Scale Ruins Everything

Given that we've been throwing cash at every conceivable idea for the last ten plus years, yet when speaking of unicorns we still have to refer back to airbnb and uber, seems like we're well past "peak unicorn" and well into the "horse with a mild concussion" era.

It's also disconcerting how much their success seems to hinge on using technology as a lever to break laws or social expectations, as opposed to technology as something that itself empowers humans to be more productive.

Getting a taxi in my college town in 2005 was agony. Make a phone call from a loud bar and shout at some guy who can barely tell what you're saying that you want a taxi and then maybe if you're lucky they show up in an hour and cost 3 times as much as you expected (and that's on a good night!) vs. "press a button, get a ride" (and have a feedback mechanism for horrible drivers or gross cars, etc.).

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

Sure, but there's a difference between "that kind of success" and "any success". To illustrate, imagine an alternate timeline with a company called "Rebu", which provides all the same phone-apps and servers and whatnot for thousands of taxi-services across the world to adopt, replacing their shitty old "computerized dispatch" systems.

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.

I think you're missing a key bit: taxi companies weren't interested in this sort of thing. In most municipalities, taxi service was a protected, government-granted monopoly. The reason taxi service was always so bad was because there was no competition, and no incentive to improve.

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.

I think we're doing a lot of work to get into the mind of cab companies, but along those lines: they weren't interested because the market isn't really that large. Uber is barely profitable now after raising rates tremendously and aggressively fighting any kinds of workers rights initiative. That means two things. First, people don't think a typical ride is worth very much, and second, people don't really have that many places to go. The destination list is 90% work, the airport, and nightlife. These are not the underpinnings of a multibillion dollar business... unless you invent self-driving cars or achieve a good old fashioned monopoly (a lot of the reason many cab companies went out of business as you say is that Uber failed to invent self-driving cars).

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.