Yea it certainly does benefit Claude Desktop to some degree, but most MCP servers are a few hundred SLOC and the protocol schema itself is only ~400 SLOC. If that was the only major obstacle standing in the way of adoption, I'd be very surprised.

Coupled with the fact that any LLM trained for tool use can utilize the protocol, it doesn't feel like much of a moat that uniquely positions Claude Desktop in a meaningful way.

> And if other vendors sign on to support MCP, then it becomes a self reinforcing cycle of adoption

This is exactly what's happening now. A good portion of applications, frameworks and actors are starting to support it.

I've been reluctant on adopting MCP in applications until there was enough adoption.

However, depending on your use case it may also be too complex for your use case.

MCP is useful because anthropic has a disproportionate share of API traffic relative to its valuation and a tiny share of first-party client traffic. The best way around this is to shift as much traffic to API as possible.

First party client , meaning browser? User agent or … Electron app, or , any mobile app?

first party client as in a claude subscription will give you access (mostly app + web)