There is a massive, profitable courier business in most cities that Uber hasn't touched. And food delivery is already being explored.
Beyond that, Uber's electronic-dispatch technology has the ability to optimize garbage pick-up and drop-off; police, fire and medical resource routing; small-vehicle fleet management for sundry specialized logistics companies; and all manner of other logistical processes presently centrally dispatched like taxis were a decade ago.
Uber is burning too much cash. But real-time electronic dispatch of variously-placed resources to randomly-distributed tasks is nothing to sneeze at. It's a difficult problem due to its myriad of edge cases, and Uber seems to have reasonably solved it.
> Beyond that, Uber's electronic-dispatch technology has the ability to optimize garbage pick-up and drop-off; police, fire and medical resource routing; small-vehicle fleet management for sundry specialized logistics companies; and all manner of other logistical processes presently centrally dispatched like taxis were a decade ago.
But why is it going to be Uber providing those services? What's their moat? Google has an absurd amount of live data from shivers using Google Maps or Waze as they drive around a city, if they launch a "medical resource routing" service tomorrow it'll blow Uber out of the water.
They’re actually doing it. At scale, practically everywhere.
> if [Google] launch a "medical resource routing" service tomorrow it'll blow Uber out of the water
I’m doubtful. One, it’s Google. Logistics requires lots of customer interaction. Uber isn’t great at this, but it’s better than Google.
Also, being able to theoretically do something is different from actually doing it. The problem isn’t routing. It’s knowing which tasks to bundle in what order. It’s knowing where tasks which haven’t been ordered yet are likely to emerge. It’s knowing how long a task might take. It’s knowing which tasks require what, and who is best placed to accept it. It’s mediating disputes between the various parties involved, and properly incentivising them.
> One, it’s Google. Logistics requires lots of customer interaction. Uber isn’t great at this, but it’s better than Google.
That's usually said when talking about Google's free services. In my experience when you're paying them money they're very responsive.
And I'm still not sure what makes Uber's tech all that notable. They simply have more drivers than their competitors do, it stands to reason the customer experience is better.
> In my experience when you're paying them money they're very responsive
In my experience, they're 50/50. They're also totally unreliable as a commercial partner. You don't want to outsource your logistics to Google only to learn about the service being cancelled in a press release.
Problem is Google's never deprecated a logistics network before. We really have no idea how the company would try and operate in that area. They've certainly been careful not to deprecate services in Cloud. But yes, you're right about customer service. Google Play/YouTube springs to mind on the developer/creator side.
> That's usually said when talking about Google's free services. In my experience when you're paying them money they're very responsive.
I'm the admin for a company gsuite. We can certainly get a google representative on the phone, but when they can't do anything for us, it doesn't qualify as responsive.
It took like 4 meetings to get invoiced billing. They wouldn't consider disabling links on email. They like to redesign the admin UI to make things take more clicks. There is no way to merge two G Suite accounts. I don't remember my other complaint, but they told me I had a good idea, but please post it in the customer forum to see if it would get done --- I've seen what happens to ideas in the customer forum, nothing, since I frequently end up there looking for how to do reasonable things that are impossible.
Uber doesn't need a moat. They built their fortress on an inaccessible mountain of thin profit margins. Every competitor bleeds lots of money to get there, and nobody is going to pump a few billions for an Uber competitor. If anything, headlines like this give competitive advantage by scaring potential competing founders and investors.
They don't have to. They just have to do it longer than the competition.
Remember, Facebook and YouTube made big losses for a while, especially after the 'exit'. YouTube outlived Vine and started putting in more intrusive ads. Facebook IPO seemed like a flop, but it went very well and they acquired all their competitors instead of outwaiting them.
Uber isn't Facebook or Google, though. Plenty of Uber drivers work for more than one company, and there's nothing to stop a new arrival from poaching a ton of Uber drivers, as long as they give the right incentives. Facebook was protected by network effects, YouTube by the large video library. From the end user's point of view Uber has no such protection.
Lyft doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon in the US. If anything, Lyft is much larger than it was a few years ago. In China and a number of markets where Uber invested heavily, the competition won the war of attrition.
It would cost billions to be a global competitor to Uber. But nearly all rideshares are local. A local company can compete at a much more acceptable price, and use its local knowledge and connections to gain an edge. There isn't much advantage to being global in Uber's market.
Things that don't support the ad business are never going to be very high priorities for google. Is a medical resource routing system going to pop out of someone's 20% time? Doubt.
> For a while, in NYC at least, they tried the courier model, but that was a few years ago
Courier services are high-risk operations sensitive to reliability.
My guess is Uber's network wasn't optimized for reliability then. Food delivery has similar reliability requirements, but the stakes are lower. (Failed food deliveries produce complaints. Failed courier runs produce litigation.)
There is a massive, profitable courier business in most cities that Uber hasn't touched. And food delivery is already being explored.
Beyond that, Uber's electronic-dispatch technology has the ability to optimize garbage pick-up and drop-off; police, fire and medical resource routing; small-vehicle fleet management for sundry specialized logistics companies; and all manner of other logistical processes presently centrally dispatched like taxis were a decade ago.
Uber is burning too much cash. But real-time electronic dispatch of variously-placed resources to randomly-distributed tasks is nothing to sneeze at. It's a difficult problem due to its myriad of edge cases, and Uber seems to have reasonably solved it.