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The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

danielcompton.net

51–60 of 542 posts

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#51
post #14
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber is too big to fail really

This usually means the government will bail you out if you do fail... Can you define your usage here?

They probably mean network effects. Facebook is the prime example. For Uber, a critical mass in users and drivers makes it hard to unseat.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#52
post #35

I can't imagine what Lewandowski and Uber were thinking here. The timeline is just too constrained to even be taken seriously.

Even at the time, knowing none of the characters or background I found Otto a very odd startup, one I almost didn't believe looked legit, and their rapid acquisition by Uber was one more "huh, strange" moment - how could they have bootstrapped out of nowhere and had tech worth that kind of money so fast? It's almost hard to believe Uber would be so brazen as to put something like this together, except that breaking t…

To me it seems like the Uber executives know the music has stopped playing, and are now trying to do anything possible to save the company.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#53

I actually think this might be a blessing in disguise for Uber. I always argued self-driving cars would destroy Uber should Apple or Google want to enter this space. Why? Because self-driving cars are basically a fleet service driven by a software. Once you remove the driver (where Uber spent so much acquiring) The only differentiator is the consumer facing experience. Neither Uber or Lyft will have as much power as…

The drivers are going to be removed from the equation no matter what though.

I do believe that this is true, but I can't help but also believe that the timelines that the tech community has in mind are absolutely too optimistic. I think like many promising innovations (AI, VR, etc.) it will have periods of rapid innovation followed by contraction and lull, repeated many times until general adoption is realized.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#55
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a stupid moonshot play. They should have just focused on being a really good taxi company.

I disagree. They were in a prime position to be "the" self driving car company, if anyone was. Instead, hyper aggressive business tactics (which were largely unwarranted) has backfired.

> They were in a prime position to be "the" self driving car company, if anyone was.

I disagree: they don't make cars. That's a huge impediment. The prime position company is surely Tesla. Or, really, any car manufacturer.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#56
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a stupid moonshot play. They should have just focused on being a really good taxi company.

I disagree. They were in a prime position to be "the" self driving car company, if anyone was. Instead, hyper aggressive business tactics (which were largely unwarranted) has backfired.

What position is that? Having a popular taxi app? That really isn't much; that advantage can disappear in an instant when a cheaper/better competitor appears.

Actually developing self-driving tech and then deploying it is almost entirely unrelated to the business that Uber has developed thus far. It's an enormous undertaking, and they were starting from almost zero.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#57
> December 3, 2015 - Mr Levandowski searched for instructions on how to access Waymo’s design server on his work laptop. Based on Gary Brown’s deposition (a Google forensic security engineer) this was an SVN server. (Brown 15)

> December 11, 2015 - Anthony Levandowski installed TortoiseSVN and downloaded 9.7 GB of data from the SVN repository. (Brown 17)

> December 14, 2015 - A USB card reader was attached to the laptop for eight hours. Google doesn’t appear to have logged what the laptop did over that time, but the implication is that data was copied from the laptop to a memory card. (Brown 18)

If these three things are true, then that looks extremely bad for Otto. I imagine they'll be a lot of questions regarding the purpose of that USB stick.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#58
For all the noise and excitement at the start of these clashes, don't they usually get settled with a licensing agreement that both sides can live with?

Sometimes we also see a medium-sized payment (not ruinous) to address the allegedly bad conduct. That usually gets paired with some lawyer-like phrases that amount to a blend of quasi-apology and face-saving evasions.

It's still an interesting suit. But after Apple/Samsung, Oracle/SAP and many others, it's hard to expect that the eventual resolution lives up to the pre-trial buildup.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#59
Outside of the case, the most striking thing to me about this is the level of detail that Google has over the logs and actions of their laptop. They were able to tell that a memory card was plugged in for 8 hours a year ago?

I have trouble finding exactly how a customer encountered a 500 10 minutes ago.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#60
post #51
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This usually means the government will bail you out if you do fail... Can you define your usage here?

They probably mean network effects. Facebook is the prime example. For Uber, a critical mass in users and drivers makes it hard to unseat.

There is no network effect here. Each additional driver does not increase the value of the network to the other drivers and similarly for passengers. Uber and Lyft are old-fashioned market makers. They increased the pool of suppliers and consumers and connected the groups. In cities where both Uber and Lyft exist, substituting Uber for Lyft and vice versa does not change the value the driver or passenger derives from either service.
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