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Is the Ride over for Uber?

smartcompany.com.au

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Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#21

Post by thenipper »

flatline wrote: post #6

I 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 expe…

I just came back from a family vacation. I looked at getting an Uber or Lyft from airport home. They were all like a twenty minutes wait and 50 bucks. We took a cab that was already there and it came in at about 40 bucks.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#22

Post by seanmcdirmid »

sshine wrote: post #18
prophesi wrote: post #5

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. 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.

> if they can achieve a global monopoly to charge their own prices Since they're banned in several countries, good luck to them.

I don’t get it. It’s not like I’m going to fly to China to get food delivered to me.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#23

Post by friedman23 »

aetherson wrote: post #9

The 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…

I disagree. Even Lyft has noticeably worse service than Uber. Compare the prices and time it takes to get a ride on both platforms. They are not comparable.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#24

Post by Jistern »

RL_Quine wrote: post #15
Jistern wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing something important. Uber is like a bit like Walmart or Costco. They all enjoy economies of scale; Uber simply has bad management.

What economies of scale? Their primary expenses, workers, are fixed cost.

No post body was provided.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#25

Post by voz_ »

Uber is an example of a company that wants to be a tech company, but (1) really shouldn't (2) kinda lacks the technical leadership to really be one.

It feels like the right call, around 2017, was to either:

(A) double down and build a platform for every kind of physical multisided marketplace (matching as a service, maps+routing+locations+geofences as a service, physical product ops as a service, etc) Where Amazon went from books->everything->AWS, Uber could have gone rides->platform-for-all-the-multi-sided-marketplaces.

OR (B) fire every engineer except the 15 or so it takes to maintain the rider and driver apps and a few services, with no new features, port everything over to common cloud companies instead of their DC (shoutout to DCA, the ugly stepbrother of SJC), and just pivot to value extraction and just maintaining it as the simple taxi app it should be.

Instead, they did neither, muddling around building random tech as if they had ads/search/social media margins while losing sight of the customers needs. There's a reason DD crushed them in food.

Edit: Since the primary response seems to be "You don't understand!" I was there 5 year, saw how the sausage was way over-made.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#26

Post by Barrin92 »

Uber would have been fine if they operated like a medium sized SAAS company as they're forced to for example in Spain, where they due to regulations sell their software to local companies.

Smaller team, focus just on the ride hailing software, take a cut of the revenue and that would actually be a decent business that doesn't try to make money by either monopolizing markets or atomizing the taxi business and destroying labour rights. Of course if you do that you can't pretend to be a gazillion dollar technology giant.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#27

Post by prophesi »

grandmczeb wrote: post #10
prophesi wrote: post #5

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. 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?

It's a 248 page document, but I know on page 161 in the "Increasing scale, creating category leadership and a margin advantage" you can read how they're hoping that other ride-share companies popular in various regions will pivot to seek profitability and reduce incentives, thus allowing Uber to overtake their market as they keep their own incentives (ie, low prices).

You can ctrl-f "self-driving" to find their strategy in that venture.

edit: Should be easy to find the prospectus via search engines, but here's a link: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001543151/f0dcd9a...

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#28

Post by Icathian »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #8
prophesi wrote: post #5

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. 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 h…

I think at this point it's pretty well-established that general availability of self-driving cars is not going to happen any time soon. Do you think Uber can hemorrhage money for another ~20 years? I think that's probably a reasonable guess at the relevant timeline.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#29

Post by martinald »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #8
prophesi wrote: post #5

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. 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 h…

How does Uber come out top in that? Surely that self driving software/car makers take the rewards. Uber is just a booking platform on top. Why would Google (with Waymo) allow Uber to book their cars, or Tesla to book their cars? They'd surely set up their own competing service to Uber and force them out of the market within months (as the prices would be so much lower).

I'd imagine the software licensing of self driving cars would be so that when you bought a self driving GM/Ford/whatever that is only for personal use and using it for taxi rides would be against the ToS. Which they could quickly catch people out on, and maybe a "taxi" version of the car costs $xxx/month more.

Unless you are suggesting that Uber actually wins the race to self driving, which I really can't see happening. Do they even have a program anymore?

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#30

Post by hotpotamus »

michaelt wrote: post #16
Jistern wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing something important. Uber is like a bit like Walmart or Costco. They all enjoy economies of scale; Uber simply has bad management.

I'm not sure I agree. I mean, it's not like Uber is buying cars in bulk at a discount smaller operators can't match, or anything like that. And it's not like they're running a lean technology operation, with just 50 engineers globally, to get economies of scale on tech expenses. The only economies of scale Uber has on their side is marketing.

There's also maintenance on that fleet of cars to consider and ride-share gets no economies of scale there. You know who does? Taxi companies.
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