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Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

blog.waymo.com

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Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#161

Post by kibwen »

anaganisk wrote: post #111
makestuff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber obviously cannot spin up an org to replicate self driving vehicles in a few months. By that logic I would say Waymo has all of the power since they could develop their own app and undercut uber on pricing. The customers would instantly leave as it is a race to the bottom with ride share.

The power of Uber doesn't lie in it's app, Google famously has been forever trying to have a chat app and we all know how many times it's failed. Then comes Google+, Google's attempt to get into social networking. Unless Google came up with something novel or something different from incumbents it never ever succeeded. Any SWE worth his salt can build a ride booking app in a month or two, but the traction and confide…

> The power of Uber doesn't lie in it's app

I'm not sure what else Uber could possibly have. Name recognition? More people know Google than Uber. Install base? More people have Android phones than have the Uber app. Drivers? Uber is trying to eliminate its drivers, as this deal shows. Uber is defenseless against Google.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#162

Post by carstenhag »

nerdchum wrote: post #91

Why is autonomous driving being pursued but not remote driving? Why can I have a seat at my house with controls and drive my Uber/18 wheeler from my house?

There isn't that much of a difference between the taxi driver sitting in the physical car or at home. Only when you Location A is in low demand, you could "hop" into a car at Location B.

But the goal is to completely eliminate the driver, which increases efficiency a lot.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#163

Post by kibwen »

nashashmi wrote: post #144
makestuff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber obviously cannot spin up an org to replicate self driving vehicles in a few months. By that logic I would say Waymo has all of the power since they could develop their own app and undercut uber on pricing. The customers would instantly leave as it is a race to the bottom with ride share.

The customer network is the hardest thing to replicate

There's no network effect from having the Uber app. All Google would need to do is push a notification to every Android phone that has Google Maps (so, all of them) that says "book your next trip through Google maps and the first ten rides are free!" and they're in business.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#164

Post by labcomputer »

kaliqt wrote: post #48
nickfromseattle wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google could bang out a ride booking app in a weekend. Google's culture isn't really built around providing human support to users. I believe there is also lots of onboarding involved for restaurants so Google may struggle there. With that said, I am constantly hit up by outsourced Google reps for Adwords + Firebase but I think the average customer has a much higher transaction volume with much better margins than a…

To be fair, I don't think Uber has a lot of human to customer interaction either.

Maybe not, but a human at Uber responded within 15 minutes when a ride I had booked drove away from me just before pickup. They canceled the original booking with no fee, then sent another car to pick me up and gave me some Uber credits.

That's 1000% better customer service than I'd ever expect from big G. Google would probably charge me a cancellation fee for not taking the trip, shut down my account for having the temerity to complain I'd been stranded, and then followed up with automated email confirming they made the right decision after review.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#165

Post by deegles »

krebby wrote: post #154
SilverBirch wrote: post #2

This is fascinating, obviously it makes a tonne of sense for uber as a platform to offer waymo's autonomous vehicles. The first question I had though was "who extracts value here". Does Waymo get to demand human-driver level prices and therefore capture loads of value or does Uber actually capture the value because they're where the customers are. But then I realised... it doesn't matter. Waymo is part of Alphabet, a…

If no one steps up to challenge Waymo in this space in a reasonable timeframe, Waymo wins. If they do, Uber wins. Uber's play is as a platform. They win if there are several SDC providers (with working autonomy). As an analogy, they're Android; they want to own the network and have multiple operators plug into the Uber app, while the hardware makers don't want to do the work to spin up an expensive 2-way marketplace.…

What does it mean for a SDC platform to "win"? They either drive safely or they don't.

We're setting up for the biggest "winner take all" product-market fit in history.

Besides, ~99.9% of people won't have the expertise to make an informed decision on which provider to use (if they even have a choice).

The only losing scenario is if one is particularly bad, leading to a ton of regulation (like a FAA for SDCs).

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#166

Post by Master_Odin »

yalogin wrote: post #89

I still don’t understand the strategy for Waymo. After running that taxi service in phoenix for this long they resorted to partnering with Uber, it’s a huge failure. What does Uber bring to the table at all? An app that is easily replicable and with google’s reputation they can easily get customers off of Uber to their own platform. It’s a colossal failure. I was really hoping they would use Waze for this purpose. In…

With Google's reputation, I'd expect them to provide terrible customer support and then also just let the whole thing stagnate after the initial splashy rollout and it had to be maintained.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#167

Post by nindalf »

wartijn_ wrote: post #58
makestuff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber obviously cannot spin up an org to replicate self driving vehicles in a few months. By that logic I would say Waymo has all of the power since they could develop their own app and undercut uber on pricing. The customers would instantly leave as it is a race to the bottom with ride share.

Yes, Google can copy Uber, but can they make it successful? Uber has a lot of users and drivers, and Google has to convince them to use their app instead of Uber or one of the other existing apps in this space. Getting into a new market didn’t work for videos so they bought YouTube, it didn’t work for their social network, and it didn’t work for a ton of other cancelled projects.

Replicating Uber is hard because it's a 2 sided market - you need to convince both users and drivers to sign up and neither will if the other isn't there already. But that's not a problem for Waymo because they control the driving side. They simply need to get users to sign up.

When you have something unique and useful, people will sign up.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#168

Post by dragonwriter »

riskable wrote: post #131
bartwr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing…

> Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. This is nonsense. Google has more than enough legal resources to handle this. So much so that it would be nothing more than a regular 3-6 month project that would be assigned a small team of lawy…

> Big companies have big legal organizations and they don't actually operate that differently from the IT orgs that so many of us on HN are used to.

Well, if you are referring to IT organizations in firms in the tech industry where that’s the core business (i.e., a value center) you are wrong, they are run more like IT orgs in non-tech firms (cost centers), vigorously minimized to be a bit smaller than they should be to handle routine day-to-day needs effectively, with new, emergent, and non-routine work outsourced.

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#169

Post by nickfromseattle »

kaliqt wrote: post #48
nickfromseattle wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google could bang out a ride booking app in a weekend. Google's culture isn't really built around providing human support to users. I believe there is also lots of onboarding involved for restaurants so Google may struggle there. With that said, I am constantly hit up by outsourced Google reps for Adwords + Firebase but I think the average customer has a much higher transaction volume with much better margins than a…

To be fair, I don't think Uber has a lot of human to customer interaction either.

According to Linkedin 54% of Uber employees (48,000) are in operations roles.[0]

I suppose some of these could be drivers, but I believe Uber's biggest department is operations, which is one of the reasons it's so expensive to enter new markets. Can't scale operations in the same way you can scale development.

Google would have to do something similar to launch their own ride-share app powered by Waymo, so could make sense to just keep Uber in the middle.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/uber-com/insights/

Re: Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous driving technology to Uber

#170

Post by somsak2 »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #57
bartwr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing…

give me 3 good software developers and I can give you an Uber app maybe in 3-6 months? but what I can't give you is uber app being on every iPhone in the country.

with those resources, you can give me the Uber app from 2010.

consumer expectations are much higher than 13 years ago and that's not going to cut it.

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