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Is the Ride over for Uber?

smartcompany.com.au

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Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#131

Post by tzs »

notatoad wrote: post #98
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.

Nowhere did voz_ say or imply that Uber was simple or easy to replicate. In fact he didn't say anything all about replicating them. What he is speculating about is a hypothetical where Uber itself stops development and just maintains their existing systems.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#132

Post by Nursie »

Uber is broken in my city now.

They don't pay very well, so there aren't many drivers. The drivers that are around will accept a ride, then fuck around for a while, driving further away, doing whatever (no, there are no scheduled drop-offs, they deliberately waste time). Then you cancel, then when you try to re-book to get a different driver ... oh look, surge pricing, it's an extra $20 for that journey now.

This is the point at which I pull out the (crappy) app for the local taxi service, that uber nearly drove out of business, who now offer a more reliable and usually cheaper ride. In fact increasingly I don't look at the uber app first any more.

It was never a good idea to allow a VC funded loss-maker to compete in pretty much every market worldwide, using this subsidy to undercut the local firms while somehow dreaming of extracting 20% on every ride.

It was always going to have to raise prices to succeed, and the only way it was going to be able to do that was by using its stacks of cash to run at a loss for long enough to destroy the competition completely. I'm just glad it failed to finish the job.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#133

Post by menzoic »

voz_ wrote: post #124
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this post. I do a hard eye-roll every time I read one of these "Hey, I could build that company's website in a weekend" or "They should only need a few engineers to keep it running" type posts. If anything it just shows that the commenter has 0 idea what they're talking about. I'm not at all saying that there isn't a good amount of "fat to trim" at large companies, but often times the hard work at these bi…

I didnt say it can be built with 15, but at 2017, features peaked, and maintenance is much easier than creation.

The most important factor that is completely lost in this argument is "scale".

Simple looking things are very complex at large scale.

Even if no new features were built, the current api and apps won't scale to meet the demand as the user base continues to grow. And at any point in time there are thousands of bugs that need to be fixed within months before they cause big issues. 15 engineers will take years to fix them.

Another big factor is cyber security. This alone will require more than 15 people. Monitoring and defending against active threats, updating libs with patches and migrating from deprecated dependencies spanning 100s of services.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#134

Post by wyre »

atty wrote: post #72
stephc_int13 wrote: post #57

Food delivery is, in my opinion, an expensive, almost always disappointing and ultimately unhealthy habit. I can see why it might seem to be an attractive business, food addiction is legal, socially accepted and the harmful side is slow enough that most people don’t notice. But this is not a “service”, it does not add value for the customer, same category as cigarettes. I don’t think that businesses riding on addicti…

There is nothing wrong with food delivery when used in moderation. I use DoorDash once a week to get a lunch delivered on a day where I have meetings running through lunchtime. It saves me time and hassle, and is a fun change of pace. It also came in very handy when a family member of mine was very ill and I wasn’t in the same city. I could order food and have it delivered to them. The service is nothing like cigaret…

> There is nothing wrong with food delivery when used in moderation.

This can be said about any addiction. The problem is addiction. If your not an addictive person that’s great, for you, but others are susceptible to addiction.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#135

Post by 29083011397778 »

naravara wrote: post #110
gruez wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They tend to know all their regular customers and area and know exactly how to get there >They will also know if there is bad traffic or an accident closing a major road and adjust wait times and order frequency accordingly. irrelevant in the age of GPS navigation with live traffic (ie. google maps) >where to park, which bell to press etc. while I don't doubt delivery drivers accrue such knowledge over time, I doubt…

> irrelevant in the age of GPS navigation with live traffic (ie. google maps) The confused phone calls I get from delivery drivers just about every time I order begs to differ. And that's assuming they bother to call rather than just leaving my order with the basement apartment or one of my neighbors or in the same address only on Northeast [name] street 8 blocks away rather than Northwest [name] street. These driver…

Or worse, they don't see the negative feedback - meaning even if they stick around long enough to handle your second order, they still won't know any better.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#136

Post by XorNot »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #101
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.

Thanks for this post. I do a hard eye-roll every time I read one of these "Hey, I could build that company's website in a weekend" or "They should only need a few engineers to keep it running" type posts. If anything it just shows that the commenter has 0 idea what they're talking about. I'm not at all saying that there isn't a good amount of "fat to trim" at large companies, but often times the hard work at these bi…

They're not saying it would take 15 to build, they're saying that maintaining it does not take nearly as many staff as they currently have. Which is correct: if Uber is simply a rideshare company, then with the technology established it should be winding down it's dev teams.

If it's instead a "every market" company then it should be doing that with its considerable on-payroll staff.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#137

Post by menzoic »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #125
MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work a startup with less than 15 technical employees and have experience at tech companies ranging from 100s to 100s of thousands of employees. Suggesting that one could accomplish or maintain a platform like uber with so few heads is a farce.

A team of 15 probably couldn't. A team of 50-100 probably could maintain something of similar complexity to the core uber app. Copycats exist using many fewer resources.

Copycats don't operate at nearly the same scale as Uber. Even Lyft operates on a significantly smaller scale than Uber.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#138

Post by hotpotamus »

bogota wrote: post #103
hotpotamus wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That really doesn’t say anything. Those teams all do very different thinks depending on the problem space. You’re not really making an argument though you are just stating two situations and hoping people arrive at your conclusion of big company is stupid.

I think anyone who has interacted with a big organization (company, government, religion, etc...) comes to the conclusion that they're disfunctional in some way. I agree that it doesn't say much, but I do wonder, how many engineers built the original Uber app and how many does the company employee today? I'm betting it's more, and I wonder how much additional functionality they've added over the years.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#139

Post by kareemsabri »

Jistern wrote: post #119
kareemsabri wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

> That would be inane. You are basically arguing, "Get rid of your competitive advantage." Uber does ridesharing... badly. They have bad management.

What? Uber Pool was never big, and I believe is now completed retired. Are you sure you know how Uber works?

> An Uber (or Lyft) driver who is able to make an average five deliveries (whether it be people, food, or parcels is immaterial to this discussion) in 30 minutes versus an ordinary taxi cab driver who is able to make an average three deliveries in 30 minutes would be correctly said to enjoy economies of scale.

This is not economies of scale. This is just more volume. It would be economies of scale if Uber paid their drivers hourly wages, so their cost per ride went down because they did more rides per hour. But they do not, they pay them a cut of the ride.

> See, I made it simple enough so that even an engineer like you could understand it!

I'd love to see your business.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#140

Post by cbozeman »

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…

If you spent $500 for a 50 minute ride, that means you should have rented a car.
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