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Google Is Developing Its Own Uber Competitor

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Re: Google Is Developing Its Own Uber Competitor

#31

Post by fidotron »

Uber have struck me before as a bigger potential headache for Google than even Facebook were/are, and I suspect this is all an effort to acquire them and drive the price down.

There is something about the automated dispatch at giant scale business which overlaps with the search as interface idea. "Get me to [wherever]" is a natural extension of what you might do after searching. Furthermore, the act of finding a driver is itself a search. Feed the driver information back into search and it gets entertaining, with queries like "What are the restaurants right now with 80% rating, tables available and will cost me less than $20 to get to?" That's a query you can only answer with the driver and price data. As such Uber have the hard bit and can grow the rest, Google face a move into a physical world full of people, which is pretty much their Achilles heel.

Re: Google Is Developing Its Own Uber Competitor

#32

Post by thrownaway2424 »

hosay123 wrote: post #18

My inner paranoid finds this interesting from the perspective of Google entering yet another domain where they have high accuracy data on the present/future whereabouts and private concerns of a large number of people.. add it to the hundred other properties they maintain that appear to have no direct business value other than capturing masses of sensitive data that was previously nicely decentralized and private. Ca…

Well you're in luck on that last point, because nobody has ever paid for their meal with Google Wallet.

Re: Google Is Developing Its Own Uber Competitor

#34

Post by ChuckMcM »

Vermeulen wrote: post #5

Google seems unable to have a partner without eventually entering their market and becoming enemies. Apple before Android, Twitter before Google+ - I guess it's inevitable with how many different industries Google tries to tackle. I think if this service is entirely defined by autonomous vehicles it's really a complete different service than Uber. No more driver ratings or passenger ratings, all the same car type, an…

I noted back in 2008 how this was an interesting side effect of Google's empowerment policy.

The way it occurred was that anyone of moderate level inside of Google could start a project involving some outside company. This was seductively easy because those companies always wanted the validation that came from working with Google. But the person could be just a run of the mill senior engineer type (of which there were many).

So this engineer and this outside partner start putting together a mashup, and it goes well. The partner is loving the Google traffic and the senior engineer inside of Google is thinking "Wow, this is going to look great on my next promotion request." So it grows and grows, largely unnoticed by the folks who are really the movers and shakers in Google.

Then it continues to go well, the engineer has recruited a couple more Googlers to help her work on the project and it hits an tipping point. It really needs a full time project manager and the amount of resources inside the Google cloud it is using has gotten to the point where you needed to allocate them specifically. Since everyone likes success this goes swimmingly and now lots of people in the world are using this mashup service. At that point it gets the attention of the 'big boys'.

What happens next is an interesting reverse slicing of the project to figure out what its business model is, how much revenue it is generating, how much it could generate. I always wondered, but never had confirmed if somewhere there was a meeting to look at these and decide on next steps.

One of the outcomes of this noticing could be "Hmmm, we have an advantage/key technology and could do this better if we recast this as a Google Product rather than being a provider to this Partner's product." And then there is some announcement of this new product initiative at Google and how cool it is going to be. Meanwhile the original partner now realized that Google isn't a partner anymore, rather they are at best a competitor and at worst a threat to their existence. At that point, depending on their resources they start scrambling to reduce their dependency on Google services in order to avoid that future.

I think for most people this is understood as a possible 'success' outcome of working with Google.

Re: Google Is Developing Its Own Uber Competitor

#36

Post by Kalium »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #32
hosay123 wrote: post #18

My inner paranoid finds this interesting from the perspective of Google entering yet another domain where they have high accuracy data on the present/future whereabouts and private concerns of a large number of people.. add it to the hundred other properties they maintain that appear to have no direct business value other than capturing masses of sensitive data that was previously nicely decentralized and private. Ca…

Well you're in luck on that last point, because nobody has ever paid for their meal with Google Wallet.

I've bought food with Wallet before. And made a meal of it.

So, I suppose I have.

Re: Google Is Developing Its Own Uber Competitor

#37

Post by higherpurpose »

hosay123 wrote: post #18

My inner paranoid finds this interesting from the perspective of Google entering yet another domain where they have high accuracy data on the present/future whereabouts and private concerns of a large number of people.. add it to the hundred other properties they maintain that appear to have no direct business value other than capturing masses of sensitive data that was previously nicely decentralized and private. Ca…

I wonder if eventually NSA will get massive layoffs because much of what they'd do would be redundant, and for 80 percent of the stuff they want they could just ask/hack Google. The other 20 percent employees will remain for users of Google competitors and more targeted spying. So essentially 80 percent of NSA's "intelligence" would be outsourced to Google (for free).

Re: Google Is Developing Its Own Uber Competitor

#40

Post by pavedwalden »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #6
geoffwoo wrote: post #2

Google could cut Uber down hard by pulling Google Maps API access. Ballsiest play Google has ever done if they execute on this. Love it.

>> "Google could cut Uber down hard by pulling Google Maps API access." Why would they do that to a company they are invested in? >> "if they execute on this." There's the key. They are going to face the same regulatory problems as Uber. Worse if they go the self-driving car route as that going to require huge overalls to legislation worldwide.

Hasn't Uber already done a lot of the bush clearing? Sure, there's plenty more to get hashed out, but it might be nice to draft behind Uber, only entering markets once the legal situation stabilizes. I've always been fond of the expression "The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese"
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