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est31 a day ago

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.

platinumrad a day ago | parent | next [-]

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.

est31 a day ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, Linux-the-kernel does have a stable ABI indeed, but this is not relevant for most ISV desktop software out there. In my comment above I was referring to Linux-the-OS (aka GNU/Linux). The userspace libs don't have a stable ABI at all, and this is a widely discussed problem. Other operating systems built on top of Linux-the-kernel don't have this problem, Android has a really stable ABI.

mr_toad 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The userspace libs don't have a stable ABI at all, and this is a widely discussed problem.

And DLL hell isn’t? Or the shambolic mix of 32 and 64 bit libraries on Windows?

Anyway, desktop binaries are increasingly rare for business software.

iknowstuff 14 hours ago | parent [-]

I dont think dll hell is a problem anymore

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-by-side_assembly

alightsoul a day ago | parent | prev [-]

You are describing the gnu c library I believe. That can be worked around with flatpak and appimage.

ammo1662 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For user space applications, Win32/Windows is the most stable ABI on Linux, via Wine/Proton.

whs a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most people don't directly call Linux syscalls though but go through glibc. It might even be unavoidable if you want to ship desktop apps as the library will use it. If it's that easy there wouldn't be Python's manylinux, flatpak base packages or Steam Linux runtime

iknowstuff a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Not relevant for user space applications written atop glibc/gtk/kde/qt

newspaper1 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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.