I always thought the economic moat was supposed to be some feat of R&D that is hard to replicate.
Like figuring out how to make an AI that functions as a human-quality call center representative. It's not that there's a network effect or something, just that noone else can figure out how to do it without a tremendous investment.
A 'moat' simply refers to the ability of certain firms (over the long-term) to sustain or increase profitability and/or market share within a given industry. For most firms, profit and market share erode over the long-term.
The discussion of light vs dark patterns in this thread is more confusing than clarifying. Moats come in all shapes and sizes because a moat can pretty much be anything that satisfies the definition above; which doesn't preclude moats from frequently being of a certain kind(s).
What about delivering a product in a way that makes it impossible for anyone else to attempt to deliver a better product than you?
For example, there might be a smart search algorithm researcher who could make a better search engine than Google, if given access to their data. But without the data, it doesn’t matter how good their algorithms are, the search will be worse.
Googles moat is so good that it precludes the very existence of viable competing services. Is this a dark moat or a light moat?
> Googles moat is so good that it precludes the very existence of viable competing services.
So how do you explain the existence of viable competing services? Plenty of people have switched to DuckDuckGo and while it still has a tiny fraction of Google's market share it appears to be viable and growing. Microsoft still operates Bing. Again its market share is tiny but at this point I imagine they continue to operate it because it is somewhat viable and not just for strategic reasons.
Like figuring out how to make an AI that functions as a human-quality call center representative. It's not that there's a network effect or something, just that noone else can figure out how to do it without a tremendous investment.
That's more light than dark, right?