Uber loses licence to operate in London, will still operate while appealing

I'm not a fan of companies like Uber or AirBnB who attempt a violent takeover of a market. However, as a consumer who needs to get from A to B, or stay at some random city, I find those services invaluable. The black cabs in London are expensive, never around when you need them, and until recently might have refused card payments (now they just seem unhappy about it). At the very least I was hoping Uber would make that industry wake up and join the modern world, but instead they chose to protest and block roads. With Uber, I always have a car available within minutes and the prices are reasonable. I just hope that the competition will take their place (and driver mass) if they do end up leaving.

Kapten and Bolt already exist, and give you access to substantially the same pool of drivers. Maybe some drivers are on Uber but not one of the others; that will change very quickly if Uber are banned. There's also Addison Lee, who have their own drivers, but offer a similar experience.

This tunnel vision of only seeing one provider of a new but fundamentally commodity service is interesting. It reminds me a lot of how Git and MySQL took off - people encountered them, thought, "oh, that's great, i'll use that", and never stopped to think if there might be better alternatives.