
Uber may have to pay Waymo or redesign its self-driving software - rockarage
https://www.engadget.com/2019/11/07/uber-waymo-self-driving-software-licensing/
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rileymat2
I have not completely understood why Uber is spending money researching self
driving cars when they could buy them later from a mass producer with a
competitive advantage in car manufacturing.

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QuixoticQuibit
I have not completely understood why Uber is at all a reasonable investment
nor why it ever received so much VC funding.

There is no business model. Uber doesn’t have anything unique, least of all
self-driving tech. There won’t be any sort of sticky network effect since
consumers can simply switch to a different ride hailing app with the lowest
price. When (if?) AVs become reality, the car manufacturers themselves can
become their own Ubers or AV-subscription service with no need for a middle
man.

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dawg-
I'm surprised that you don't see the network effect of Uber/Lyft as being very
sticky? It's not as simple as everyone just migrating to another app. It would
be really hard to start a new ridesharing company from scratch because of a
chicken-and-the-egg type of problem. New riders won't use the app if there are
no drivers, and new drivers won't use it if there are no riders. Back when
Uber and Lyft first came out, they had the luxury of being first which gave
them more wiggle room; people were probably more willing to go out on a limb
and use the app even if there was a sub-optimal amount of riders/drivers. But
a brand new app wouldn't have that privilege. Would people be as patient as
they were with Uber and Lyft? Or if it takes more than 5 seconds to find a
ride would they just switch to Uber where they know they can have a ride as
soon as they push the button.

One way the market could be more competitive is if there was some sort of
protocol for ridesharing where you could access drivers from all the different
services on a central platform. Then the services would have to compete to see
who can offer the best prices and the best availability at certain
times/locations. It would give room for new services to pop up because the
transition between using Uber and whatever new service would be seamless. Or
rather, there wouldn't really be a transition at all. Today I use Uber,
tomorrow I use Lyft, the next day I use whatever, just based on what ride is
closest/cheapest at the moment I want to use the app.

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tyingq
Interesting that the identified software isn't in the list of what Levandowski
was accused of stealing.

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Traster
The Levandowski case is focused on just nailing him on the things they're
super confident about, so I don't think it's surprising that the software in
this case is part of that list - not least because they had no way of knowing
Levandowski stole it until this independent expert verified it.

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tyingq
As I remember it, they had pretty good logs. The indictment mentioned "over
14,000" files he downloaded.

