
Lyft's Nice-Guy Strategy Leaves It Struggling to Catch Uber - msoad
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2016/04/21/technology/21reuters-lyft-ubertech.html?partner=IFTTT
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IanCal
>"We were trying to figure out a way to reward Lyft for having better business
practices and not violating our laws,"

You shouldn't need to particularly reward businesses for not breaking the law,
surely. You should be able to punish those that break the law sufficiently
harshly that breaking the law is not profitable.

On a different note, I wonder what the requirements are for a distributed
marketplace. Extremely similar things are regularly built, is there enough
common in the area of "request quotes/bids for services/items, set time limit,
pick one" to become just an open protocol? I guess the harder parts would be
dispute management and reputation, though they don't seem like impossible
hurdles.

~~~
tmptmp
>>You shouldn't need to particularly reward businesses for not breaking the
law, surely. You should be able to punish those that break the law
sufficiently harshly that breaking the law is not profitable.

This point is very important. But why do we see people tempting to reward
businesses which do not break law?

Because, we seldom see the ones breaking the law getting punished severely.
What happened to Volkswagen? The CEO didn't even get the proverbial slap on
the wrist, instead he got fucking multi-million dollars in reward! Was
Volkswagen forced out of business? Hell no. What happened to Goldman Sachs and
other such criminals? Nothing serious. Uber is getting free ride by breaking
laws. What happened to it? Nothing.

So, people tend to think that way. Beyond that this is a very serious threat
to free and open market economy and even the western democracies. As this is
used by the covert and overt opponents and enemies of western free market
economy based democracy to push forward their communist (or other equally bad
ism) propaganda. It reminds me all that 99% vs 1% propaganda.

And unless, this is fixed, I guess, many general people in the western world
will continue to fall prey to their vicious propaganda.

~~~
licebmi_at
How is it propaganda if all that you said it's true? With all your fear
mongering ideas of communism, you can't blame them for capitalism own
weakness. Karl Marx[1] predicted this and that's why he postulated that
capitalism would prey on itself. Everyone who tried to warn about this
weakness and every call to fix this (just like your comment) was dismissed as
communist and enemy of the western world. Communist might be a bad idea, but
not everything should be treated "vicious propaganda".

[1]: Born in Prussia, part of the Western world AFAIK.

~~~
tmptmp
>>How is it propaganda if all that you said it's true?

That's a good question as it raises a very important point, namely, the
weakness of capitalism. But what I think is this weakness of capitalism can
and must be tackled from within the capitalism. Sadly, at this moment, at
least in the US we are not seeing any serious efforts being done in this
direction.

>>With all your fear mongering ideas of communism...

Time and again, communism and Marxism have demonstrated how vicious these
ideas are: e.g. the mass killings and suffering of people in China, Russia.
See these [1], [2].

The fear is not baseless, whereas the "free market economy based democracy"
has been seen to be the best societal structure ever existed. I don't mean it
can't be made better but that improvement can certainly not be brought by
turning to Marxism [3].

>>but not everything should be treated "vicious propaganda"

I agree with you to some extent here as not everything should be treated
"vicious propaganda". (That's why I upvoted it.)

But it can be seen clearly that communists and Marxists are trying to take
advantage of such things by creating "propaganda" items like 99% vs 1%; and
trying to sway the public opinion in their favor. This is vicious because they
are trying to portrait everyone within the top 1% to be vicious while
demanding "free rides" (in the Marxist style) for everyone within the 99%,
whereas we can see that only some people at the extreme top are doing
somethings wrong. And thus with such propaganda these people are trying to
kill the very "free market economy based democracy" itself.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989)
[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Marxism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Marxism)

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slackstation
Alot of people in this thread talking about how they won't use Uber for
whatever reason. Those are the minority of opinion.

More people will use ride services when they are cheaper. Rides are a
commodity. You will get there just as much with Uber as with Lyft. It doesn't
make that big of a difference to most people. It's like the level of luxury in
a car. I'm sure it's rare to find people not taking a Lyft or an Uber because
the car didn't have leather seats.

I'm a daily user (to and from work, carless for over 18 months now) and I use
the cheapest option. Historically it was Uber. Checked and for the past 4
months or so, it's be Lyft so I switched. Now it's back to Uber because of one
reason, price.

The drivers on Lyft seem a bit happier and nicer but, it doesn't really make
that much of a difference. I'm not using a car service for the quality of a 10
minute conversation with a random stranger that I'll never see again.

~~~
lukasm
I use Uber because it's the only good cab company in Europe.

~~~
cpach
That seems like a bit of a generalization considering Europe contains about 50
different countries.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Quite a lot of which have pretty much the same level of service (apps
included) _and_ are also legal.

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dthakur
5 days ago: Lyft gaining on Uber as it spends big on growth (sfgate)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11509461](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11509461)

Today: Lyft's Nice-Guy Strategy Leaves It Struggling to Catch Uber (nytimes)

Confusing world.

~~~
ryanx435
They are both propaganda pieces. The first was paid for by lyft, the second by
Uber.

PG wrote an essay about this type of thing, but I can't seem to find it right
now

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dthakur
Yup, I thought it was worth pointing it out. re:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

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pbreit
The story does't quite match the headline. The take-away seems to be that in
the face of a substantially better resourced competitor, Lyft is holding its
own and even gaining, in large part due simply to happier constituents.

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ryporter
It's interesting that these two companies are so competitive that they can't
even work together in trying to win over regulators. Doing so would likely be
mutually beneficial by increasing the size of the pie. Evidently it will
require an even bigger threat, such as the one DraftKings and FanDuel face, to
bring them together in common cause. I just feel like this rivalry has become
overly personal.

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LeoPanthera
I use Lyft (as a rider) exclusively, and have never been picked up by a driver
who did not also have an Uber phone on their dash.

~~~
chrisseaton
I don't understand how that's possible. I thought Uber was about big expensive
black cars with drivers in suits, and Lyft was about regular people giving you
a lift in their hatchback. I've never take a Lyft, but I can't imagine the
Ubers I've been in putting a pink moustache on their top-of-the-range
Mercedes.

~~~
HappyTypist
That is uberBLACK. Most rides are UberX

~~~
chrisseaton
I knew about UberX but I thought that was just a side-project. I always
thought Uber's tagline was 'your personal driver' and all the photos on the
website used to be black cars.

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hueving
Uberblack is the side project at this point. The big money is in the majority
of people that need to get from point X to Y cheaply.

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chris_wot
I really hope that Uber goes under one day.

~~~
phodo
You are entitled to your opinion, but I am curious as to why you would say
that. Based on business / ethical practices, or is it something else?

~~~
darkclarity
I'm not that bothered by them personally, but I would rather see these
international taxi brands gone. They take away income and entrepreneurship
from local economies.

The world is slowly becoming a boring homogeneous place run by multinational
brands. It's like fast food outlets, coffee shops and so on, most of them are
run from another country and look exactly the same - there's no character.

~~~
sho_hn
I feel you. I moved to Seoul, South Korea a few months ago, a city of many
thousands of coffeeshops. Among the natives, Starbucks is really popular --
meanwhile I go out of my way to avoid going there, because it's frustrating to
move 8500km and not feel the distance traveled after putting the effort into
it. The rising popularity of IKEA, which arrived in Korea about two years ago,
is concerning for the same reason.

It's really not about naively craving exoticism (which inevitably wears off
anyway), it's just a desire for an environmental confirmation of a major life
change, the absence of which is psychologically disconcerting.

Luckily there's still a boatload of little unique, charming. non-chain
coffeeshops to go to, too.

~~~
hocuspocus
If there's one thing I really missed during my time in Korea, it'd probably be
Ikea. There's just no good alternative.

~~~
sho_hn
You can always play gmarket roulette ...

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ajdlinux
If Lyft ever expands to Australia, I will make a concerted effort to use them
over Uber.

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dec0dedab0de
I have only been using Uber for about a year, and haven't given Lyft a try
because my credit card gives me 20% cash back on uber. That promotion ends
soon, so I will probably try Lyft then.

