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Is the Ride over for Uber?

smartcompany.com.au

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Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#91

Post by rufus_foreman »

johnebgd wrote: post #49
voz_ wrote: post #25

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 we…

Uber crushed themselves in food. As a customer, I would get the wrong food about half the time in NYC even pre-pandemic. I complained and got a refund the first couple of times but then they stopped refunding me when it kept happening. Clearly thought I was fraudulently trying to get meals for free. Thing is, I’ve been a customer since the black car only days. Been Uber VIP for my high rating as a customer. Problem w…

"DoorDash Introduces Premium DoorDash+ Service Where They Will Actually Attempt To Get Your Order Right"

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#92

Post by jollybean »

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…

? "there's no difficult-to-copy element of it"

Wow, no, it's a 2-sided market problem (drivers and customers) that's incredibly difficult to reproduce.

And then there's brand synergy, economies of scale with regulatory issues etc..

Regular taxis are 'easy to reproduce'.

Food delivery is hard because there actually isn't any margin. It's all VC money paying for everything.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#93

Post by skippyboxedhero »

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.

This isn't the case. Uber repeatedly, and likely fraudulently, claimed that they were profitable ex-growth markets (iirc, they made this claim shortly before their IPO, I remember it being leaked to compliant journalists). They have never attempted to obtain a global monopoly either (they bought stakes in companies outside the US, which clearly wouldn't have given Uber itself scale economies). The only place that you saw people make the claim about driverless cars was on Reddit, management never made that claim...because it makes no sense.

The underlying business can, obviously, be profitable. There is a guy near me who runs a taxi app, town has a population of ~5k people (no city with an Uber taxi service for miles around), and he is profitable. The problem is that most tech companies are run by morons who have a big stack of other people's money to burn (it really is that simple, all of these companies thought this day would never come...it has come, it is today).

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#94

Post by quickthrower2 »

martinald wrote: post #29
quickthrower2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 driv…

I guess it depends on who is 'they' in 'their cars'?

Maybe Tesla sell the cars to individuals / businesses, and now the individual wants to find a way to get some extra money from it so they rent it out via a platform.

Uber already has the mindshare and the tech.

Maybe Tesla just wants to sell / rent the cars and not get into the market place.

Tesla could try to compete on that, but they could try right now and compete with Uber, right? It is the same thing.

All that financial risk is now pushed down to individual 'franchisers'.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#95

Post by [deleted] »

hackernewds wrote: post #80
vladf wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, strong disagree. Having interviewed a couple of candidates from this space, even for just rideshare pricing for both demand and supply sides is an incredibly sophisticated statistics and economics problem, where appropriate modeling can have long term revenue impact. Even within this vertical it seems you’d need a lot more than 15 engineers.

It's mind boggling how most people think it's a simple matching FIFO matching algorithm, instead of how mind bogglingly complex making ride-sharing happen at scale is I would know.

[deleted]

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#96

Post by jollybean »

sanatgersappa wrote: post #31

Uber started out well as your "personal chauffeur" with premium cars and polite, professional drivers. Then they started chasing numbers and valuation, and it was all downhill from there.

If by 'downhill' you mean 'their business expanded massively and they became a global phenom', then yes.

They were never necessarily professional drivers, and the drivers today are just as 'polite'.

The market for NYC 1% high end cars is very small compared to the value of unlocking the big marginal market inefficiency brought about by medallions.

All of that said - a bit of technology and flexibility by the world's cities and taxi fleets would have made them a lot more money and made Uber pointless.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#97

Post by csande17 »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #75
voz_ wrote: post #25

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 we…

I love the "small team of focused engineers" trope for apps like uber. It's so easy to blow past that number. Website? That's a team. iPhone app? That's a team. Android? Another team. Data collection and A/B testing platform for all the front ends? Another team. Backend? A team. Infrastructure? Another team. AI solutions for problems like delivery time estimation? Another very expensive team. BI for the executives? Y…

An underappreciated aspect of computer programming is that maintaining a program often requires less work than writing it in the first place. Once you finish writing the iPhone app, you've finished writing the iPhone app, and you can get by with a much smaller team--possibly just one person--to handle bugfixes and maintenance.

Unicorn tech companies generally don't realize this, which is why they all redesign their apps over and over and add poorly-thought-out features all the time. They're still paying for a build-an-entire-iPhone-app-from-scratch-sized team, and all those engineers are desperately looking for stuff to do!

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#98

Post by notatoad »

voz_ wrote: post #25

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 we…

it always makes me happy to see the "tech bros come in here and think that everything we do is simple and easy to replicate" trope every other industry complains about holds true even when applied to the tech industry.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#99

Post by hotpotamus »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #75
voz_ wrote: post #25

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 we…

I love the "small team of focused engineers" trope for apps like uber. It's so easy to blow past that number. Website? That's a team. iPhone app? That's a team. Android? Another team. Data collection and A/B testing platform for all the front ends? Another team. Backend? A team. Infrastructure? Another team. AI solutions for problems like delivery time estimation? Another very expensive team. BI for the executives? Y…

Fairly recently I moved from a company of about 8,000 to a company of 54 or so. At first I wondered how the tiny company got anything done, but they've been around for 30 years so I figured they must have some skill. Now I wonder what the hell all those 8,000 people actually did. Each team you just named is 1-2 people at the current gig.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#100

Post by potemkin_buster »

martinald wrote: post #29
quickthrower2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 driv…

> How does Uber come out top in that? Surely that self driving software/car makers take the rewards.

There's a lot of variables but the car-makers are probably better positioned espcially when it comes to moving around fleets of self-driving cars and servicing them at a nationwide scale

I'm guessing they may be better at dealing with the legal and regulartory issues that could emerge

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