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We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

greg-satell.medium.com

171–180 of 318 posts

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#171
Where I was during uber's ascent, uber's defining value proposition was circumventing the artificial monopoly created by the taxi medallion system. This "disruption" was actually great, it shook up an industry that needed shaking up (ironically I now use cabs because they have become better than uber where I am. This would not be the case if uber never existed).

But even if it did some good "disrupting", I think the article's point is it's not real innovation. Same e.g. with self booked travel, self scan groceries, etc, they are not really innovating, they just change a power balance.

So the it ends up being bad when all the capital is chasing these disruptors instead of "innovators" for some definition.

The thing it misses, I think, is that many of the big winners (or monopolies if you like) actually do end up funding massive amounts of innovation.

Facebook and Google have contributed huge $ to AI/ML research, Amazon Go I think qualifies as real innovation (and I think there are many amazon examples that are more than just an app). Tech is easy to pick on (I've picked on it a lot) and Uber may be an egregious example of a company that disrupted and didn't give back (though they don't make money either). But I think there has been some major innovation come out of tech companies, even if that isn't how they got rich in the first place.

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#172

Disruption in our economy means "losing billions of euro for years". 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.

So, Amazon's business model?

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I would guess because they didn’t have billions in Vc money to lose while they tried to weed out competition and secure new customers

I would guess they did not have the timing right with the advent of 3G internet with minimum viable bandwidth to be able to operate things like maps and GPS and payment processing in real time, combined with the advent of usable mobile phones with sufficient qualities of battery life, touch screen sizes, and computing power.

The 2007 to 2012 period was a perfect storm of bringing together connectivity with never before utility from newly developed devices, and if you were in the right place at the right time to stake a claim, then you had significant first mover advantages.

It was discovering new land that had not been settled yet, similar to when computing and society advanced to allow for computers in every home, and then internet connectivity, and then finally, 24/7 computing plus internet computing in your pocket.

Of course, having deep, deep pockets to hire the people at the forefronts of this land rush is also a huge advantage.

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#174
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Having taken a $30 Uber to drive 15 minutes lately, when a taxi would’ve cost $10 or so, I don’t think they’ve ultimately created much value with their rideshare service. They’ve basically just moved the entities around, and now it takes a lot longer to get a taxi. You forget just how terrible the taxi industry was prior to Uber. I would walk for miles rather than take a taxi. I would gladly pay 2-3x more for an Ube…

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.

This must be regional. My experiences are from the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia. Terrible, miserable service. I hate the old taxi industry in a very visceral way. If you're seeing good/better service in your location, and they cost much less than Uber, I imagine they have no issues staying commercially viable and you'll be able to keep enjoying their services.

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#175

Can we get an open source gig economy app where 75% of the profits go to gig workers? Then 7.5% would go towards employee rights and benefits of gig workers, 7.5% towards contributors improving the software, and 10% towards customer support and legal third parties.

https://drivers.coop/

If you are in New York City you can use drivers.coop.

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#176
post #110

So as I read the article main argument is, as rephrased: Commercial airlines are building on top what Wright brothers did and just grab easy money instead of figuring out how to fly people to the Moon.

I think that is an unfair summarisation since all the Wright brothers did was fly a very non-practical plane for about ten seconds as a kind of "MVP". There was no market. Commercial airliners took that core technology, refined it, and used it to actually create an entire new service and market.

I am writing about Ryan air or Southwest those companies did nothing to on R&D for flights.

No one is accusing them that we don't have a Moon colony because they are doing what they do.

Author is accusing application operating company that there is not enough innovation because of them. So it seems author just took Uber marketing division where they shout about "innovation" seriously.

There are companies that are doing actual R&D and Uber is buying services/goods from them, so it is like Southwest buying Boeing planes is actually paying R&D costs of coming up with better planes.

Also author is making point that somehow there is not enough innovation - well I have different point of view - whole innovation happened and made it possible to operate something like Uber. Smartphones and mobile connectivity with GPS is the innovation that was not as widespread 20 years ago, heck even 10 years ago things were still starting up.

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#177
post #123

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 It's incredible spending time in the undeveloped/developing world - all the problems and solutions that "gig" apps supposedly are good for live on to this day all over the world. Need a place to stay? Ask around the village and someone will be more than happy for you to sleep in the spare room for $1/night. Need a ride? Wait where the locals are, you'll get in a communal "taxi" wit…

> Need a place to stay? Ask around the village and someone will be more than happy for you to sleep in the spare room for $1/night.

Out of curiosity - where did you have such experience?

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#178
The problem is incumbents get lazy and start profit-seeking. Competition is the only way we know to have a chance of fighting it. The taxi industry got away with ripping off customers and having terrible service for ages. In my country they would regularly overcharge or take longer routes. Or you call and they decide not to come, or you walk around waving your hands frantically at a taxi hoping they stop. As a tourist, its even worse because you have no idea what the rate should be.

I don't know if gig companies or all VC companies are perfect, but lets not pretend industries regularly fail to innovate in the absence of competition.

Healthcare - the tech disruption in healthcare actually makes it easy to see a doctor over video call for small stuff and easy to track my records over time. The existing healthcare system requires me to call and wait weeks for an appointment and use some clunky UI to even message a doctor. And everyone knows how terrible insurance is..

Banks - In Canada, I can't get a single bank to give me API access to my own account. Their native interfaces suck, and connecting with Mint is frequently buggy. Mint itself is much worse than Quicken for browsing transactions, grouping, charting, but Quicken's API connection to banks sucks, despite also being built by Intuit. Crypto websites and apps are much better & provide great API access. If they had a trustworthy stablecoin, i would move in a heartbeat.

Education - university prices keep going up even as their model remains the same. Even as the actual content of courses is freely available online. University costs are insane, student debt levels are insane. Software is the first industry where the majority of what you need to know especially as you move beyond general CS comes from the internet, _for free_.

Electric cars/space - Reusable rockets were literally considered impossible a decade ago, they are reality now.

Like it would be great to have actual innovation. It would be nice if we had any meaningful anti trust enforcement or other ways to force innovation. But in my (relatively short) lifetime, i have almost never seen large scale innovation happen in the absence of competition. Any serious competition feels like "disruption" to industries accustomed to hanging out and collecting profits.

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#179
I’ve been using delivery apps on and off for the past few months. Between the promos I’ve received, I’ve gotten groceries delivered for less than the items cost let alone the gas and time to deliver them. I’ve had multiple food items delivered at a lower cost than me walking there and buying in store as well. Talking to a few drivers for the companies - its tough, but they make a decent amount in the city (4-7k a month)

Re: We must return to an economy fueled by innovation, rather than disruption

#180
We do not have an economy built on disruption, we have an economy built on the myth of disruption. No better example than Theranos.

And we have an economy built on lock-in. No better example that Apple, or perhaps Google and Amazon. These are both ways to extract value from the economic system, not ways to improve it. The Apple Tax, Google Adsense.

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