Uber has issues but honestly it's night and day compared to what taxis were like. And they decrease DUI's.
Do you believe Rebu could that have managed to draw the same level of venture-capitalist money and unicorn-ness and hype, even sharing the same core technologies, code, and product features?
I don't think it would, and I'm asserting that comes from business-plans, labor relations, legal challenges, government lobbying, investor marketing, etc., which in several cases have been, er, ethically-problematic.
- Tons and tons of users buying vehicles they can barely afford to drive for them
- Tons of restaurants already struggling to get by saddled with needing an iPad or two at their counter to intercept online orders, and needing to charge more and anger customers just to break even on the fees
- Huge amounts of sexual assaults because Uber didn't vet drivers
And lest we leave it merely implied: Uber is worth what Uber is worth because it's a taxi company that owns no Taxis and pays no taxi drivers a proper wage. That's why it's a billion dollar unicorn. Same as AirBNB is a hotel chain that owns no hotels, UberEats/Doordash are food delivery services that don't own restaurants, Instacart is a grocery chain that doesn't own grocery stores.
Honestly if you want to really be cynical about it, the true path to finding the next tech unicorn is figuring out how to be a $business that owns none of what a $business normally does, and hires no employees that $business usually does, and then wrap that up in an app, and convince poor people to do the work for you because they have no other options. Boom, unicorn.
The way taxi companies had languished in obsolescence was definitely a problem, but I struggle to consider if Uber was the best way to solve that on any front.
So why would they bother to adopt "Rebu"? It's nothing but downsides: their taxi drivers have to work harder, have to be more polite and drive more safely, have to have cleaner cars, and have to be more accountable in general. Not to mention of course Rebu is going to take a cut of all rides booked on their platform.
There was no way to make regular taxi service better without structural and legal reform that the incumbents did not want. The only way to fix it was to go outside the system and do something sketchy. And it worked! For all their issues and controversies, the ride-hailing app experience is amazing, especially when compared to old-school taxi service. Some legacy taxi services have stepped up and improved a bunch since then, and others have just faded into obscurity.
The taxi market, in the US at least, was a textbook case of regulatory capture to stifle competition. Google "taxi medallion prices nyc" for an example. Uber was clearly the 'good guy' in flouting those laws and later getting them repealed. The cartels that controlled the medallions had no interest in improving the technology until they had competition.
Bob Smith annoyed enough Uber drivers in Milwaukee that now he can't get a ride in Poughkeepsie. Maybe that's valid, maybe it's not. But it is pretty new, and I doubt it was in the slide deck when Uber hit up the VCs.
The social aspect of these sorts of things can't help but get entangled with the politics of social mores. Maybe Bob was giving the Uber drivers wet willies. A lot of people would think he caught that ban fairly. Maybe Bob was too politically incorrect for the Uber drivers. Not quite so sure he deserves to be sentenced to hoof it until the Sun burns out. How do we know the bans are of the fair former and not the latter? We don't. It's a private company, they can be as opaque about this as they want.
Good, bad, who knows, but it certainly makes for a completely different landscape.
The legacy taxi services had this problem too, though, as you note, not on a global level. Pre-Uber, there was one taxi service that stopped taking my calls. I have no idea why. I had no way to appeal this, or to even get in touch with them to find out what was going on.
In the meantime, Bob still probably has public transit or local old-school taxi services to fall back on (which somehow still exist). Many areas even have local ride-hailing apps. Worst-case, Bob will have to rent a car when visiting other cities.
Put differently, a common business model in late 20th century and early 21st century US capitalism is to find a transaction that is already happening "at scale" and figure out how to insert your own company into the transaction and extract some percentage of the value.
The primary way of accomplishing this is to create a (new) story to tell about the value you claim you are adding to the transaction ("it's so easy", "we have an app for that", "so much quicker") even though in many cases nobody (or very few people) were asking for whatever you bring to it.
This does not mean that there is no value added. What these companies do not represent are new transactions: no new products, no new macro-scale services ("but you get a car with your phone now!" still boils down to "someone will drive you where you want to go").
I wouldn't even say it's isolated to businesses anymore. This is the same economic forces that's prompting all the crypto nonsense from a few years back, bullshit businesses like drop-shipping, social media influencers, etc. There's just nothing left to build anymore it seems. Every industry is stagnating, year over year there's no crazy new innovations anymore, nothing to get excited about. Just dumber and thinner versions of things we already had.
The tech industry is currently bending backwards so far it's collective spine will snap any second now trying to convince people LLM's are the next big huge thing, and there's just nothing there. 150 billion dollars for fancy autocomplete.
Well, it kinda is a fundamental problem, with regard to the original article's premise that scale is a problem. These services can't operate on VC's terms without scaling up to a national or global level. And this, by its nature, means your Uber problem in California follows you to Georgia, and possibly to Uzbekistan.
What if Uber shares its ban list with Toasttab? Or if Uber buys Toasttab?
Laws may be able to address this, but laws always lag. Sometimes by a lot.
But overall this was pretty bad investment for humanity. Let's just stipulate it's a lot easier to get a ride at a reasonable price and that's a good thing (not a given considering increased traffic and greenhouse gas emissions, plus decreased pressure for cities to move away from car-dependency). Was it worth multiple billions of dollars and software engineering hours? Like, assuredly not. It's a big "LOL" drawn in lipstick on a portrait of the efficient market hypothesis. It turns out the private sector is also great at just setting huge piles of cash on fire.
It got reasonable funding but couldn't get taxi companies to sign up.
Things got a bit better when it became clear that Uber was going to kill taxi companies but too little, too late.
In the US at least, there are two classifications for "car for hire."
One is street-hail - you wave down a car or get into one at a stand. That was heavily regulated and taxi companies had the relevant licenses.
The other is "town car". You call for a town-car and it shows up. town-car was very lightly regulated.
Yes, every taxi company offered town-car services, but there were lots of town car companies that didn't do street-hail.
Uber/lyft are town-car companies. Neither one does street-hail.
Then zimride said “you can use that gps receiver you’ve got in your pocket to find people who need a ride near you and we’ll suggest how much gas money to split”. But pretty quickly people started just taking passengers even when not on their own trips, and lyft morphed in to…. Basically Uber.
What else is there?
- Boeing - Just need to invent a better commercial passenger airplane
- Lockheed - The day of 150 million dollar manned fighter jets is coming to an end.
- Electricity distribution - PG&E or Southern California Edison. Only way to crack this is with decentralized power distribution and batteries
- Waste Management - Trash collection, recycling, and processing
- DeBeers Diamonds - Diamonds can basically be synthesized in the lab at will now.
I wouldn't say nothing there, and that something is something. Translation, rephrasing and a lot of management tasks like summarizing what happened are way easier and better than any previous models I've seen.
Creating images and logos is usually very constrained by what you can describe without describing what's not there, it's impressive nonetheless.
Autopilot code autocomplete is pretty good, but not replaces all engineers good, rather increased efficiency good.
The problem is they all lie about it being the thing that will replace all knowledge work. CEOs are buying it up and salivating.
It could replace a lot of middle management at my company. But those are the people that are staying.
Maybe you are right for the US, but here in Germany at least, and I could be wildly wrong about numbers:
- Uber: not a game changer, popular with a certain demographic, but taxis were mostly fine anyway
- airbnb: ok, huge
- doordash/etc: maybe executing a bit better, but delivery has existed just fine
- instacart et al: now we get to the real thing. groceries delivery had only been done by a couple of chains, and sometimes only for a couple years, then abandoned again already. so you never really got whatever you wanted, from where ver you wanted. Paired with our sometimes very limited shop opening times (6-20 at most, in recent years more, but just in some states) this was different, e.g worth it even if it is not your weekly haul and/or alcohol for a party.
(Black cabs don't have to be black, but usually are. As to why they're called "Hackney carriages" - the last person to know the reason probably died in 1863.)
Even the canonical example of lobbyists can make some ambiguously defensible position that they add some value; e.g., "We make sure constituents have a conduit to their representative"
Self driving is the only way uber or a taxi can be a large business. The cost of labor is just too high and so most people are forced to learn to drive.
Even with the above I question if self driving is really worth it. If you own a car and have it parked nearby it is ready to go when you want to leave, and better yet you can store your stuff in it. Combine that with rush hour - most people are traveling at about the same time every day, and some people wanting nicer cars than others and it is hard to see how it can work out. (unless you live in density such that parking is hard - but then transit must be your answer not individual cars since self driving cannot solve traffic)
In fact you could easily see car manufacturers offering such services - something like Zipcar but more convenient as the cars can self redistribute.
I find it hard to believe Uber will ever break even ( not on the day to day costs - recouping all that upfront investment ).
Having said that, the likes of Uber have changed the world - so the money wasn't entirely wasted.
And who knows, your view might be right.
Now if it was instead a website, sure, much easier. No need to create accounts etc, just visit "chicagotaxi.com", perhaps shown on a sign at the airport/station/etc, then book and pay with applepay/googlepay.
But installing some application, signing up, having my data stolen, all to be told "no taxis available", is the reality of a local app.
Doordash/Instacart/Uber Eats/etc are just market solutions to the problem of everyone being worked too fucking hard and not having the time to exist as people anymore. And while in principle the idea of "hiring someone who has nothing to do and having them do your grocery trip" is perfectly fine, even innovative, in practice what it amounts to is someone making less than minimum wage while putting mileage on their vehicle and burning fuel while a startup in the bay area collects the lions share of the fees from the customer. My gripe isn't with the business itself, the concept is fine. My gripe is that Instacart takes the money that should be going far more to the person actually doing the work. They should of course collect some: what they are doing is not devoid of value, for certain: but they should collect significantly less.
Incidentally that's the same problem I have with Uber. Matching people who want to work with people who have tasks they need to do is not inherently evil. What's evil is doing that, paying the people working peanuts, and charging out the ass for the service anyway so you can pocket more profits for being a middle man.
"Value extraction" almost implies non-ownership, and represents more of a contractual arrangement whereby you provide X to a set of transactions that would happen without you, and in return you receive Y. Obviously if Y is universally of less or equal value to X, nobody is harmed. But if Y is of significantly more value to a given demographic or particular circumstances, then it is not clear that this is a win for society overall.
Where they overlap is if you have managed to create sufficiently high barriers to entry in the field of "providing X". This is tantamount to ownership of a resource that people want, and you're the only provider (or one of just a few).
Generally shared cars only make sense when someone drives very little anyway. Cars are expensive and so shared cars are either too expensive to be used often, or very hard to get at. Renting a car for a weekend is about half the cost of a monthly payment on the same car, but if you buy the car you have it the rest of the month (and if you buy a car you have used options or keeping the car after it is paid for to bring the total cost down - you will have to pay maintenance costs but those tend to be much less).
Before the launch of UberX, the Uber app positioned itself as a convenient way to call a black car/limo and, for drivers, to get some extra business between their "regular" calls. It was a semi-luxury though it only cost a bit more than a yellow cab (I only ever used Uber pre-UberX to get to/from the airport).
Really, other than surge pricing, I don't think Uber innovated very much on the tech side. Their success in disrupting cabs was rather down to flooding the market with supply, oftentimes in ways that flouted the law.
It's an indictment of the VC model where essentially you build a company that hogs all the value for investors. If you think this is a good model, i.e. that investors make better decisions than governments, labor, and the market, then I think you have to reckon with the utter wastefulness that is Uber. A better thing here would have been to just build a ride hailing app for existing cab companies.
But big airports have a taxi line. You stand in it, and you get a taxi.
I flew into Washington DC last week, and it was faster to stand in the taxi line than to call an Uber and wait for it to arrive. On the other hand, it was faster to get an Uber back to the airport when I left than it was to catch a taxi.
And of course, certain cities have decent transit systems. Both Chicago and DC (and hundred of other cities) have transit fare cards you can put in the wallet app on your phone. Some, like DC don't even need an account or download. Just add money with the payment card already stored in your phone and go. The experience is better than Uber - assuming the transit system is any good.
1) Guarantee of payment by card
2) Guarantee of receipt
3) Guarantee of going to the right destination
The week before I landed at Dulles and got an Uber. The queue for the taxis was very long, but the wait for Uber was hardly quick either. Last time I took a taxi in DC they refused to take card. That was pre-covid, but why would I take the chance again.
Taxi companies did it to themselves.
Possibly. However you could also see the Uber type market as reducing the need for people to buy cars - threatening their core business, as well as reducing the number of their potential customers and again shifting the power away from them.