161–170 of 318 posts
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Sure, but like I said - solving a problem in the US and then rolling it out across the globe just “because” doesn’t mean the rest of the world needed it, just mean you had enough money to outcompete even if your service is worse.
Why did people take to Uber outside the US if there wasn't a need?
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Not writing software, using it requires software literacy. How many people do you know that refuse to learn the software they use everyday? How many times have you helped a friend or colleague with some problem just by googling it even when you don't really understand what they do for a living? It's not that we need everyone to create software, but it would unlock huge productivity gains if everyone stopped pasting s…
Somehown I think the literature on excel is lacking. Do you know any reference which shows 'how to use it' in your sense?
The race to the bottom I'm seeing in e-commerce is just hilarious. Great for consumers. Not so great if you are a delivery driver.
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I never had an issue with taxis in most European countries I have lived on, so reaching 50 it is quite a number of taxis, and still manage to this day without ever having taken an uber, which I refuse by principle due to the way their treat employees.
In Finland Uber lead to deregulating taxi market, which to no ones surprise lead to worse service, less skilled drivers, less availability on average and more expensive service... Then again I suppose the Uber lovers want exactly those things and an exploiting entity to leech money in between.
Fully agree with this. It seems like so many of the apps that come to dominate just make up for shortcomings unique to the US that then, with money, take over the rest of the west for no good reason other than scale to get 25 people at the top of those companies rich. I’ve never seen the need for Uber. Taxis have never been an issue in the UK and the most successful firms in the city I lived when Uber was starting ou…
"I’ve never seen the need for Uber." A very bold claim. I am not sure about the finances of Uber and how it impacts shareholders vs employees and how many people are getting rich off it, but let me tell you that services like Uber have been a God send as a consumer. The haggling with old school taxi drivers is one of the worst experiences one can have, not to mention that you have no idea what the prices should be if…
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>You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, [...] I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different, It's more than just a substitution of tapping an icon vs dialing a phone number. The Uber business model of non-medallion cars and geographic matching algorithm builds up a "distributed mesh" of drivers to serve passengers -- especially those who are n…
> drivers can ignore it and wait for the more lucrative airport-to-downtown ride for $50. Why? Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips and instead, incentives them to wait for the longer airport trips. So hub-to-suburb and suburb-back-to-hub is "dead time" the drivers are not paid for. Isn’t it the same for Uber? They don’t get paid to get to your locat…
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I have friends in South Africa who built a small business similar to uber in 2004 on SMS and future phones. Worked really well, however, at the end of the day an idea does not build a business like uber. Extremely well executed startups does, which of course requires a team in just the right milieu and timing.
> I have friends in South Africa who built a small business similar to uber in 2004 on SMS and future phones. (I assume you meant "feature-phone" there?) You should tell your SA friends to reach out to some tech journos, they'd love to write a "Uber before Uber" story, and I'd like to know the reasons why their project didn't pan-out myself. SMS-based applications had a lot of potential in the mid-2000s, often the fa…
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I have friends in South Africa who built a small business similar to uber in 2004 on SMS and future phones. Worked really well, however, at the end of the day an idea does not build a business like uber. Extremely well executed startups does, which of course requires a team in just the right milieu and timing.
> I have friends in South Africa who built a small business similar to uber in 2004 on SMS and future phones. (I assume you meant "feature-phone" there?) You should tell your SA friends to reach out to some tech journos, they'd love to write a "Uber before Uber" story, and I'd like to know the reasons why their project didn't pan-out myself. SMS-based applications had a lot of potential in the mid-2000s, often the fa…
Yeah, if I had to guess, it was so extremely hard for them to recruit taxi drivers in South Africa. The metered taxi industry has always been extremely untrusted (my personal opinion), and basically non-existent.
They approached these guys and also the hand full of companies that existed back then, but it really wasn't until Uber established a trusted driver experience that we really started using taxis on a daily / weekly basis. So they simply did not have the funding / momentum to establish such a large scale transition in transportation and consumer trust within SA.
For years prior to Uber, the segment for "upper / middle class" public transport was not served and for sure not accessible. You could phone a cab company in Cape Town and get a taxi, but then it was super expensive and that was basically the only option – service which was also not available in most other cities.
When Uber arrived, they (and other companies) helped jobless drivers secure funding for cabs and within a year or two there were thousands of drivers, cabs and Ubers in all metros.
For the first time, when I had to go to the airport, I could get a Uber instead of asking a friend to drop me off. Crazy but this was the reality.
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>You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, [...] I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different, It's more than just a substitution of tapping an icon vs dialing a phone number. The Uber business model of non-medallion cars and geographic matching algorithm builds up a "distributed mesh" of drivers to serve passengers -- especially those who are n…
> drivers can ignore it and wait for the more lucrative airport-to-downtown ride for $50. Why? Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips and instead, incentives them to wait for the longer airport trips. So hub-to-suburb and suburb-back-to-hub is "dead time" the drivers are not paid for. Isn’t it the same for Uber? They don’t get paid to get to your locat…
That's why the GP talks about a "distributed mesh" of drivers. There's simply more Uber drivers than there have ever been taxis in most places. So in the age of Uber if you're in a suburban area there's a high likelihood there's an Uber driver near you. So there's a small amount of unpaid driving time for the driver. There's also a decent chance of them finding a return passenger at the destination thanks to a similar increase in the number of potential riders vs taxis.
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The fact that medallions were so expensive that you could retire off owning one was the problem . There weren't enough taxis.
The insanity was that medallions had monetary value in first place. Just imagine that you couldn't start software company unless you bought medallion from someone already operating one. Or any other business for that matter... As for each type of business there is very good reasons to limit amount of those...