151–160 of 376 posts
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I think it was the publicly stated strategy because saying "we want to monopolize taxi service, then raise prices" doesn't sound great to regulators.
When has monopolizing a sector then jacking up the prices ever worked as a strategy?
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No, that was never the strategy, no matter how many times people on HN claimed it was. Both Uber and Lyft are aiming for profitability next year with human drivers. (Disclaimer, I work for Lyft but this has been said in public many, many times by both companies.)
What strategies do rideshare companies plan to employ to reach profitability: increasing prices, cutting costs, etc? And what will the implications be for riders and employees alike.
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Big bets and promises for the future was all they had. Trying to be a solid profitable business in a dying industry isn't going to work out well for them.
Wait, how is ride-sharing / cabs a dying industry? People are always going to need to get from point A to point B, and if anything, the younger generations are less likely to own cars. Public infrastructure is never going to fill the gap except in certain urban areas.
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Why would they need Uber? There are hundreds of similar taxi apps
Hundreds? With Uber there's a car maybe 5-10 minutes away at all times, that's certainly not true with most of their competition.
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Big bets and promises for the future was all they had. Trying to be a solid profitable business in a dying industry isn't going to work out well for them.
Wait, how is ride-sharing / cabs a dying industry? People are always going to need to get from point A to point B, and if anything, the younger generations are less likely to own cars. Public infrastructure is never going to fill the gap except in certain urban areas.
There's nothing inherent about this. If the promised alternatives to owning cars turn out to be BS, the younger generations will have to own cars whether they want to or not.
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No, that was never the strategy, no matter how many times people on HN claimed it was. Both Uber and Lyft are aiming for profitability next year with human drivers. (Disclaimer, I work for Lyft but this has been said in public many, many times by both companies.)
And nothing about this deal indicates Uber is stepping away from self driving cars. They basically structured the deal as buying stock in the company and investing $400M. Letting them focus on their core business while still having a large financial stake in AI cars. The big development is that self driving cars turned out to be an extremely hard problem which didn’t match company timelines (or potentially company bu…
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Yeah the more I look the more I find proof that self-driving cars has been seen as an existential threat by Uber/Lyft for years and years with Travis Kalanick (ex-CEO) saying it repeatedly. Here's an interview from him on exactly this topic. https://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-interview-on...
If there are competitors (e.g., Waymo) that have self-driving that's significantly cheaper, then Uber and Lyft can't compete. So it's a huge potential threat to their businesses. And if self-driving makes rides much cheaper, that can significantly boost the size of the market. But that does not imply that they can't be successful and profitable businesses in a world without self-driving cars, which is the frequently-…
Also, saying that Uber/Lyft need to create their own self-driving cars is ignoring the fact that other companies that create self-driving cars are, and will likely continue to offer rides in their cars through existing ride sharing companies.
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No, that was never the strategy, no matter how many times people on HN claimed it was. Both Uber and Lyft are aiming for profitability next year with human drivers. (Disclaimer, I work for Lyft but this has been said in public many, many times by both companies.)
And nothing about this deal indicates Uber is stepping away from self driving cars. They basically structured the deal as buying stock in the company and investing $400M. Letting them focus on their core business while still having a large financial stake in AI cars. The big development is that self driving cars turned out to be an extremely hard problem which didn’t match company timelines (or potentially company bu…
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I love it when job interview pitches fall flat like that. Many years ago, I had a job offer from IBM for a class of server I wasn't familiar with. The guy explained it to me like this: "You see, desktops these days are running Linux, and mainframes are running (IBM OS something?). We represent a class of server bigger than desktops but smaller than mainframes. It's an exciting space. The desktop class of PCs are hand…
IBM "Midrange", aka AS/400: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i They were an interesting - but dead - sideline of computing evolution. I never used one, but they had a interesting object-based (instead of file based) operating system.