I just wonder whether the analogy holds from atom based businesses to byte based businesses. At the end of the day, there are pretty hard constraints on how much a competitor could undercut Vulcan - they'd need to be better a) crushing rocks and b) driving those rocks to where people need it. Something about that, while simple, seems really nonfungible to do well. The business may traffic in commodities, but the service and quality it provides ironically seems to be not really a commodity.

Conversely, AI models feel pretty different. People will swap models at the drop of a hat and while not perhaps fully fungible, the cost of switching can be as low as one engineers it to be. In this case, the service does really seem to feel more like a commodity.

Not sure where this leads or how this ends. Perhaps those two will swap poles for me (IE as robotic automation improves, there are more commoditized Vulcans, and as metered intelligence improves, they become less fungible). I just can't quite see how yet. Just food for thought.