Uber has issues but honestly it's night and day compared to what taxis were like. And they decrease DUI's.
- 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.
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.
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.