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Is the Ride over for Uber?

smartcompany.com.au

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Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#221

Post by addicted »

Teever wrote: post #162
menzoic wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Uber is nothing more than a rent-seeking middle man and no one cares about how complicated their rent-seeking activities are behind the curtain The term rent-seeking gets thrown around a lot more lately, mostly from the web3 crowd. Most times its not used right. It's only rent seeking if the middleman isn't providing any value. Otherwise they're just getting paid for providing a service that people value.... Think a…

> reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace[0] >reduced wealth creation Uber and Lyft are pushing drivers into poverty[1] > lost government revenue How Uber dodges paying tax in Canada[2] I don't care about the complexity of the the black box algorithm that Uber implements because I know what purpose it serves. The whole pu…

Uber is best understood as a legal entrepreneur.

Their skill lies entirely in breaking laws in a way that allows them to make more money than the fines they pay.

In addition to their legal entrepreneurism their next skill lies in hiding externalities. They push costs to everyone else (drivers, riders, cities by massively increasing traffic, everyone who lives in those cities who have to deal with the noise and pollution of the additional traffic, etc) without having to bear any of it themselves.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#222

Post by mantas »

airbreather wrote: post #214
al_mandi wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber facilitates matching and routing and many other things. Don't you think that those features are worthy of paying for them?

Where I live you have to work a full 8 hour shift to be a taxi driver. So the real benefit of Uber was enabling mums to drop off children at school and then work until time to pick them up again (one example), casual self determining work not available to many in other ways. I live fairly central, guy around the corner from me is retired, hangs at home picking up the odd job as he feels like, great for him, plus he c…

> plus he can control his income relative to impacts to benefits

In other words, benefits abuse?

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#223

Post by iso1631 »

Uber is pretty much useless in the UK, it's be neutered to the point it's nearly as bad as taxis, because the drivers get to see where you're going before they accept your ride.

At heathrow a couple of weeks ago and tried 5 times to get a taxi to take me 30 minutes down the motorway, each time it was a minute wait showing nearby cars and eventually saying "not possible to find you a ride", had a similar experience in Newcastle a few weeks ago. If I can't rely on it then it's useless to me - may as well run the gauntlet of black cabs and "oh no I'm not going there this time of night mate"

The recent reviews in the app store are full of 1* reports with the same problems.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#224

Post by meheleventyone »

addicted wrote: post #221
Teever wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace[0] >reduced wealth creation Uber and Lyft are pushing drivers into poverty[1] > lost government revenue How Uber dodges paying tax in Canada[2] I don't care about the complexity of the the black box algorithm that Uber implements because I know what purpose it serves. The whole pu…

Uber is best understood as a legal entrepreneur. Their skill lies entirely in breaking laws in a way that allows them to make more money than the fines they pay. In addition to their legal entrepreneurism their next skill lies in hiding externalities. They push costs to everyone else (drivers, riders, cities by massively increasing traffic, everyone who lives in those cities who have to deal with the noise and pollut…

Sounds more like a parasite.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#225

Post by mschuster91 »

astrange wrote: post #180
menzoic wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

The problem is legal regulations. Wanna know why SAP is so successful despite their software being practically a legend for horrible UI, slowness and other nightmares at an absurd-seeming price point? Because they invest an absurd amount of money into lawyers, process engineers, developers and QA to keep track on law, judicial precedent and XO changes all across the world, so that their customers only have to pull in the latest monthly update and their processes (assuming they didn't deviate too hard) are automatically compliant with all possible kinds of bullshit.

Uber, AirBnB, Amazon FBA and other globally active marketplace companies deal with the same thing - their business is in facilitating other people's business without having to think about local laws and regulations.

Payment alone is a real hard thing: people wish to pay with whatever payment card scheme is most popular in their specific home country - which may not be the usual Mastercard/Visa duopoly -, they may wish to do so in wherever country they are at the moment, there may be international sanctions at play, different regulations about CC fees, clawback periods, taxes, VAT...

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#226

Post by gruez »

mantas wrote: post #222
airbreather wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live you have to work a full 8 hour shift to be a taxi driver. So the real benefit of Uber was enabling mums to drop off children at school and then work until time to pick them up again (one example), casual self determining work not available to many in other ways. I live fairly central, guy around the corner from me is retired, hangs at home picking up the odd job as he feels like, great for him, plus he c…

> plus he can control his income relative to impacts to benefits In other words, benefits abuse?

If the welfare program says you only get money if you earn under $2000/month, what's wrong with keeping your income just under $2000 month?

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#227

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

eclipticplane wrote: post #60
potemkin_buster wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it, I make a decent amount of money and haven't used their service prices crept up.. $43 usd for $22 usd in fast food burgers is insane

And it only takes a few times going through checkout to ask, wait, I got a $10 burger and $4 fries, how is my order $30? Nah, I ain't _that_ hungry for a luke-warm burger and soggy fries. Amazon won online retail, and changed online retail behavior, by getting rid of shipping fees. The price you see on the product is the price you pay (sans sales tax, but at least in the USA no one is used to seeing tax included).

> by getting rid of shipping fees.

you actually mean "by hiding shipping fees in an annual subscription model carefully tuned to deal with real world customer ordering behavior".

Non-Prime customers still see shipping fees for everything.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#228

Post by remflight »

Terrible article. It’s basically a negative yelp review masqueraded as some sort of financial analysis. He’s essentially a pissed off ex-customer that on one hand complains that they don’t pay the drivers enough, but also complains that the service is now too expensive. The article is utter garbage.

If you look at Uber’s drop in valuation, it’s commensurate with the drop in all tech companies. In fact, the article is seemingly singing the praises of DoorDash but Uber is down roughly 50% since Nov 2022 but DoorDash is down 75%.

And there’s nothing new that this article brings. Same old “Uber shouldn’t exist” meanwhile it’s set to become profitable.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#229

Post by ejb999 »

addicted wrote: post #221
Teever wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace[0] >reduced wealth creation Uber and Lyft are pushing drivers into poverty[1] > lost government revenue How Uber dodges paying tax in Canada[2] I don't care about the complexity of the the black box algorithm that Uber implements because I know what purpose it serves. The whole pu…

Uber is best understood as a legal entrepreneur. Their skill lies entirely in breaking laws in a way that allows them to make more money than the fines they pay. In addition to their legal entrepreneurism their next skill lies in hiding externalities. They push costs to everyone else (drivers, riders, cities by massively increasing traffic, everyone who lives in those cities who have to deal with the noise and pollut…

>>Their skill lies entirely in breaking laws in a way that allows them to make more money than the fines they pay.

Almost like AirBnB's model.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#230

Post by chopsuey5540 »

oldstrangers wrote: post #41
Barrin92 wrote: post #26

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 destroyi…

Modesty is an underappreciated aspect of running a successful company. The endless pursuit of growth is usually a byproduct of ego or at the behest of some intangible idea of "creating shareholder value." Just fucking create a killer product and work on refining that product to the best of your abilities. If you get bored, start a new company. You don't have to grow every company into the next Apple.

"Just fucking create a killer product and work on refining that product to the best of your abilities".

I'd argue that that is the exact reason why Apple is where it's at today.

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