So in summary OpenAI are basing their valuation of 285 billion on the moat of 'users won't be arsed to download a different app'???
Seems optimistic when there is very little intrinsic stickness due to learning the UI or network effects. Perhaps a little bit chat history - but not 285 billions worth.
Also completely ignoring the fact that most devices things will start to come with the same features directly built into the device/app - and the largest market will be as a commodity backend api that the eventually users won't know or care if it's a google or openai model.
As I see it, they need to be doing stuff nobody else can ( in either price or performance ), otherwise it's hard to justify the valuation.
It took Google a decade before they released Chrome so OpenAI has plenty of time to have a Chrome moment. Maybe it'll be something that comes from the OpenClaw acqui-hires?
During that time - as was pointed out elsewhere - Google search was simply way better than the alternatives - embarrassingly so. It also paid the Mozilla foundation lots of money to be the default.
Google wasn't bleeding money like crazy at the time. Google was operating in a post-hype cycle. We are most likely somewhere in an epsilon around the peak of the AI hype and OpenAI is more comparable to AOL or Yahoo. One striking similarity is the inability to innovate themselves, instead relying on copying others or acquiring.
The OpenClaw guy is surely a decent product person, but OpenClaw did not innovate in any real sense. He was just pushing an existing idea to the limit without any concern for quality or security. It had its hype moment, it inspired a bunch of people, and might find its own niche, but it is a flavor of the week kind of thing. I've been getting a lot more cold-calls by non-technical people in the last few weeks thanks to it. Congratulations, the quality threshold that justifies my response rose in equal measure. Nothing was gained, just a lot of tokens spent.
Um. Google has already integrated Gemini into Chrome. I'm not sure what you mean by "OpenAI has plenty of time to have a Chrome moment". If you're just referring to the browser wars, the original wars were fought (furiously) between Microsoft, Mozilla, (and to a lesser extent Apple). Microsoft thought they had won, and then Chrome came out.
> It’s not anymore (actually google is awful now) and people are still using it
if people are still using it, then it's really one of the few things, right?
* you are wrong and it's not awful
* it _is_ awful but good enough for normal people to never care about alternatives, which are anyway not even very easy to find given the absolute stranglehold google has on that slice
either way not quite the same as choice of llms today.
I am using duckduckgo for a decade. But especially, I am using Firefox Saved searches a lot. I type mdn in the bar, and it searches in the Mozilla developer network. osm is openstreetmap, so is stackoverflow, w is Wikipedia, yt is YouTube... I often know on which website I will find the info anyway, so I use less a generic search
I used Kagi for several months, I guess I'd at least recommend trying it out.
I stopped using it, though, and I can't honestly say I've missed it. It was nice not having sponsored results, I guess, but overall it didn't feel like a transformative experience.
Yeah but the only alternative that's actually better is paid. Google is still best ad supported search engine out there. There's no one obvious to turn to or recommend.
The best free alternative to Google right is ironically $preferred_llm_provider and ChatGPT is the obvious uncapped free option. I think free will end up being OpenAI's most if they manage to make it profitable.
Google was better, but I'd argue that, say after 2014 or so, for the vast majority of my searches there was no real difference with Bing, and in some areas Bing was better (e.g. some aerial imagery in maps). Bing still never made a considerable dent in Google's market. I can easily see ChatGPT being a similar story.
Google was clearly superior fo a long time. They got close to 90% before enshitification started in earnest. We are not at that stage yet with AI chatbots.
Also, Google benefited from being the default on mainstream OSes. When people have to download an application, getting one or the other does not take more effort. Yes, OpenAI being tightly integrated within Windows, Android, and iOS would be a moat. That’s not the case and it is unlikely to happen. Google will go with their own and Apple won’t put itself in a situation where they are reliant on a single company, they got burned enough times.
Also which search engine was the default was a massive factor - that's why Google paid for that.
If Google hadn't controlled Chrome, and or paid for defaults - they could have pretty much lost all their traffic overnight - ( if they weren't better ).
Search is easy to monetize with ads and less expensive to operate. Unless AI services can do the same thing, they'll have to charge money at some point, and then customers will look for the cheapest.
All of googles products are unique in some way and have genuine moats. The search engine was the best. The ecosystem was there and pretty good. Docs had online collaboration. And on and on.
You'd be surprised that most people don't find any pleasure in comparing and trying out different software. They're looking for something which works and ChatGPT is just an amazing product. People aren't going to look for something else unless it breaks for some reason.
Most people who have a vehicle aren't trying out different motor oils, or comparing every month if they should change model, etc.
> As I see it, they need to be doing stuff nobody else can ( in either price or performance ), otherwise it's hard to justify the valuation.
Do you have a car? What does it do that no other car does?
> the moat of 'users won't be arsed to download a different app'???
don't even need to download anything, just open your browser and go to google.com to use gemini
last week-end, I've seen a non-tech friend who previously used chatGPT on his phone, just go on google to ask stuff to the AI (they have no idea it's gemini and it doesn't matter)
if you are not looking for having some kind of relationship with an AI (from what I understand people use chatGPT for this use case), but just looking for an AI to search stuff, then in my opinion you can't beat google search + gemini summary all at once for free with a single prompt
These models respond differently and have their own "personality". Even in coding, there are people who swear by one model over the other. I know engineers who just stick with Claude and could not care to try Codex. For them, if it's not broken, why fix it?
> Even in coding, there are people who swear by one model over the other
I just swear at the models. =P But jokes aside, I liked Claude Code and found it a big productivity boost for a month or two. Then the honeymoon phase slowly ended and I realized how much of its code I was rewriting myself. I don't use assistants anymore except to summarize changes for commit messages or PRs (and then I rewrite those summaries).
Not sure how many developers are like me, but I am very open to Claude, very open to Gemini, open to open source models (including gpt-oss), but am very reluctant to use frontier OpenAI models. The Microsoft distrust runs extremely deep, the browser authentication dance demanded of users for ChatGPT was the most extreme of the major frontier models, and early OpenAI API service stability was absolutely terrible. Llama had my back back then.
This is is no way dismissing your concern but I think this reinforces my point about branding. Whether or not Microsoft is handling AI in a responsible way, we don't trust them due to their poor practices on Window.
Apple has offered products with little value over competitors for a long time now, but they still get to command a large premium on their products because "the vibes are right".
When engineers analyze things they look at the specs, stats, and metrics. When consumers analyze things they look at what others are doing, feel for vibes, roll into the convenience, and stick with the familiar.
> The overwhelming volume of Apples sales comes from people who wouldn't notice if their device was running 2016 level hardware.
How could we possibly know this? This is just an argument from elitism, as though the plebes should be happy playing Farmville on their gateway computers, while us haughty developers sit in our ivory towers and herald in the end of the anthropocene using machines we can actually appreciate.
They make a good point. Apple's most-popular device is a smartphone that doesn't handle workloads any heavier than Snapchat or Instagram. The value prop of the iPhone is not rooted in the performance or battery life (as Liquid Glass showed us) but just the branding.
Apple makes more money selling iPhone accessories than they make selling Macs. The desktop market share isn't going up, the Mac's lifeline is depreciation of old hardware to force Mac owners into the upgrade cycle: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
> They make a good point. Apple's most-popular device is a smartphone that doesn't handle workloads any heavier than Snapchat or Instagram. The value prop of the iPhone is not rooted in the performance or battery life (as Liquid Glass showed us) but just the branding.
It's not a good point, it's an assumption based on elitism, just like your assumption that nobody is doing anything other than Snapchat or Instagram on their phones, or that they're only buying an iPhone because of the branding and not also the performance and battery life. In your head, what do you think the average iPhone user looks like? Are they drooling simpletons?
> Apple makes more money selling iPhone accessories than they make selling Macs. You look at the desktop market share in 2026 and it's very apparent that the Mac's regular upgrade cycle is driving Apple's sales, not direct competition: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
What point are you trying to make here? People like the iPhone, the iPhone makes a shitload of money, so therefore people who have Macs don't appreciate the hardware? Or what?
Almost nobody is doing anything other than Snapchat or Instagram on their iPhones. That's the point, "the overwhelming volume of Apple sales" was the original claim and they're absolutely right. Compare every single Apple product on volume and you will not approach the volume of iPhones being sold. Even cult-classic product lines like the Mac cannot hold a candle in comparison to Airpods sales volume.
If the iPhone was a branded Android device, then sure, maybe this would be an elitist argument. But the iPhone is a proprietary platform with a locked-down browser, locked-down store, locked-down GPU drivers and OTA updates that decide how long your battery lasts. It is not elitist to point out that Apple customers by-and-large ignore these facts, it's the objective circumstances of the smartphone market.
> For example, I thought there was universal sentiment that apple silicon / M-series computers are pretty unmatched.
5 years ago, sure, but the x86 world has come a long way since Apple dumped Intel. I'd certainly take a 2026 Intel machine over something with an M1-M3.
I think the point was supposed to be default
apps in an OS, similar to default search
engine.. What I am missing is that OpenAI
is in no way that default. Every OS, browser,
etc should be able to find a more profitable
default than sending someone to OpenAI.
Apple is one of the very few companies committed to (hardware) quality. They make sure their entry level models are very decent. You can't buy a apple product that is complete shite.
Yes, the software side is getting worse in recent years but is it at least slightly better than the competition for average consumers.
Plus being a tech monopolist they can offer a whole ecosystem of software and hardware that works great with each other. So the value proposition is greater than the sum of its parts.
That is the problem with OpenAI, they have only one thing. Google can bleed money all day long and they don't need to care because they have other profitable business ventures.
The way to make money with LLMs is to either be technically superior which only works short term until the competition catches up or create a monopoly. The second option is dead in the water with the advent of the Chinese models. I guess they can lobby to have them banned and create a cartel with their other US based competitors. Otherwise they are screwed. That is why they are allowing military use of their model now. They need that sweet government money to survive. Also they keep talking about AGI so the government gets scared about the Chinese reaching it first and supports them. Complete scam.
it's a very different world when you switch from an iphone to an android phone or vice versa. However, Claude.ai and chatgpt.com are not very different at all. If one has ads and the other does not, it's easy to switch.
If a setting is default, if an app is presented on the front they'll continue to use it as it is. The crowd here always overestimates how competent/interested the general public are in these things.
99.9% (source: my life) of users never even open the second level of the settings app. 99% don't even open the settings app. They don't know how much they can even change or care.
iPhones auto surfacing airpods to pair with was not for convenience it was a necessity. People don't know how to pair with bluetooth. Now android does it as well.
There's a generation that grew up with appliances that accounted for their mistakes rather than failing. There's no need to learn or understand how something works.
> Authority matching responsibility. That's the only fix I've seen work.
So, if I understood correctly, complaining that his architectural advice for other teams/people was constantly ignored, and his solution is the same thing he was complaining about.
ie The teams he was advising also thought authority should match responsibility - and they did want they wanted and ignored him?
Well we know he was wrong as his entire premise was based on war being inevitable - all the logic flows from that one wrong assumption.
Also trying to take out supposed capabilities before they are built - doesn't mean the Russia people are suddenly freed from communism. ( cf Iran ). Also there is a premise that it's somehow a one off event. When in reality you'd have to constantly monitor and potentially constantly strike ( cf Iran ).
I think some of those barriers are going away ( in the UK it's now possible to get symmetric full fibre at a reasonable price ), static IPs, ISP's without filtering etc.
I think the main barrier is still the complexity of running your own service - it's a full time job to keep on top of the bad actors.
For example, if you have your own domain it's perfectly possible to run your own email server - however it's quite a lot of ongoing effort - it's not just set up and forget.
> however it's quite a lot of ongoing effort - it's not just set up and forget.
I have seen those kinds of opinions on internet already few times. No it is not that complicated.
Yes you need to buy server.
Yes you need to setup the DNS.
Yes you need to maintain, and update server and its software.
But this is like that with everything you selfhost.
Beside that you need mostly 1 time operations like:
- setup domain entries
- setup SPF
- setup DKIM
- setup certs
- install server (of course)
- test if this works
- setup some Google Postmaster account because they do not like new domains sending them emails
I do not remember anything else beside some administrative tweaks here and there. But!
I never attempted to run postfix, dovecot combo myself. I was aiming to run whole thing on Docker and forget about configuring dozens of config files on Linux host.
With docker you can just migrate whole set of volumes to new machine and that is it. I am running Mailcow BTW.
I am not sure about other mailsevers but with Mailcow I occasionally (once per week maybe) get spam notification (release/delete call to action) that I just click and that is all. I have DMARC reports coming in but as far as I remember they are about my own server outgoing emails.
So no, I do not think so.
As for my own emails they were rejected maybe by just few times. But I do not use email much - just some personal communication. I am not running marketing campaigns that places my IP on some blacklist.
I think I just one time was on one of spam lists. I just emailed them or applied for removal via some webform and they removed the entry pretty much instantly. I do not remember other problems.
As far as I understand this article it talks about different IPs in SPF. This is just one machine with one IP. I do not send big quantities of emails from other servers. And even if I would need to I would just create mail box and send emails via that mailbox.
A UK comedy called RedDwarf used variations of smeg as a mild expletive quite liberally. When asked some of the producers claimed they made it up to get around broadcast rules, but most people think it's a shortening of smegma.
I agree that the original 4 parts of the web component spec ( custom elements, shadow dom, templates, modules ) had varying levels of battle testing and perhaps the most valuable ideas ( custom elements and ES modules ), were those which did have the biggest precedence.
> Frameworks collaborate, research and discover solutions together to push the technology forward. Is not uncommon to see SolidJS (paving the way with signals) having healthy discussions with Svelte, React, Preact developers.
This feels a bit deflective from the very real issue of in page framework interoperability - which is different from dev's taking to each other and sharing ideas.
When people say battle tested what they are really doing is looking for bias confirmation. Its no different than when they say software becomes more durable due to community validation.
The only way to be sure is to actually measure things, with numbers, and then compare those numbers to some established baseline. Otherwise its just a guess. The more confident the guess becomes the less probable from the average it becomes. This is how rats out perform humans in weighted accuracy tests in clinical trials.
Not sure what you mean - are you asking number of users, length of time etc?
All I'm saying with this is that ideas which have actually been implemented, used and evolved, are much less likely to have rough edges than something that's never left a whiteboard or spec document. I wasn't expecting that to be controversial.
This stuff is difficult - if I remember correctly the original web components vision was a completely self-contained package of everything - that didn't survive contact with reality - however the things like custom-elements, templating and ES modules are, in my view at least, very useful - and I'd argue they are also the things that had the most precedents - because they were solving real world problems.
That is an irrational comparison. There is no comparison between components and something imaginary or theoretical. The comparison is between components and not imposing components into the standards, which are both well known conditions.
People don't need components. They want components because that is the convention familiar to them. This is how JavaScript got classes. Everybody knew it is a really bad idea to put that into the standards and that classes blow out complexity, but the noise was loud enough that they made it in for no utility reason.
The idea that people don't want some sort of improved modularity, encapsulation, reusability, interop etc I think is wrong.
We can argue about whether components as proposed was the right solution, but are you arguing that templates, custom elements and modules have no utility?
Templating, for example, has been implemented in one form or another countless times - the idea that people don't need that seems odd.
Same goes for a js module system, same goes for hiding markup soup behind a custom element.
There was an initial proposal called web components that comprised a whole slew of enabling technologies - like custom elements, like modules, templates etc. Some of the proposals never got implemented.
The closest single thing to web components is custom-elements ( with optional shadow dom and optional slots ).
That completely misses the point. You are mistaking your preference for some objective, though unmeasured, benefit.
I could understand an argument from ignorance fallacy wherein your preference is superior to every other alternative because any alternative is unknown to you. But instead, you are saying there is only way one of doing things, components/modularity/templates, and this is the best of that one way's variations, which is just a straw man.
You really aren't limited to doing this work the React way, or any framework way. If you want to continue doing it the React way then just continue to use React, which continues to evolve its own flavor.
> But instead, you are saying there is only way one of doing things,
Nope. I did not say there is only one way of doing things. I asked you whether you really thought people didn't want improved modularity, encapsulation, reusability, interop.
For example without standardised modules you either had to choose one of several community module systems or live with poor modularity and encapsulation. And by standardising modules interop improves.
> If you want to continue doing it the React way then just continue to use React,
Only one of us is appearing to want to stop the way the other only likes to develop. If I want to use custom elements why all the anger?
> agree that the original 4 parts of the web component spec ( custom elements, shadow dom, templates, modules ) had varying levels of battle testing
What battle testing? Literally nothing in Web Components was ever battle-tested before release. You wouldn't need 20+ specs to paper over the holes in the design had they actually veen battle-tested.
Read my comment again. I literally said that various parts had various levels of precedents - and that the more successful parts were those with stronger precedents.
> Literally nothing in Web Components was ever battle-tested before release.
So you don't thing the ideas of modules or templates had had multiple precedents?
Totally agree that some aspects had much less precedent - and that's why, in the end, they either didn't get implemented or haven't got much traction.
> The best and most useful data is often inaccessible to crawlers.
Interesting point.
> ost open forums are dead because discussions happen on login platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, X, Discord, etc
Ironically isn't one of the reasons some of those platforms started to use logins was so they could track users and better sell their information to ad people?
Obviously now there are other reasons as well - regulation, age verification etc.
Does this suggest that the AI/ad platforms need to tweak their economic model to share more of the revenue with content creators?
I wonder if it may depend on the type of learning.
Whether it's something completely new and alien - in which case children might be better, or whether it's learning through association - ie I understand that because I can connect it to previously learnt concepts ( which would favour people with more previous knowledge ).
For example, something like maths is often seen as a young persons game, but at the same time you probably don't want a 14 yr old running your company.
Seems optimistic when there is very little intrinsic stickness due to learning the UI or network effects. Perhaps a little bit chat history - but not 285 billions worth.
Also completely ignoring the fact that most devices things will start to come with the same features directly built into the device/app - and the largest market will be as a commodity backend api that the eventually users won't know or care if it's a google or openai model.
As I see it, they need to be doing stuff nobody else can ( in either price or performance ), otherwise it's hard to justify the valuation.
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