The only real mote was and is mindshare. Build mindshare, don't screw your users, and your competition will have a hard time dethroning you. LLMs will probably force SaaS and software prices to come down, which will be a great opportunity for dethroning reigning champions.

PostgreSQL, for example, has a ton of mindshare. It will be hard to dethrone it.

OpenSolaris was Sun's attempt to recover from the loss of mindshare to Linux. The a company that had become dominant in databases due to mindshare acquired Sun then failed to understand the mindshare play, and it killed OpenSolaris. Explain that one to me.

Even mindshare might not be such a moat now.