Uber has issues but honestly it's night and day compared to what taxis were like. And they decrease DUI's.
Do you believe Rebu could that have managed to draw the same level of venture-capitalist money and unicorn-ness and hype, even sharing the same core technologies, code, and product features?
I don't think it would, and I'm asserting that comes from business-plans, labor relations, legal challenges, government lobbying, investor marketing, etc., which in several cases have been, er, ethically-problematic.
So why would they bother to adopt "Rebu"? It's nothing but downsides: their taxi drivers have to work harder, have to be more polite and drive more safely, have to have cleaner cars, and have to be more accountable in general. Not to mention of course Rebu is going to take a cut of all rides booked on their platform.
There was no way to make regular taxi service better without structural and legal reform that the incumbents did not want. The only way to fix it was to go outside the system and do something sketchy. And it worked! For all their issues and controversies, the ride-hailing app experience is amazing, especially when compared to old-school taxi service. Some legacy taxi services have stepped up and improved a bunch since then, and others have just faded into obscurity.
But overall this was pretty bad investment for humanity. Let's just stipulate it's a lot easier to get a ride at a reasonable price and that's a good thing (not a given considering increased traffic and greenhouse gas emissions, plus decreased pressure for cities to move away from car-dependency). Was it worth multiple billions of dollars and software engineering hours? Like, assuredly not. It's a big "LOL" drawn in lipstick on a portrait of the efficient market hypothesis. It turns out the private sector is also great at just setting huge piles of cash on fire.
In the US at least, there are two classifications for "car for hire."
One is street-hail - you wave down a car or get into one at a stand. That was heavily regulated and taxi companies had the relevant licenses.
The other is "town car". You call for a town-car and it shows up. town-car was very lightly regulated.
Yes, every taxi company offered town-car services, but there were lots of town car companies that didn't do street-hail.
Uber/lyft are town-car companies. Neither one does street-hail.
It got reasonable funding but couldn't get taxi companies to sign up.
Things got a bit better when it became clear that Uber was going to kill taxi companies but too little, too late.
The taxi market, in the US at least, was a textbook case of regulatory capture to stifle competition. Google "taxi medallion prices nyc" for an example. Uber was clearly the 'good guy' in flouting those laws and later getting them repealed. The cartels that controlled the medallions had no interest in improving the technology until they had competition.
What else is there?
- Boeing - Just need to invent a better commercial passenger airplane
- Lockheed - The day of 150 million dollar manned fighter jets is coming to an end.
- Electricity distribution - PG&E or Southern California Edison. Only way to crack this is with decentralized power distribution and batteries
- Waste Management - Trash collection, recycling, and processing
- DeBeers Diamonds - Diamonds can basically be synthesized in the lab at will now.
Bob Smith annoyed enough Uber drivers in Milwaukee that now he can't get a ride in Poughkeepsie. Maybe that's valid, maybe it's not. But it is pretty new, and I doubt it was in the slide deck when Uber hit up the VCs.
The social aspect of these sorts of things can't help but get entangled with the politics of social mores. Maybe Bob was giving the Uber drivers wet willies. A lot of people would think he caught that ban fairly. Maybe Bob was too politically incorrect for the Uber drivers. Not quite so sure he deserves to be sentenced to hoof it until the Sun burns out. How do we know the bans are of the fair former and not the latter? We don't. It's a private company, they can be as opaque about this as they want.
Good, bad, who knows, but it certainly makes for a completely different landscape.
In the last 2 weeks I've used the Uber app in Washington, New York, Miami and Stoke (UK). One app, 4 cities, 2 continents.
Since before Uber/Lyft?
- Tons and tons of users buying vehicles they can barely afford to drive for them
- Tons of restaurants already struggling to get by saddled with needing an iPad or two at their counter to intercept online orders, and needing to charge more and anger customers just to break even on the fees
- Huge amounts of sexual assaults because Uber didn't vet drivers
And lest we leave it merely implied: Uber is worth what Uber is worth because it's a taxi company that owns no Taxis and pays no taxi drivers a proper wage. That's why it's a billion dollar unicorn. Same as AirBNB is a hotel chain that owns no hotels, UberEats/Doordash are food delivery services that don't own restaurants, Instacart is a grocery chain that doesn't own grocery stores.
Honestly if you want to really be cynical about it, the true path to finding the next tech unicorn is figuring out how to be a $business that owns none of what a $business normally does, and hires no employees that $business usually does, and then wrap that up in an app, and convince poor people to do the work for you because they have no other options. Boom, unicorn.
The way taxi companies had languished in obsolescence was definitely a problem, but I struggle to consider if Uber was the best way to solve that on any front.
Put differently, a common business model in late 20th century and early 21st century US capitalism is to find a transaction that is already happening "at scale" and figure out how to insert your own company into the transaction and extract some percentage of the value.
The primary way of accomplishing this is to create a (new) story to tell about the value you claim you are adding to the transaction ("it's so easy", "we have an app for that", "so much quicker") even though in many cases nobody (or very few people) were asking for whatever you bring to it.
This does not mean that there is no value added. What these companies do not represent are new transactions: no new products, no new macro-scale services ("but you get a car with your phone now!" still boils down to "someone will drive you where you want to go").
I wouldn't even say it's isolated to businesses anymore. This is the same economic forces that's prompting all the crypto nonsense from a few years back, bullshit businesses like drop-shipping, social media influencers, etc. There's just nothing left to build anymore it seems. Every industry is stagnating, year over year there's no crazy new innovations anymore, nothing to get excited about. Just dumber and thinner versions of things we already had.
The tech industry is currently bending backwards so far it's collective spine will snap any second now trying to convince people LLM's are the next big huge thing, and there's just nothing there. 150 billion dollars for fancy autocomplete.
Maybe you are right for the US, but here in Germany at least, and I could be wildly wrong about numbers:
- Uber: not a game changer, popular with a certain demographic, but taxis were mostly fine anyway
- airbnb: ok, huge
- doordash/etc: maybe executing a bit better, but delivery has existed just fine
- instacart et al: now we get to the real thing. groceries delivery had only been done by a couple of chains, and sometimes only for a couple years, then abandoned again already. so you never really got whatever you wanted, from where ver you wanted. Paired with our sometimes very limited shop opening times (6-20 at most, in recent years more, but just in some states) this was different, e.g worth it even if it is not your weekly haul and/or alcohol for a party.
Even the canonical example of lobbyists can make some ambiguously defensible position that they add some value; e.g., "We make sure constituents have a conduit to their representative"
Then zimride said “you can use that gps receiver you’ve got in your pocket to find people who need a ride near you and we’ll suggest how much gas money to split”. But pretty quickly people started just taking passengers even when not on their own trips, and lyft morphed in to…. Basically Uber.
see: regulatory entrepreneurship
And who knows, your view might be right.
Before the launch of UberX, the Uber app positioned itself as a convenient way to call a black car/limo and, for drivers, to get some extra business between their "regular" calls. It was a semi-luxury though it only cost a bit more than a yellow cab (I only ever used Uber pre-UberX to get to/from the airport).
Really, other than surge pricing, I don't think Uber innovated very much on the tech side. Their success in disrupting cabs was rather down to flooding the market with supply, oftentimes in ways that flouted the law.
