Too Important to Be a Moat
Most discussions of competitive advantage focus on what a company has.
History suggests a different question:
What do other companies not yet understand?
Advantage comes from asymmetry. Once something is widely recognized as valuable, capital flows in, talent follows, best practices spread, and the advantage begins to disappear.
Technology provides some of the clearest examples.
A new technology often begins as a differentiator. Over time, it becomes infrastructure.
Not because it failed, but because it succeeded.
The more useful a technology becomes, the more widely it spreads. What once distinguished leaders becomes the minimum requirement for participation.
Electricity followed this path. Databases followed this path. Cloud computing followed this path. AI will likely follow it too.
Their importance increased.
Their ability to confer advantage diminished.
This pattern extends far beyond technology. Markets have a tendency to convert insight into convention. What begins as an edge becomes a best practice. What begins as a capability becomes an expectation.
The mistake is to confuse importance with differentiation.
The technologies that matter most are often the least capable of creating a moat.
The challenge is not acquiring what everyone knows is valuable.
It is recognizing where advantage will migrate next.
