| I think this is more interesting as a rubric than as a prediction. I agree with some of it and not with others; I don't know if we're "cooked" or not; I do like how they've broken vertical software's moats down though. 1. I don't buy that chat interfaces will replacing existing user interfaces. I'm in particular a little bit familiar with Bloomberg's user culture. I don't know that I buy that it's going to be replaced with LLM chat prompts. But software agents are going to make faithfully reproducing those existing user interfaces much easier, so: half credit? 2. Half credit again on LLMs vaporizing the "business logic" moat, because the vertical-specific rules that justified the original software market are I think a lot harder to encode in Markdown than the 1 week they gave it, and also verification becomes a bear as more ground-truth business logic is replaced with nondeterministic AI output. There's a thing happening here for sure, I just don't buy it's as decisive as they say. 3. Public data access: I 100% buy this. If this was a real moat, it's dead. 4. Talent scarcity: same deal. Remember, we're talking about vertical software, where the underlying technical work is fairly repetitive and best-practices driven; it's the exact slice of software development work LLMs excel at. 5. Bundling (you get IB messaging along with your charting and your news service); maybe. This point feels tautological. Work out what LLMs do to each of the bundled experiences and there's your answer for how resilient that moat is. 6. Proprietary data: I think they're just dead on right here, and it does indeed seem to be a good time to be a company like Bloomberg? 7. Regs lock-in: half credit, because AI does make regs compliance a lot easier, and I think we're at the very early stages of seeing how. 8. Network effects seems like a repetition of "bundling" and if I have a qualm about this rubric it's that they made it look like an even 10, so they could have clean wins and losses. 9. Transaction embedding (ie, being a payment processor or a loan originator) also seems tautological; it's a moat, sure, but they're begging the question of whether AI enables people to stand up viable competitors. 10. I think "system of record" and "transaction embedding" are kind of the same moat. I wish people would not blog on X (I will call it X when it's used as a crappy blog platform); these ASCII charts are awful. But that's neither here nor &c. |