Hardware specs cannot break the switching costs of a proprietary software ecosystem.
Silicon competitors cannot capture market share on performance alone because developer lock-in and talent concentration in proprietary software environments prevent buyer switching.
The same conclusion keeps arriving from across the workspace's research — 1 topics independently instantiate this theme. Filter the evidence by where it came from:
The first measured crack in the hardware moat arrives as an open-source software attack on the developer lock-in that actually defends it.
Nvidia is paying $12.93B to deepen the developer lock-in that keeps rivals like AMD and Intel from gaining traction regardless of their hardware specs.
Even record results and better tokens-per-dollar cannot move buyers locked into eighteen years of CUDA libraries and developer habit.
To maintain its software-driven moat, the dominant chipmaker directly recycles its hardware profits into licensing software and acqui-hiring top engineering talent.