Comment by netdevphoenix
Comment by netdevphoenix 4 hours ago
What is Google's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here. What prevents people from just using Altavista/Yahoo/[any other search engine].
You vastly underestimate the power of habit and branding combined together. Just like then, the vast majority of people equate ChatGPT with AI chatbot, there is no concept of alternative AI chatbot. Sure people might have seen some AI looking thing called Copilot and some weird widget in the Google Search results but so far ChatGPT is winning the marketing game even if the offerings from rivals might be the same or even superior sometimes
Google's competitive moat 20-25 years ago was being a significantly better search engine than the alternatives. That remained true for decades.
You can't say the same about ChatGPT. And Google wasn't spending $4 to make $1 almost 10 years after its founding, which will become an issue at some point.