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.

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.)

I have no idea how the other commenter could come to the conclusion that Steam is trivially replaceable.

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.

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.

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?

Network effects are a moat.

A vertically integrated system that people depend on with non-portable integrations is a moat.

Regulatory Capture is a moat.

What is the moat of the Google Search? To me the LLM is the first and the only disruptor so far of the Search.

It used to be their high search quality, difficult to replicate technology. Now they don't have one.

Well, Google’s willingness to pay potential competitors tens of billions of dollars per year to disincentivize developing a competing search engine is kind of a moat.

Their moat is lock-in across services now. People are "Google" users not just "web search" users.

Google’s moat is eroding (filling?), but over the years it shifted from best product/tech to best brand.

Google is still good enough for most searches. Say finding web page of restaurant or some cursory information on popular topic.

I suppose competitor would have to be really good on those times most users need something better.

So it is the brand and familiarity. It would need to get really bad even on most basic things to be replaced.

muscle memory

Here's an idea for a moat: "You know all the ethically extremely questionable grabbing of personal data and creative work we did to build our LLM? Yeah, that's illegal now. For anyone else to do, that is."

Copyright is an outstanding moat. Think Disney.