note: I do generally agree with the article, but this also shows why you shouldn’t use analogies to reason.

scarface_74 2y ago
Google was already dominant before Chrome. Why would anyone want to buy Chrome instead of just basing a browser on Chromium? How are they going to monetize it?
LittleTimothy 2y ago
I don't think you're analyzing this right. The web browser itself has no defensible moat. The reason that Chrome is winning is because Google has a massive money printer in the basement run by 3 guys and a hungry Alsatian (trained to bite anyone who messes with the money printer), and then 100,000 smart engineers desperately trying to find some application to throw that money at. The result is Chrome, Google invests in it because they don't want to be intermediation between them and eyeballs - it's a strategic play, not necessarily a direct money maker. So that's why they do it. But there is no moat, they have the number 1 browser because they spend enormous sums of money hiring top engineers to build the number 1 browser. And this has been true of the browser for a long time, Internet Explorer won because they forced people to use it and used a tonne of anti-competitive practices to screw the competition. Firefox still managed to disrupt that simply by building a better product. This is the clear evidence there is no moat - the castle has been stormed repeatedly.
alexey-salmin 2y ago
The moat for Chrome is "it's free because it's subsidized by Google's search monopoly". Before that moat for Explorer was "it's free becaus it's subsidized by Microsoft's OS monopoly", that's what killed Netscape, they couldn't subsidize the Navigator. OpenAI can't do anything comparable to Google at this point because they have no other product. If anything they're more like Netscape.
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scarface_74 2y ago

Google was already dominant before Chrome. Why would anyone want to buy Chrome instead of just basing a browser on Chromium? How are they going to monetize it?

LittleTimothy 2y ago

I don't think you're analyzing this right. The web browser itself has no defensible moat. The reason that Chrome is winning is because Google has a massive money printer in the basement run by 3 guys and a hungry Alsatian (trained to bite anyone who messes with the money printer), and then 100,000 smart engineers desperately trying to find some application to throw that money at. The result is Chrome, Google invests in it because they don't want to be intermediation between them and eyeballs - it's a strategic play, not necessarily a direct money maker. So that's why they do it. But there is no moat, they have the number 1 browser because they spend enormous sums of money hiring top engineers to build the number 1 browser. And this has been true of the browser for a long time, Internet Explorer won because they forced people to use it and used a tonne of anti-competitive practices to screw the competition. Firefox still managed to disrupt that simply by building a better product. This is the clear evidence there is no moat - the castle has been stormed repeatedly.

alexey-salmin 2y ago

The moat for Chrome is "it's free because it's subsidized by Google's search monopoly". Before that moat for Explorer was "it's free becaus it's subsidized by Microsoft's OS monopoly", that's what killed Netscape, they couldn't subsidize the Navigator. OpenAI can't do anything comparable to Google at this point because they have no other product. If anything they're more like Netscape.

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