I think the market is ripe for a real Uber Black. A super premium service that guarantees a cab no matter where you are within a minute. No cancellations. Your own personal on demand limousine. People are so tired of cancellations and not finding rides, I bet some will pay a premium just for the predictability that you can go anywhere whenever you desire.
Is the Ride over for Uber?
111–120 of 304 posts
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#112Uber 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…
Just wondering where the credibility to make statement (2) comes from? This is a pretty big thing to say about a company that has generally been tackling some major technical challenges for quite a few years now. Yes, the economics of the whole thing has changed drastically during their journey, and there have certainly been leadership failures along the way, but they have obviously had technical leadership for quite some time now.
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#113Betteridge’s law of headlines: no.
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Food delivery is practical, mainstream and has been for 40+ years in the West. It works great "inhouse". They tend to know all their regular customers and area and know exactly how to get there, where to park, which bell to press etc. They will also know if there is bad traffic or an accident closing a major road and adjust wait times and order frequency accordingly. The person that runs the delivery joint can also w…
> Food delivery... works great "inhouse". but > Plus they also want to take 30-50% commission for the privilege. If food delivery works great in house then why do restaurants pay Uber so much? I'd wager employing drivers is impractical for a lot of restaurants.
In the '90s when you wanted to order delivery, you'd open a phone book and pick a restaurant. Some would pay extra for a big, extra-visible listing in that phone book.
Uber, Doordash, etc get away with charging such premiums not because delivery is so costly but because they've made themselves into a new phone book. Hungry customers open the app to look for a restaurant, and the restaurant wants to be listed there.
However that's not really a win for the restaurant. It might not increase their business, just stop them from losing it. If the app didn't exist at all, those customers would find them another, less convenient way. But because the app exists, the customers stopped using those ways.
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#115I think the market is ripe for a real Uber Black. A super premium service that guarantees a cab no matter where you are within a minute. No cancellations. Your own personal on demand limousine. People are so tired of cancellations and not finding rides, I bet some will pay a premium just for the predictability that you can go anywhere whenever you desire.
Isn't that just Uber Black?
I've found the drivers to be almost universally accommodating (almost like they're being paid more fairly!)
And you can even get an hourly Uber Black that will wait on you indefinitely.
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#116These threads are usually flush with bullish supporters of Uber. This time around I see none.
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You've never done iPhone development it seems where there's neverending new or deprecated versions of iOS and "kits". I've had clients that try this without a dedicated team, and each time was a nightmare for them(and hence us) where nobody remembered how anything was done
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#118Earlier 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 really not. "Economies of scale" isn't a magical spell. There has to be a function by which a large companies turns its scale into an economy. Walmart and Costco both negotiate much more attractive deals with their suppliers than their competitors can, because they can place larger orders with those suppliers, due to their scale. Because Uber connects one rider with one driver (or one meal-eater with one driver f…
Ironically, Uber Pool is the only reason I kept using Uber, but their scale wasn't big enough for it to work properly. In peak hour to or from the central business district it was great. Anywhere else it was hit and miss.
I noticed that in the past, you'd get the pool discount even if you travelled by yourself. They've changed the terms to "up to 30% discount if someone rides with you".
As a customer, the benefit of using Uber was that they would absorb the risks, spreading it out across millions of customers. Now, I have to individually wear the risk of a pool trip not having multiple customers, while simultaneously being enormously disadvantaged in my ability to estimate the chances of other people joining. Uber has billions of times more information at hand for their estimates than me as an individual.
When I saw this change, I realised that it's a sign of the beginning of the end...
Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
Engineer here. Despite your condescension it doesn't appear you understand economies of scale. Economies of scale means the cost goes down when volume goes up. An Uber driver can only drive one passenger at a time (put aside pool, which requires a price discount to get people to use it). So the number of drivers required to serve N passengers simultaneously is N. Costs scale linearly with rides per hour. UPS has econ…
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Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?
#120The 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…
Of course it is easy now that they have been around for over a decade, the problem with the whole space is not technology, but economics. Once you have competitors in the space, it becomes a race to the bottom in regards to cost. Eventually this creates a rift between the service providers and the company, and everything just kind of slowly disintegrates.