[jongjong]

No moat? In the software industry?

My decades of experience suggests that the opposite will happen. People will realize that the software industry is 100% moat and 0% castle.

People will build great software that nobody will use while a few companies will continue to dominate with vaporware.

[andsoitis]

> few companies will continue to dominate with vaporware.

that makes no sense. "Dominate" implies people use or buy you software. If you produce nothing ("vaporware") how can you dominate?

[jongjong]

Most modern software is horrible. Linux is objectively better than Windows and cheaper but it has much smaller market share. Same story with OracleDB vs PostgresDB. Developers recently identified a critical vulnerability in MongoDB that had been there for 10 years, yet RethinkDB, a superior product was shut down (at least the company) because they couldn't find enough customers. There are so many such cases.

They're vaporware in relation to what else is available.

[mikert89]

Yes, the moat is disappearing. Go look at any stock index of publicly traded saas companies, they have all been selling off 50% in the last six months. This is going to be a bloodbath

[usefulcat]

Some are down over the previous 6 months, but not by 50%. At least among the largest.

    Company:     6 month change:
    ============================
    Palantir:    +20%
    Salesforce:  -9%
    Shopify:     +40%
    Intuit:      -26%
    ServiceNow:  -30%
    Adobe:       -17%
    CrowdStrike: -1.5%
    Snowflake:   -3%
    Cloudflare:  0%
    Autodesk:    -9%

Above companies are the 10 largest from this list:

https://www.mikesonders.com/largest-saas-companies/

[kubb]

OTOH there’s no reason not to hire a small in house dev team to make bespoke software for any company.

Except for the token cost maybe.

[anonu]

Thats just not true. $CRM is at worst flat looking back 1 year. $IGV, software ETF is the same. Definitely not down 50%.

[jongjong]

The moat is marketing and social media algorithms. These tech companies are subsidized by investors and drive up the CPC to levels that don't make financial sense this is the moat.

If a superior product launches without marketing, it will not get a single customer; it's incredibly hard to spread through word of mouth these days... With paid advertising, you end up paying Facebook inflated CPC to get bot traffic!

[sdf2]

Lol what a nonsensical post. Stock prices? Your argument would hold more weight in regards to talking about revenues which are a reflection of sales performance. But stock prices? hahaaha.