Why I don't believe in Uber's Success

Post by beambot » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 12:48 AM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #248

beambot wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon actually didn't have much competition at a key point in it's growth Except for every single brick & mortar store -- which has always been Amazon's biggest "competitor".

Brick and mortar stores were (and still are) extremely weak competition. That's why Amazon utterly crushed many of them and continues to do so. Not just small mom and pops either. Borders, which at one point was one of the largest bookstore chains in the nation, shuttered its doors because it didn't switch to an online model fast enough. Barnes and Noble at some point was in deep trouble as well.

Post by rcach001 » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 12:51 AM UTC

vannevar wrote: post #101

dageshi wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is in a low margin commodity business with massive amounts of competition, but they're still massive and becoming even bigger because they do what everyone else can do just that little bit better that there's no real reason to switch away.

Also a good point. Low margin doesn't have to mean unsuccessful. But it's taken 20 years for Amazon to get where it is. Uber's valuation seems pretty premature. Amazon lost money for years because it was building infrastructure. Uber is losing money because it is subsidizing its sales. Amazon may have been low margin, but I don't know that they ever took investor money and gave it directly to customers in the form of…

Post by gumby » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 12:55 AM UTC

gmarx wrote: post #240

gumby wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Airlines lost those regulations under Reagan Actually it was under Carter -- he pushed for it, spurred by Alfred Kahn whom he appointed to the CAB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_Deregulation_Act Carter was also the one who chose Volker to head the fed and squeeze inflation (to kill stagflation). This cost Carter the election because it also squeezed the economy...but ignited a recovery that Reagan got credi…

It's fascinating how many things that started under Carter people misremember and attribute solely to Reagan. We really do reform our memories to conform to simple stories

Post by pfarnsworth » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 1:03 AM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #117

avn2109 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TFA and a lot of commenters here don't seem to understand that Uber doesn't want to compete with taxi services, which are a niche business to be disrupted en route to the real prize. It wants to compete with your car - imagine 12 lanes of L.A. traffic composed mostly of Ubers. That's their dream. They even admit this in public. [0] The day they can get cost per mile one penny below what you'd spend owning a Toyota Ca…

I can believe that's their goal: I see little reason to believe they'll succeed in it, beyond making the market a bit bigger than the current taxi/minicab market. Just because they're very good at supplying an unlicensed minicab service (apparently subsidised by VC money in many areas) doesn't mean they can (i) run a minicab business at a profit so much more efficiently than every other minicab business in history th…

Post by ghaff » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 1:19 AM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #259

wrsh07 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a self driving world, peak traffic will be served by buses. (Or subways in cities that can handle it) Like everything - high bandwidth vehicles will do the bulk of the work, and seamlessly trade off to "last mile" self driving small vehicles.

> In a self driving world, peak traffic will be served by buses Huh? If suburban Americans aren't opting to share rides into work now and don't have or want bus services now, particularly not connecting bus services, what difference is non-human drivers going to make?