Is the Ride over for Uber? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#171

Post by jorvi » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 3:42 AM UTC

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…

> There's a reason DD crushed them in food.

Can people please stop making statements true for America as if they are true for the world? In my country we have UberEats, Deliveroo and a few others, but DoorDash doesn’t even exist.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#172

Post by hotpotamus » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 3:44 AM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #159

hotpotamus wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, we're nowhere near the scale of Uber. We have a few thousand users supported by 7 developers, 2 ops people (one is me) and 7 in customer support who provide 24/7 support with an on-call rotation. If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much. I'm told really effective companies like Netflix are quite skilled at leveraging technolo…

> We have a few thousand users > If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much Two orders of magnitude would land you with a few hundred thousand users. Uber has ~93 million users in 80 countries. Just supporting payments in all those countries is a full-time job for a dedicated team.

I suspect it also means our unit economics are several orders of magnitude better than Uber's.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#173

Post by mech422 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 3:44 AM UTC

jlmorton wrote: post #168

mech422 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key difference for me, is actual pizzeria drivers usually have hot bags.. Whereas, 75% of the time 'app' drivers dont. Doesn't matter if I'm first or last in line, if the food is cold either way. Its gotten so bad, we're actually surprised when we order straight from say..dominos, and get hot food, instead of cold.

Yeah I agree with that. Uber Eats is really hurting their business by requiring drivers to buy the hot bags, assuming they're still doing that.

Yeah - it seems like such a basic thing...

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#174

Post by cozzyd » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 3:45 AM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #65

elektor wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come? Fewer markets?

A much smaller company that has never turned a profit, where the sharedholder's equity will soon become negative. They can't afford to lose money forever, and they've never demonstrated they can make money.

Well Lyft runs the bikeshare system here which I use a lot so hopefully they don't go out of business too soon... (I almost never use ride share...)

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#175

Post by pcurve » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 3:46 AM UTC

thenipper wrote: post #21

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.

Me too. Took a cab from JFK to NJ for $85. $120 for Lyft $140 for Uber. Prices eventually came down to $105 and $115 by the time I took the cab, but still.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#176

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 3:50 AM UTC

jlmorton wrote: post #157

> This writer, previously an avid Uber Eats user, now avoids it in almost all cases and instead, orders directly from restaurants, which have mostly built an online ordering systems. Going direct means your food isn’t ruined I don't know if this is confirmation bias, or just a lie to add weight to the thesis, but it's obviously absurd, as anyone who has ever worked for, or even ordered directly from a local restauran…

> Your local pizzeria does not have the driver go back to the restaurant for every order and deliver it directly to you. They certainly don't have a fleet of people ready to pickup your order. They pickup every order that's available, it's completely unoptimized in every way, and you get your order on the luck of the draw.

So, I worked as a delivery driver, and when it wasn't particularly busy, most deliveries were one at a time, and when it was busy, there was both am assigned limit on deliveries taken at once and incentive to optimize by proximity, because not being time inefficient was money out of the driver's pocket (since the bulk of pay was tips + fixed per delivery payment).

(And these days, more of the pizzerias with in-house delivery do have apps with location & status information on deliveries.)

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#177

Post by greatpostman » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 3:53 AM UTC

zonotope wrote: post #123

greatpostman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point: I just got rejected for a short ride from a cab at the airport in nyc. Dude was very angry I was only going a few miles. Hopped out, ordered a Lyft, got a great ride from a dude with a wife and kids.

It's illegal for a taxi at NYC to reject a fare to any part of NYC. He might huff and puff if you're going out of his way, but he has to take you. You shouldn't have gotten out.

I ran out of that cab when he got angry. Zero chance I stay and it’s great to have the competition of Lyft and uber

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#178

Post by jimmux » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:01 AM UTC

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…

I'm split on this. Personally I never use food delivery for these reasons, among others. On the other hand, I have friends with disabilities who have had a real improvement to their quality of life by making food more accessible.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#179

Post by simonblack » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:13 AM UTC

Uber is a scam.

It is never intended to make a profit. EXCEPT for the guys in management, who are soaking the fool investors and non-businessmen drivers alike, while they laugh all the way to the bank. It's a business-model straight out of the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s.

If the investors wised up, and the drivers wised up. Uber would evaporate away like the morning mist. And the Uber management guys might actually have to go out and get a REAL job.

Is the ride over for Uber? Uber never ever had a real ride to start with.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#180

Post by astrange » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 4:29 AM UTC

menzoic wrote: post #133

voz_ wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Uber was designed to be incredibly overcomplex and scaled from the beginning; you can read people’s accounts of the fancy technology they invented to scale other employees’ stuffing code in nonstop. Of course, those other employees had no reason to write that code, and were just doing it because Uber had a lot of money and decided to hire a lot of people to do random busywork.

If “it could be done in a weekend with less people” is true for anyone it’s true for Uber. They should be replacing systems with ones that may scale worse but are cheaper. Scaling=complexity comes from companies like Google/Meta where the engineers practice promotion-based development.