Is the Ride over for Uber?
smartcompany.com.au
Is the Ride over for Uber?
1–10 of 304 posts
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#2I think the ride is much shorter for lyft than uber.
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#3I think the ride is much shorter for lyft than uber.
How come? Fewer markets?
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#4Betteridges law applies.
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#5Uber's IPO prospectus pretty much says they'd only be profitable if they can achieve a global monopoly to charge their own prices, and/or hope that driverless cars become ubiquitous soon. So this isn't too surprising, and also the status quo for most startups to burn investor cash ad-infinitum until they reach the theoretical gold at the end of the rainbow.
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#6I was on work travel last week. No Uber from the airport - three cancelations then I caught a Lyft. It was over $500 for a 50 mi ride to a neighboring city which I was mostly looking at out of curiosity. My friend was recently held up (well, attempted) by an Uber driver in Nashville who had canceled last second so he could not even find who the driver was to file a complaint.
It seems like the former gap in user experience between Uber and taxis has largely vanished. This may partly be reflective of the great resignation as well: a lot of people who are working have still just given up.
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#7Interestingly, it looks like not entering the Food delivery business might have been a good strategy from Lyft.
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#8Uber's IPO prospectus pretty much says they'd only be profitable if they can achieve a global monopoly to charge their own prices, and/or hope that driverless cars become ubiquitous soon. So this isn't too surprising, and also the status quo for most startups to burn investor cash ad-infinitum until they reach the theoretical gold at the end of the rainbow.
Well they are not the mafia. If Uber has a monopoly, and wants to charge me $50 instead of $10 to get to the city centre, I won't go, or find another (non-ride-sharing) way to get there. I might go 1 in 100 times of course because of urgency. But then regular cabs are still a thing too.
This is the problem with being the middleman in a low margin world. I don't want to pay a fortune to get somewhere, and the driver has other jobs they can do if Uber effectively pays below minimum wage.
Uber just needs to survive until the self-driving car thing is fully online, which means they are the Stripe of self-driving car micro-rentals. Then they will do very well and be very profitable, IMO.
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#9The problem with Uber Eats is exactly the same as the problem with Uber's rideshare: there's no difficult-to-copy element of it. It's been clear for at least seven years that it's easy to spin up a food delivery service, just the same way it's easy to spin up a rideshare service. The basic technology is something a small team can conjure up out of nowhere in a few months, the two sided marketplace is heavily incented to abandon a given platform if another platform gives a better deal, and all the bells and whistles that a large development team can add to it don't really move the needle in terms of value, enough to make the marketplace sticky.
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#10Uber's IPO prospectus pretty much says they'd only be profitable if they can achieve a global monopoly to charge their own prices, and/or hope that driverless cars become ubiquitous soon. So this isn't too surprising, and also the status quo for most startups to burn investor cash ad-infinitum until they reach the theoretical gold at the end of the rainbow.
> Uber's IPO prospectus pretty much says they'd only be profitable if they can achieve a global monopoly to charge their own prices, and/or hope that driverless cars become ubiquitous soon.
What do you mean by “pretty much”? Where in the prospectus do they say this?