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Uber Slayer: How China’s Didi Beat the Ride-Hailing Superpower

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Re: Uber Slayer: How China’s Didi Beat the Ride-Hailing Superpower

#31

Post by tluyben2 »

usaar333 wrote: post #4

The article is rather light on details on what Didi actually did better, but from using Uber as a foreigner in China, I could see significant problems in Uber's product execution: 1. The Android app continues to use Google Maps which is Great Firewall blocked, meaning I had to use a VPN to load uncached tiles. 2. Uber in turn IP blocks EC2, preventing me from using my main VPN while in app. 3. Entities on the map are…

For 1 & 2: when was that as for the last 1.5 years at least they use Baidu and it works fine. 3 yes indeed, very annoying. 4. In the west support is good: from China they just do not respond unless a driver screwed me on purpose (doing the ride without me in the car which happened a few time): I would receive no mail but the amount paid would be set to 0 rmb. 5. Even most car brand names are in Chinese now it seems.

What we find most annoying that I always set pick up as an intersection of two streets (fuxing/wulumuqi but in Chinese) and then stand on the corner and yet they always call to ask where we are. We are on the f*cking corner I entered and we do not speak Chinese very well so a mumbling guy does not work well. They stopped allowing you to send sms to the driver, like you can in other countries which would allow to send google offline translated details... so often they just cancel the ride because we cannot explain. Uber Black still do their best so usually that is the easiest.

Last year things were definitely easier. Drivers were doing their best more for foreigners, you could sms and they would not call before, they would just pick you up.

A big pet peeve is with Google and maybe someone here knows how to fix it; I use Google Translate with offline translations but when you are online, even though Google cannot be reached, it will try to do it online. It is beyond annoying when you quickly want to translate something, you have offline installed and yet it will just hang trying to reach the mothership...

Edit: now that I have access to Google to search for my Translate issue, I will give Netguard a go.

Re: Uber Slayer: How China’s Didi Beat the Ride-Hailing Superpower

#32

Post by tekromancr »

Fricken wrote: post #26
bpodgursky wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We had a local chat start up but slack ate their lunch. Everyone here just uses the slack free tier. How do you compete against free? The point of division of labor (aka how civilization got built) is that it's not _necessary_ to spend time re-doing the same thing others are doing. Slack is giving you something for free that you don't _have_ to spend time or money building now. Now you have X engineers free to work…

Nations, communities, individuals: they value autonomy. Building their own networks rather than submitting to whatever is being fed by silicon valley is not a pointless job.

Apparently not, otherwise they would have used the locally produced. But they didn't, they chose the freebie SV tools.

Re: Uber Slayer: How China’s Didi Beat the Ride-Hailing Superpower

#33

Post by polemic »

Uber's problems extend far beyond China. While the app is nice, its the cheap fares that bring the vast majority of users to Uber, vs competitors or plain ol' taxis.

Those cheap fares are artificially low, funded by SV money and ignoring regulatory issues. But money does run out (or investors want a real return eventually), and regulators either change the law (nullifying their advantage) or crackdown completely.

Uber's network effects are almost non-existant. Every small geographic market has to be fought and won the hard, and expensive way. And when the money runs out and the fares go up, there is no market lock-in. Barriers to entry are low, potential competitors include anyone with a car, Uber just doesn't have a way to lock in market dominance.

Which is probably why they're rushing toward driverless vehicles as fast as they possibly can. Their own staff are an existential threat so they have to remove them as soon as possible. Except that puts them in direct competition with a whole range of extremely well funded, and well connected industry players.

So. Good luck Uber, this is just an example writ large of where Uber is heading in the not to distant future.

Re: Uber Slayer: How China’s Didi Beat the Ride-Hailing Superpower

#34

Post by notahacker »

aianus wrote: post #16
readhn wrote: post #6

I completely understand Chinese (or any other country) entrepreneurs, why let some foreign company come in and take all the money (ultimately a lot of it outside the country) when you can do the same internally. The idea is not a rocket science, all about execution. And locals know the specifics of China more than a bunch of silicon valley grads. Cheers to these guys for making it work in China. And Good luck to Uber…

> why let some foreign company come in and take all the money (ultimately a lot of it outside the country) when you can do the same internally. Because those engineers and entrepreneurs could have spent their time producing something globally new and innovative instead of creating an Uber clone. Then they could have sold that new thing to the world and everyone (global consumers and the aforementioned Chinese) would…

Or - considerably more likely - they could have created a significantly less successful Uber clone, like many engineers and entrepreneurs have managed in other countries where Uber operates. I mean, if it were that easy to come up with revolutionary new business models that the entire world needs, we wouldn't see quite so many cookie cutter startups in Silicon Valley either...

Actually, the more plausible arguments against protectionism and state aid for favoured corporations are the precise opposite to the one you're making: it's good for consumers to have a wider choice of ride-booking apps, and not a choice guided by the government. If the ridesharing apps are likely to tend towards being a monopoly anyway then there certainly are advantages to having it a locally owned and run one.

Re: Uber Slayer: How China’s Didi Beat the Ride-Hailing Superpower

#35

Post by bsder »

tomtang0514 wrote: post #30
aianus wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pie is not a fixed size. The Chinese could produce something new and innovative instead of clones and sell those to the US, making the pie bigger for everyone.

They tried, and US government bans Huawei

The US government banned Huawei for many reasons.

One of the reasons that should hit home to the HN crowd is that Huawei simply up and 100% cloned some of the highest-end Cisco routers in their early days.

While I'm no fan of patents, when you clone something down to the bugs (which is how Cisco demonstrated the cloning) you deserve to get some penalty.

Re: Uber Slayer: How China’s Didi Beat the Ride-Hailing Superpower

#36

Post by prebrov »

tomtang0514 wrote: post #30
aianus wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pie is not a fixed size. The Chinese could produce something new and innovative instead of clones and sell those to the US, making the pie bigger for everyone.

They tried, and US government bans Huawei

Huawei was banned from government contracts, not from the U.S. [edit: afaik]

Also, it appropriated so much of Cisco's IP (quite poorly), at least as it was establishing itself as a network equipment vendor, that I wouldn't call Huawei innovative, not back then.

It was a pretty clear case of cloning very expensive tech for a dime with MASSIVE government support.

Re: Uber Slayer: How China’s Didi Beat the Ride-Hailing Superpower

#37

Post by serge2k »

bpodgursky wrote: post #10
the_common_man wrote: post #8

For those crying wolf about protectionism... In general, I think most nations should have more closed door policies like China. My country (which won't be named) does not have a startup ecosystem anymore and we have become a consumption ground for one silicon valley startup after another. Instead of fostering local startups and paying some money (since many bootstrap and do not have big pockets), all the companies ju…

> We had a local chat start up but slack ate their lunch. Everyone here just uses the slack free tier. How do you compete against free? The point of division of labor (aka how civilization got built) is that it's not _necessary_ to spend time re-doing the same thing others are doing. Slack is giving you something for free that you don't _have_ to spend time or money building now. Now you have X engineers free to work…

The problem is, say you have developed an app that is on par with Slack.

You launch and are trying to grow your business.

Then Slack shows up and is giving away a similar product because they have VC money to burn. How do you compete?

Re: Uber Slayer: How China’s Didi Beat the Ride-Hailing Superpower

#38

Post by alphapapa »

bpodgursky wrote: post #10
the_common_man wrote: post #8

For those crying wolf about protectionism... In general, I think most nations should have more closed door policies like China. My country (which won't be named) does not have a startup ecosystem anymore and we have become a consumption ground for one silicon valley startup after another. Instead of fostering local startups and paying some money (since many bootstrap and do not have big pockets), all the companies ju…

> We had a local chat start up but slack ate their lunch. Everyone here just uses the slack free tier. How do you compete against free? The point of division of labor (aka how civilization got built) is that it's not _necessary_ to spend time re-doing the same thing others are doing. Slack is giving you something for free that you don't _have_ to spend time or money building now. Now you have X engineers free to work…

So where do you draw the line? Should there be one computer company, one car company, one airplane company, one movie studio, one agriculture company, etc? That's the natural conclusion of your logic. Either you add a bunch of special cases (that doesn't work in X, Y, and Z industries, or in country A's economy or culture), or your logic is flawed. And if you add special cases, you have to justify them.

So either you think that there really should be one company per thing (for whatever definition of thing), in which case that's a whole 'nother ballgame, or your theory is logically inconsistent.

Re: Uber Slayer: How China’s Didi Beat the Ride-Hailing Superpower

#39

Post by toomuchtodo »

dylz wrote: post #11
jensvdh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does Uber block EC2?

This is pretty standard, we block all "cloud" ranges for end-user-facing things (antifraud, etc) Bots on EC2 scraping and bruteforcing and whatnot, free tier being abused for free proxies

Good to know for future projects.

Re: Uber Slayer: How China’s Didi Beat the Ride-Hailing Superpower

#40

Post by usaar333 »

chrischen wrote: post #12
usaar333 wrote: post #4

The article is rather light on details on what Didi actually did better, but from using Uber as a foreigner in China, I could see significant problems in Uber's product execution: 1. The Android app continues to use Google Maps which is Great Firewall blocked, meaning I had to use a VPN to load uncached tiles. 2. Uber in turn IP blocks EC2, preventing me from using my main VPN while in app. 3. Entities on the map are…

#1 - was this because you were still using the US store downloaded app? I highly doubt they would release Uber to Chinese people with a non-working maps.

Yes, I was using the playstore app.

But this is what I mean as an example of an easily fixable problem. If user is using the Play Store app, show a dialog or otherwise redirect them to another source. Even a simple help menu telling you about the problem and how to fix it is low-cost.

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