321–330 of 399 posts
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Spinning up a messaging app without a compelling differentiation is hard. It's much easier with a compelling differentiation. Waymo could just set prices at half of Uber and boom instant market share.
Instant market share if they're willing to lose 2x the money that Uber is losing. It's not like drivers are going to be falling over themselves to sign up if it's a 50% paycut.
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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.
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…
Nonsense
It would be a huge job. Even for Google
Not the critical aspect of this announcement, but they are explicitly expecting autonomous food delivery. That makes sense in principle, but in practice… This will be all the wrong kinds of exciting for a while. If you are a designer with a taste for spilling soup, cold pasta, and involuntarily calzone pizza, I recommend you start looking at options there, because: - Restaurants operators do not want to leave their k…
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I think you're underplaying the difficulty of what Uber has built. Uber is an operations-heavy business. Determining pricing strategies, handling incidents, and working with local governments is at the core of its service. Google has traditionally shied away from businesses that require big operational investments in real-world assets the way that, say, Amazon or Airbnb have. These take time to build properly, and is…
Waymo already has to deal with local governments.
Which is one reason they want to tream up with Uber. They know how hard it is
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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.
No but if you're Google you can put it on literally every android phone quite quickly.
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…
The backstory that seems to have been forgotten here is that self driving cars are still a money bleeding endeavor. It's why Uber sold its own self driving division and it's something Cruise has said in the past still needs to be figured out. Uber has pivoted to doing partnerships with any self driving player that is looking for a customer base. Waymo doesn't have the tech nor the desire to figure out logistics to co…
They also don’t work. At least not by any sane definition. Sure, if you’ve mapped the area in advance, nothing changed,the weather is nice and nothing unusual happens all might be okay but otherwise it’s a shitshow.
Human drivers are cheaper and more versatile. There is no point in this other than trying to persuade the markets Google hasn’t spanked millions on a dead end.
Many comments saying Waymo could easily spin up an Uber-replacement app are missing one key point: integrating with Uber allows Waymo to have a slow rollout / soft-launch. They can start adding support one city at a time. And for the Uber user, the Waymo option only pops up for you if the ride you requested is within the Waymo range and they have cars available. This way they can also collect tons of data about how u…
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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.
What's an example of something for consumers that Uber 2023 does a lot better than Uber 2010, if the drivers behave entirely cooperatively? (since we're talking autonomous vehicles here)
another big deal is gps accuracy in cities, which is a pretty non trivial problem but at this point a consumer expectation https://www.uber.com/blog/rethinking-gps/
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Ah, the internet where people who know absolutely nothing cite a PR blog directly from a company providing bold assertions that then give them 100% confidence. I’ve been in at least four fully self-driving dev / S0 / drivable buck vehicles and they are absolute garbage imo. We had one planned demo that was delayed because of fog in 2020, not road fog, but crap on the LiDAR glass. How many have you directly worked wit…
Waymo driving in rain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGbMnLCXXxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiD9l72uFCg Waymo driving in fog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbgDTCCdL6s
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As others have pointed out, Google could scoop up tons of riders in a heartbeat, by announcing a ride share platform publicly (which would get tons of news coverage) and by advertising the feature within Google Maps, Waze, etc. Google only needs to put together a one-sided marketplace, where Uber/Lyft had to build a two-sided marketplace. And Google already has a connection to billions (at least hundreds of millions)…
Imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth if Google started advertising its own taxi service on Google Maps.