Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Uber Bubble

braveneweurope.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 556 posts

Re: The Uber Bubble

#171

Post by greiskul »

imtringued wrote: post #112
avs733 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be curious to see independent citations of these claims.

As someone whose virtual in-game company has grown so much that I lost track how much things cost and how much money I am actually making. I would argue it is very common. This is in a game where there are already turn key spreadsheets that tell you how much profit you are theoretically getting per day. The problem is that your "pipelines" are long and you may end up stock piling stuff for two weeks buying at one pri…

What game are you talking about? Is it eve online?

Re: The Uber Bubble

#172

Post by henrikschroder »

Gwypaas wrote: post #105
criddell wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> employs thousands of people You made me wonder how many people are actually employed by Uber. I thought thousands sounded like a lot for what they do. First Google result - 29,000 employees. That blows me away. It sounds like Uber itself is ready for disruption.

Uber is being disrupted by for example Bolt, which is their frugal Estonian competitor. An example close to me is that Uber essentially already lost the Swedish taxi market. They had a couple of years as the the top dog making everyone install an app but due to the huge overhead got undercut. This is a market with a completely unregulated taxi sector as long as you follow the base regulations. Maybe sometimes a bit a…

> An example close to me is that Uber essentially already lost the Swedish taxi market.

One thing that happened in Sweden though is that every single large taxi company made their own app with a big nice button for "I want a car, here, now", connected payment methods, and real-time tracking of the car you ordered.

So for me as a consumer, I can either press the button in a taxi app, and typically get a nice Mercedes or similar, with taxi plates, with a licensed taxi driver, properly insured, connected to a real taxi company with customer service representatives that I can call if anything goes wrong.

Or, I can press the button in Uber, pay the same money, but get a dude in his Toyota. Oh, and if the dude doesn't like me as a customer, he can downvote me, which results in me getting worse service in the future.

Say what you want, but at least the Swedish taxi companies out-competed Uber fair and square, instead of either giving up, or resorting to shitty political games to get Uber banned.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#173

Post by treis »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #9

The real magic of Uber is that it allows drivers to convert the depreciation of their car into cash at a time and schedule of their own choosing. For the reasons discussed in the story, this may still technically be a net negative in the long term compared to driving a regular cab fulltime, but a) drivers find it far preferable to/cheaper than alternatives like payday loans, and b) many Uber drivers have multiple job…

I think people drastically overestimate the depreciation from mileage. When you go to sell your car in 15 years the difference between 150k and 300k miles is maybe a couple grand. You're taking about a few cents per hour.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#174

Post by pessimizer »

aetherson wrote: post #69
pessimizer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slavery is not a trade you choose to have practiced on you, it is a trade you choose to practice. And as a slave, you always have a choice. It's not cost effective to monitor and restrain you well enough to keep you from killing yourself indefinitely. Lacking others, plenty of slaves have chosen and do choose this option. Same as if all physical work turns into piece/gig-work. You can choose to do it, or you can choo…

Or, you know, as a gig or piece worker, you can choose to do something else , which as it turns out is not a choice a slave enjoys. Do you feel kind of dirty suggesting that a slave can just choose to kill himself and comparing that to Barcelona cab drivers? If you don't, why not?

> as a gig or piece worker, you can choose to do something else

Not if every other job is gig and piecework.

> Do you feel kind of dirty suggesting that a slave can just choose to kill himself and comparing that to Barcelona cab drivers? If you don't, why not?

No, because choice is a word that means something. You're doing the common rationalization that there are always choices in employment, so while any particular employment can be arbitrarily bad, it's not slavery. I'm pointing out that slaves also have bad choices.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#175

Post by acchow »

hackernewds wrote: post #139
acchow wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are 100% correct. This is the magic There are people who want to make a positive return on their time + vehicle depreciation. But they are on the open market competing against people who are in a cash crunch and happy to have a net negative return on the same, as long as it temporarily allows them to convert depreciation into cash. This is why drivers will always lose in the long term. They are racing against eac…

The missing part of this jigsaw is that not everyone is _simultaneously_ seeking to _temporarily_ convert depreciation into cash. with enough market players, such a microsystem can sustain itself

There could be an equilibrium where players are net positive.

But given the housing shortage, how expensive everything is, and how many people are raising children paycheck to paycheck, I just don't see how we'd be arriving at such an equilibrium in the US.

Maybe in some rich Northern European country.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#176

Post by gruez »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #169

I feel this entire thread has quite missed the point of the question the way a neutrino passes through a solid object and interacts with nothing but empty space. People have talked about microeconomics, gig economies, labour shifting, bad old days, safety, subsidies, licenses.... but we've gotten no closer to understanding; "Why Is a Company That Lost Billions Claimed to Be Successful?" To answer this one must ask "W…

>Under financialised logic it is absolutely immaterial whether Twitter, Uber or whatever make a penny. Ever. Or whether any of the stakeholders are served. The rules of traditional business go out the window.

What makes you think that shareholders in Twitter or Uber don't care that they'll never make a penny? They're not turning a profit now, but it seems at least somewhat plausible that they'll make money in the future. Under that assumption (ie. future expected earnings), it seems perfectly consistent with "rules of traditional business".

>Under that system, Uber is successful so long as the financial market says it is. When it decides it's not successful, it's not. One has to realise that a total detachment of political economics and power has taken place.

Congratulations. You just discovered "the price of something is what someone is willing to pay for it", not its actual utility.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#177

Post by xwolfi »

sbarre wrote: post #76
ttcbj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all interesting points. However, I recently used Uber Premier twice in Miami, after not using any car service for two years, and the experience was excellent. It was fast, friendly, the car was nice, and I was happy with the price. For my use case, I am happy to pay more to get a better service, but it didn’t really seem that expensive. Both drivers had been doing Uber for a long time, which would be surpri…

> Both drivers had been doing Uber for a long time, which would be surprising if they were getting ripped off Did you happen to ask if this was their full-time gig, or if they were doing it as supplementary income?

It's probably a side gig, which is amazing. It means taxi didn't need to be a job all along.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#178

Post by acchow »

cameronh90 wrote: post #118

Do people actually claim Uber is a successful business? In the UK, none of the original companies that built the railroads still exist. Many of the railway companies were never particularly profitable and the railway boom was a stock market bubble. Lots of them were fraudulent or poorly run. Eventually they all either went out of business, or amalgamated and ultimately got nationalised. Nevertheless, they proved the…

> I can't see Uber as a company surviving the next few decades, but without them the taxi experience would likely still be as horrific as it was in the 90s.

100% this. Uber made "Uber" a solved problem, so spinning off clones became cheap and easy.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#179

Post by fellowniusmonk »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #23

Why are there so many competitors in the delivery/taxi type services, but in the short term rental industry Airbnb seems to be mostly unchallenged? I would've expected to see a lot of VC money being thrown there as well, but I'm only seeing Airbnb raising their fees and actually making a profit.

The history of AirBnB is very different in term of the market it entered.

1. Taxies had government enforced monopolies. Vacation rentals had practically 0 regulation.

2. The vacation rental market that already undergone a VC backed "freemarket" consolidation into a single global provider. HomeAway owned effectively everything with VRBO/VacationRentals.com/bedandbreakfast.com/abritel/stayz, etc. With "kept opposition" like flipkey and the ever present craiglist to prevent anti-trust.

----

So Taxi services have gone through these stages during Uber's life.

1. Inefficient government enforced monopoly and resulting near universally hated service

2. Defacto de-regulation (via effective non-enforcement)

3. Provider proliferation and price/economics discovery 4. Market consolidation

----

Whereas AirBnB entered a market that was already at step 4.

4. Market Consolidation (HomeAway was still actively buying players that weren't flipkey during Airbnb's ascent and thus preventing proliferation.)

5. Opened new markets for urban rentals forced the larger consolidated industry players to support the same (which they did, and that makes a big difference in proliferation.)

6. Follow-on effect by driving hotel construction and driving long-term rentals up ----

It's the difference between breaking up terrible government monopolies (Uber) and AirBnB dominating and expanding into an unregulated industry that already had large and relatively nimble players.

If anything Brian Sharples and the board at HomeAway quite obviously shot themselves in the foot moving too slowly due to "innovators dilemma" around subscription vs demand pricing (and other concerns) and they left an avenue of attack open for Airbnb to get sufficient momentum w/ urban properties to steal their customer base (the homeowners) using the demand side as a cudgel.

Re: The Uber Bubble

#180

Post by Gwypaas »

henrikschroder wrote: post #172
Gwypaas wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber is being disrupted by for example Bolt, which is their frugal Estonian competitor. An example close to me is that Uber essentially already lost the Swedish taxi market. They had a couple of years as the the top dog making everyone install an app but due to the huge overhead got undercut. This is a market with a completely unregulated taxi sector as long as you follow the base regulations. Maybe sometimes a bit a…

> An example close to me is that Uber essentially already lost the Swedish taxi market. One thing that happened in Sweden though is that every single large taxi company made their own app with a big nice button for "I want a car, here, now", connected payment methods, and real-time tracking of the car you ordered. So for me as a consumer, I can either press the button in a taxi app, and typically get a nice Mercedes…

> So for me as a consumer, I can either press the button in a taxi app, and typically get a nice Mercedes or similar, with taxi plates, with a licensed taxi driver, properly insured, connected to a real taxi company with customer service representatives that I can call if anything goes wrong.

> Or, I can press the button in Uber, pay the same money, but get a dude in his Toyota. Oh, and if the dude doesn't like me as a customer, he can downvote me, which results in me getting worse service in the future.

Just to be precise, the dude in a Toyota will also be a licensed driver with taxi plates with their stuff in order, although exactly to the limit of the legal requirements.

They've just realized that in general very few customers care if the car is a new Mercedes or a new Kia hybrid. The only thing which matters is the cost at the time of pressing the button.

Post reply on HN