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Is the Ride over for Uber?

smartcompany.com.au

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Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#281

Post by lazide »

csande17 wrote: post #97
MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #75

Earlier 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…

Oh, they realize it - which is why the managers and execs whose ongoing career trajectories require managing larger and larger orgs spend so much time coming up with more work!

Most line engineers often realize it too pretty quickly, which is why we end up with so many new frameworks every time there is a huge boom cycle.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#282

Post by rightbyte »

agentcoops wrote: post #237

Anecdata of course: I've been a frequent and global user of Uber for far too long, but in the last six months I've unintentionally stopped using the app completely both locally and while traveling. At least in Europe, the Uber experience, for drivers and riders, has become egregious and competition from aggregators of local taxi infrastructure can finally offer a well-designed app at an almost identical price point w…

Taxi companies has the benefit of scale in a way that Uber drivers' don't. I don't think not maintaining the vehicle fleet "at scale" will work out in the long run for Uber's drivers and thus Uber when they run out of lusers running at a loss.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#283

Post by nobody9999 »

admax88qqq wrote: post #272
nobody9999 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>NYC is on a whole other scale than just about any other city in North America. The density of NYC changes the economics of just about anything drastically. Absolutely. Which is why I qualified my statement with "YMMV." That said, I think one aspect is broadly applicable: Most low to mid-price restaurants (not chain restaurants) operate on pretty thin margins. And the 12-30% (just for "listing" on their website) can…

I'm unconvinced. Restaurants are not "forced" to eat those service fees, they can up their prices on delivery apps to compensate. Does that make it a bad deal for the consumer? Maybe, but lots of people seem to be willing to pay the premium for the experience and convenience of ordering through the app. Locally I've seen plenty of restaurants have different prices on UberEats than online.

>I'm unconvinced. Restaurants are not "forced" to eat those service fees, they can up their prices on delivery apps to compensate.

I'm talking about service fees to the customer, not the restaurant. The restaurant is already paying 12-30% on every single order. That includes phone orders via the fake websites these services set up with a VOIP number (not the restaurants' own numbers) that forwards to the restaurant.

As for upping the menu prices, IIUC, these services (GrubHub definitely, the others I'm sure do the same) require restaurants to charge the same prices as their eat-in menu.

You're welcome to disagree as to whether or not it's a good or bad deal for anyone, but I've seen (and had it confirmed by several former restaurant owners) restaurants go out of business because they, can't make a profit via the delivery services. Even ones that had been doing just fine for decades.

>Locally I've seen plenty of restaurants have different prices on UberEats than online.

Fair enough. I wouldn't use UberAnything even if it was free, so I wouldn't know. But I am certain about GrubHub/Seamless.

I expect you're still "unconvinced." Which is no skin off my nose. I'm loathe to tell anyone what to think, do or say, as it's neither my business nor my concern.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#284

Post by dmitriid »

hotpotamus wrote: post #172
dmitriid wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It doesn't. Your unit is tiny. A few thousand users doesn't even break the threshold of "death by Hacker News".

Uber's 93 million in 80 countries means that (very roughly) in each country they have three orders of magnitude more users than you: 93 mln/80 countries = 1+ mln in each country = 1000 times more than you = 3 orders of magnitude.

As I said, just dealing with payments in each country is often a full-time job for a dedicated tema even if you process payments through a third party like Adyen.

Are Uber operating at 100% efficiency? Hell no. Will you have several orders of magnitudes fewer people than Uber when you grow to Uber's size? I very highly doubt it.

Of course, there are exceptions like WhatsApp, but WhatsApp in itself is a very simple product (that is very hard to scale), and was (and still is) very slow in rolling out features.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#286

Post by astrange »

mschuster91 wrote: post #225
astrange wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Uber was mainly successful by just ignoring the regulations nobody liked and hoping it’d work out, though. It really looks like they just managed to convince everyone that taxi routing is hard and can only be done by hiring 1000 geniuses to write 1000 queueing systems in Scala.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#287

Post by fundad »

xeromal wrote: post #165
zonotope wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like a great idea to force someone who doesn't want to take you somewhere to take you somewhere. I'm not letting someone make me an asshole. I'd rather use the app.

u mean a job?

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#288

Post by airbreather »

wdb wrote: post #268
gruez wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because it indicates you are able to find a job that earns you money

not if you are retired, the way it works here the marginal tax rate of a pensioner could end up around 80% when means tested pension payments are taken account of.

For someone that has worked all their life and paid a shitload of tax I find that a little offensive and have no problem with them optimising their returns in their golden years.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#289

Post by icedchai »

martinald wrote: post #36
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Food delivery also isn’t very practical in developed country markets without a huge increase in productivity vs labor costs. It’s just too expensive compared to a country like China where it is cheap enough to be ubiquitous. Automation could be disruptive here…someday in the form of food delivery land and/or air drones. It really is the same with ride share: it just isn’t economical considering how much human labor i…

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…

I live in suburbia and gave up on food delivery years ago. The drivers would regularly get lost. I would provide directions on how to find my apartment building and unit number. They would arrive at the complex, and still get lost, having not read the instructions. Some drivers would call, say "I'm in the parking lot", and expect me to find them (there's 8 different buildings.)

It's cheaper and more convenient to pick the food up myself.

Re: Is the Ride over for Uber?

#290

Post by icedchai »

miked85 wrote: post #218
naravara wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

To make it worse, I have gate code to enter my complex - I have succinct, exact instructions including the gate code and how to navigate to my building. 90% of the time they never even read the instructions, call to ask for a gate code and then take 10 min to find my place.

I ran into similar issues many times. I don't even have a gate code, but finding the building can be confusing. They do not read the instructions.
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