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Comment by YetAnotherNick | Hacker News Reader

> What's their moat?

I find this question really annoying. Almost all tech companies have no moat except for maybe brand and network moat which postman also kinda has. What's Apple's moat? Or Google's?

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What is Apple’s moat? They have an integrated hardware and manufacturing supply chain with their own OS and a proprietary chip architecture that no other device manufacturer on earth competes with!

It's just because they have money. It will take billions of dollars and multiple years for other companies to reach that but I don't see any moat except if money is the moat.

Same with postman. Right now they are so much ahead in features that it would take multiple years for other company to match it.

I think its more than money and time. Getting supply chains right (both hardware and software) is really hard at scale. Additionally there’s network effects of their proprietary ecosystem that thousands of developers and millions of users have invested in. Thats very very sticky. Unless Apple fucks up majorly I don’t see that changing.

> Unless Apple fucks up majorly I don’t see that changing.

I agree 100%. I just said the same is true for postman that it is hard for some other company to replace it.

Google has all the money and their phone and phoneOS are still second tier. It's not money. It's about picking a problem and focusing on it. Further, it's about picking the right problem.

Google picked "How do we save (an additional) 20B+ per year in cash payments to a competitor" and "how do we have a path to accessing the world's data ... that is on a phone." -- and then won at both.

Google: chrome is free and makes up 62.85% of browsers and android makes up 70.89% of all mobile operating system. Both drive users to google. Google ads is still one of the easiest tools for monetizing websites and advertising with a large market. Even if Newcomers bridge the massive technical gap, they won't have the same size of market so they aren't going to be as attractive unless they niche down significantly.

Apple has a strong luxury brand, higher quality, a large valuable market with a strong app community. They have a similar insulation to external players. Macbooks also tend to be popular in development communities due to its unix based os and strong support, which can be a strong alternative to a linux os for companies, but has been watered down with Windows push to support WSL2.

Postman doesn't have a moat. They don't have a strong marketplace where they can profit of exchanges. They don't have a significantly more advanced tool. it can be easily replaced by any user with an equivalent product with no real loss.

Google has a search index. Apple has hardware & manufacturing IP.

How is search index a moat? It's hard to build, yes, but there is no moat here and anyone can build it as long as they have infra, talent and money.

Also for Apple while I am not sure, but looking at the Android phones there is hardly any feature of Apple which hasn't been covered by some Android phone, so I don't think IP is an issue. It's just that overall quality is much more consistent for Apple across generations that it has built a good brand.

I don’t think you understand how moat is used in this context. A moat isn’t impossible to cross, just harder to cross than a lawn. Also, I don’t think you can saw two features are the same unless the quality is the same. Two sms apps are not equal if one of them occasionally fails to send/receive messages.

If you include quality as moat, by that definition postman has the moat of better quality, higher brand reputation and having more money.

I agree that postman has a moat. I think it’s important to say that every company has a moat in that they’re organized, located somewhere, and have customers. The size of the moat varies. We can treat a moat as a scalar value of dollars to cross.

Every company also has a valuation, either through public markets, private markets, or discounted cash flows.

A house cleaning company has a moat of trained cleaners, existing client generation process, goodwill of existing clients, etc. If the value of their discounted cash flows exceed the cost of crossing their moat, they are vulnerable.

The argument is that crossing postman’s moat would cost much less than their private valuation, and their future roadmap is unlikely to build a moat that is significantly harder to cross.

> It's hard to build

The definition of a moat.

Apple probably has half a dozen layers of moats one of which is their M line of processors.

Maybe these companies having no moat is part of the problem, though I would argue "stickiness" or "inertia" props a lot of them up, Hotel California style.

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