Owns the enterprise seat and the procurement line item; every new product ships through doors it already holds.
| Dimension | MOATE | Community |
|---|---|---|
| Switching costsweight 15Office formats, Active Directory, and decades of internal tooling built on Windows. | 9 | — |
| Network effectsweight 15Teams and shared documents create some pull; weaker than a true network. | 6 | — |
| Scale & cost advantageweight 12Azure scale and a global enterprise salesforce that no startup can replicate. | 8 | — |
| Brand & pricing powerweight 12Trusted by IT, rarely loved by users; pricing power comes from bundling, not desire. | 7 | — |
| Cornered resourceweight 12Enterprise relationships and the OpenAI partnership; neither is permanent. | 6 | — |
| Distribution controlweight 12Windows, Office, and Teams put every new product one click from hundreds of millions of workers. | 9 | — |
| Disruption resilienceweight 12An AI-first interface that makes the document an export format is the real threat. | 6 | — |
| Independenceweight 10Antitrust history keeps regulators attentive, but no single dependency dominates. | 7 | — |
The four biggest tech companies plan to spend about $725 billion on AI this year, and even they can't pay for it out of pocket. Amazon is moving chips off its balance sheet, Alphabet is selling stock and Meta is renting its own data centers back from investors. Who can afford the war says more about their moats than the spending does.
Anthropic's leaked IPO filing shows the fastest revenue ramp in software history. OpenAI is nearing $70 billion a year. We re-scored both moats against the numbers. Revenue went up. One moat went down.
The AI labs cut their prices in the same week. Amazon gave away the software that runs their models, on every cloud. The brains are getting cheap, and Amazon wants to own the body.
Question 1 of 8
Saved.
