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0 pointsaetherson12y ago0 comments

(A disclaimer: I work for Flywheel -- we're an Uber competitor. Take anything I say about Uber with a grain of salt.)

I'm not sure how much synergy there actually is between "get a taxi on demand" and "deliver goods on demand." I mean, taxis have existed forever. Presumably, if someone thought it was cost effective, they could have used taxis as a logistics network long ago. But taxis are really, really, really expensive (and Uber black cars are yet more expensive) in terms of what people expect to pay for shipping. UPS or the postal service will ship a small package across the country for me for $10 or less. A taxi in SF won't go a mile for $10.

Is there some reason to believe that Uber changes the game with regard to all that? They aren't drastically lowering the price of taxis. Their success has been in raising the service level of taxi-like-services, and in reducing the inconvenience of getting a taxi dispatched to you. I don't say this to take anything away from Uber -- I think they have a fantastic service -- but I don't see their successes as being things that really have a lot to do with what you want from a goods distribution network. If what you want to do is have a very expensive courier service for some kind of physical good, do you really mind calling dispatch and talking to a person?

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zaidf12y ago

Uber could know with 100% confidence based on past data that a driver passes by a certain address almost daily. For him to deliver a courier to that address would be significantly less work to driving a few miles only to deliver the coirier(the assumption in your argument).

I still don't know if the financials make sense in my particular example but it does tell you the optimizations Uber can make based on the historical data.

aethersonOP12y ago

Well, but no. They can't know with "100% confidence" where a driver will drive in any given day. They probably can't even know with 90% confidence. Taxi drivers don't drive regular routes, they drive where a diverse set of passengers need to go. There are probably a few destinations that a lot of drivers hit almost every shift (most notably the airport), but arbitrary business or residential address 1 to arbitrary business or residential address 2? Probably not.

And if they were to offer some kind of "by the way" service where you say, "I want to get this package across town, you send somebody who will eventually deliver it to my destination because my destination is near a major taxi destination," do people actually want that service? I was under the impression that in-town point-to-point couriering was typically done because you have a tight deadline for when the package needs to arrive -- after all, if it's just a few miles away, and you aren't on a tight schedule, you could just mail it and it would probably arrive the next business day. This doesn't sound like a big business opportunity to me.

Delivery of large quantities of goods on a same-day timeframe, like Amazon wants to do, that's a big business opportunity. But I don't see how Uber's business or Uber's dataset solves that problem.

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