Comment by cryptonector
9 days ago
The only real mote was and is mindshare. Build mindshare, don't screw your users, and your competition will have a hard time dethroning you. LLMs will probably force SaaS and software prices to come down, which will be a great opportunity for dethroning reigning champions.
PostgreSQL, for example, has a ton of mindshare. It will be hard to dethrone it.
OpenSolaris was Sun's attempt to recover from the loss of mindshare to Linux. The a company that had become dominant in databases due to mindshare acquired Sun then failed to understand the mindshare play, and it killed OpenSolaris. Explain that one to me.
Even mindshare might not be such a moat now.
AI coding assistants make it trivial to switch between models, and developers will switch to a different model from a different provider if the new model is perceived to be better than the current one even if that perception is completely subjective.
Furthermore, the only users who will actually pay for AI are these assistant-using developers and other power users -- people who will not hesitate to switch to something better. We are already used to new model releases being neck in neck and there is no real incumbent/underdog dynamic going on here.
Yes, there is strong mindshare among the normies, who only know about "ChatGPT", but as soon as they graduate into a powe user, then the above applies to them.