logoalt Hacker News

est31yesterday at 11:49 PM2 repliesview on HN

Those solutions have moats:

1. the cloud moat is mostly around talent really. Try finding people who can self host the alternatives to S3 et al at the HA and the scale the businesses need. Those alternatives are usually not free either, and each product might have its creator acquired (and the product cancelled) or similar. if you're a larger business then the data lock in becomes a moat: getting your data out of the cloud is prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, large businesses have sweet discounts.

2. ms office has immense networking effects due to its formats being quasi standards in many industries. try sending an odt to a government entity. As for gsuite, it uses open formats but it's classical google fashion a large suite of software bundled together and not that expensive for what it offers.

3. Linux is not a free alternative if you're a business, you still need to pay someone to support the computers with linux on it, and operating systems have the strongest network effects ever. Linux also has no stable ABI so one can't easily deploy third party software for it.

What's the LLM moat? Codex is OSS and Claude has gazillions of alternatives. Cursor is a nice app but it's a bunch of patches on top of vscode, a team of 5 people can vibecode it in 6 months.


Replies

platinumradyesterday at 11:56 PM

Linux has a very stable userspace syscall ABI. About as stable as Windows, and much more stable than MacOS or the BSDs. I agree with everything else though.

show 4 replies
newspaper1today at 12:33 AM

Interesting that LLMs remove the moats for 1 (except for data lock-in) and 3, possibly even 2 if they can convert formats on the fly.