Where I was during uber's ascent, uber's defining value proposition was circumventing the artificial monopoly created by the taxi medallion system. This "disruption" was actually great, it shook up an industry that needed shaking up (ironically I now use cabs because they have become better than uber where I am. This would not be the case if uber never existed).
But even if it did some good "disrupting", I think the article's point is it's not real innovation. Same e.g. with self booked travel, self scan groceries, etc, they are not really innovating, they just change a power balance.
So the it ends up being bad when all the capital is chasing these disruptors instead of "innovators" for some definition.
The thing it misses, I think, is that many of the big winners (or monopolies if you like) actually do end up funding massive amounts of innovation.
Facebook and Google have contributed huge $ to AI/ML research, Amazon Go I think qualifies as real innovation (and I think there are many amazon examples that are more than just an app). Tech is easy to pick on (I've picked on it a lot) and Uber may be an egregious example of a company that disrupted and didn't give back (though they don't make money either). But I think there has been some major innovation come out of tech companies, even if that isn't how they got rich in the first place.
What’s missed in these discussions is these regulations had a point to them. It’s obvious Uber driving around without passengers increases congestion. Really look at AirBnb, Bird, etc and they all offload externalities from the company and it’s customers to everyone around them.
When the basic building model is to break the law, chances are the law had a point and people are going to want a return to normal eventually. The only way they survive long term is if the general population feels it’s the new normal is a useful tradeoff. In the short term they can massively subsidize users, but long term the same basic economic reality sets in so they need some actual innovation.
> What’s missed in these discussions is these regulations had a point to them.
This varies a lot by area - For example, I'd say the NY medallion regulations had a point to them, and that point was to systematically abuse cab drivers for the profit of the local government and banks.
Then for example - in my area (Atlanta) medallion supply was capped at 1600 - the result meant cabs basically didn't exist outside of the airport. Need a ride home from a party? Called a cab company? They won't show up. At all. They will dispatch cab after cab after cab that simply will never EVER show up.
Cabs would show up to exactly two places - Nice hotels that paid them under the table to make sure they kept coming, and the airport. Conveniently those two places tended to make circular trips.
So are there negative externalities to ride-sharing? Sure. Is it currently better than the previous cab monopolies? I'd argue yes. Do Uber and Lyft really represent a sustainable model? I don't think so.
> This varies a lot by area - For example, I'd say the NY medallion regulations had a point to them, and that point was to systematically abuse cab drivers for the profit of the local government and banks.
NY cab medallion regulations were rooted in the aftermath of the Great Depression where it was a race to the bottom and little things like "car maintenance" were viewed as a burden.
Funnily enough, Uber and Lyft are in this race to the bottom right now. Hopefully we can stop it before they start kidnapping people.
NY medallion regulations auction off street space to the highest bidder, rather than allowing a tragedy of the commons: giving that limited public resource away to businesses who profit on it and consume it to the point where others are restricted from using it.
>What’s missed in these discussions is these regulations had a point to them
And what point would that be?
Satisfying some legislator's desire to show Karen they're "doing something"?
Raising the barrier to entry for new entrants?
Protecting people?
Everyone who has a poorly thought out regulatory knee-jerk reaction likes to imagine that it's all the 3rd option but there's a heck of a lot of the first and second sailing under the flag of the third and a heck of a lot of people who would rather just use some heuristic like "more laws, more paperwork, more license fees, more better" than actually think critically about all three options.
A critical mass of the general public assuming that every regulation's primary purpose was to protect people when created and that said purpose has stood the test of time is how you get crap like the taxi medallion system in the first place.
Initially the point was to reduce the number of Taxi on NYC streets, especially unsafe Taxi. The existing regulations did require a defensive driving course for Taxi drivers as well as a fairly clean driving record etc. But at it’s core was New Yorkers being fed up by how crowded the streets had gotten.
> Uber's defining value proposition was circumventing the artificial monopoly created by the taxi medallion system
Licensing/regulatory evasion is one of the principal strategies that got Uber (taxi services), Airbnb (hotel services) and Paypal (banking services) off the ground and allowed them to compete so effectively against incumbents.
Eventually regulation caught up somewhat but the newcomers still seem to enjoy a favorable regulatory/licensing regime.
And of course another major strategy for Uber and Airbnb was eliminating full-time frontline employees.
I was actually describing the opposite situation: regulations helped the newcomers (who evaded them) and hindered the incumbents (who did not.)
In the case of taxis, while the medallion system (for example) gave medallion owners a monopoly on regulated "taxi" service, it also discouraged (or outright prevented) them from expanding services and competing effectively against Uber. Moreover the monopoly market's reduced competition did little to encourage innovation or service improvements.
That being said, your point is a good one in general, and the same result (regulation preserving incumbents - for a time at least - by increasing barriers to entry and shielding them from competition) repeats itself over and over. One could imagine a powerful company (Facebook) welcoming regulation as a way to preserve or prolong its dominance by creating a regulatory burden that potential competitors would struggle to overcome.
The problem is incumbents get lazy and start profit-seeking. Competition is the only way we know to have a chance of fighting it. The taxi industry got away with ripping off customers and having terrible service for ages. In my country they would regularly overcharge or take longer routes. Or you call and they decide not to come, or you walk around waving your hands frantically at a taxi hoping they stop. As a tourist, its even worse because you have no idea what the rate should be.
I don't know if gig companies or all VC companies are perfect, but lets not pretend industries regularly fail to innovate in the absence of competition.
Healthcare - the tech disruption in healthcare actually makes it easy to see a doctor over video call for small stuff and easy to track my records over time. The existing healthcare system requires me to call and wait weeks for an appointment and use some clunky UI to even message a doctor. And everyone knows how terrible insurance is..
Banks - In Canada, I can't get a single bank to give me API access to my own account. Their native interfaces suck, and connecting with Mint is frequently buggy. Mint itself is much worse than Quicken for browsing transactions, grouping, charting, but Quicken's API connection to banks sucks, despite also being built by Intuit. Crypto websites and apps are much better & provide great API access. If they had a trustworthy stablecoin, i would move in a heartbeat.
Education - university prices keep going up even as their model remains the same. Even as the actual content of courses is freely available online. University costs are insane, student debt levels are insane. Software is the first industry where the majority of what you need to know especially as you move beyond general CS comes from the internet, _for free_.
Electric cars/space - Reusable rockets were literally considered impossible a decade ago, they are reality now.
Like it would be great to have actual innovation. It would be nice if we had any meaningful anti trust enforcement or other ways to force innovation. But in my (relatively short) lifetime, i have almost never seen large scale innovation happen in the absence of competition. Any serious competition feels like "disruption" to industries accustomed to hanging out and collecting profits.
So I agree with some of your points: I.e. I think people would generally agree the user experience of Uber is an improvement over taxis even if the labour conditions are a regression.
The problem I see is that even the potential for disruption is consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. With IP law the way it is, Google and Apple acting as gatekeepers to mobile ecosystems, Amazon owning e-commerce and squeezing or competing with vendors who depend on it - the world is increasingly becoming a place where a project has to be blessed by one of a handful of giant corporations to be allowed to exist.
And it’s making things worse for consumers. For instance Disney buying up entertainment properties and putting them behind a walled garden, or MS doing the same with game studios.
Silicon valley made its name as a place where a couple people in a garage could invent something to change the world. It’s debatable whether it’s even worth trying anymore, since it’s such an uphill battle to compete with the giants. If you ask me that’s a problem and we should seriously think about the way IP law is handled.
> I think people would generally agree the user experience of Uber is an improvement over taxis even if the labour conditions are a regression.
I am going to make my point bluntly. Do you think the people driving for Uber are dumb? Every time I see this kind of argument I feel like it removes any agency from the gig workers. The implication is "Uber's drivers don't understand they are getting screwed. We need to change the rules of the game so Uber stops screwing drivers."
I have never seen a good argument for how Uber is exploitive that doesn't assume the drivers are to dumb to realize they are being exploited.
Not really no. Typically in the US try comparing health care services, since they all have different coverage, pricing model, duration etc... unless you are an economist with time and a robust model you can't say which is the best / cheapest. That's why the only way to give consumers a fighting chance is to actually create a market by forcing them to flatten their offerings.
Similarly in my country (I cannot say for other places) Uber driver's cash on hand is relatively good. But they are independent contractors so don't get a pension and no contribution for disability/maternity insurance. So it's hard for the drivers to actually price those externalities.
So no, drivers are not dumb, when markets are not clearly defined, companies are very good at making it hard to compare their offers with those of the competitors.
Would you say that everyone who falls victim to predatory lending is dumb? Or do people maybe get exploited when they are in bad economic situations as well?
Every week there are startups in Silicon Valley (and other places) building great products, getting more funding rounds, getting acquired, and going public. There are an infinite number of potential new market segments where the incumbent tech giants have no IP. Invent something new.
It's the individuals who invent the things that are truly the most worthwhile, and the small groups surrounding them who bring more prototypes into reality. The kinds of new things that can become universally desirable without so much actually needing to disrupt anything old or established.
The capitalists might still be able to offer the best leverage to approach universality, but 50 years ago their currency was drastically debased like everyone else up and down the food chain.
These are losses that have never been recovered, but it still left the surviving capitalists in much stronger financial control relative to everyone else. Millions more citizens of a quite smaller country were pushed downward into more survival-type activities in place of the structure which had allowed the benefits of increased productivity to trickle down. There was great pressure to reverse the flow of that wealth trickle, which eventually prevailed and grew exponentially, it became more & more of a "consumer economy", trickling up. Until the vast majority of individuals' generational resources that could be allocated to innovation have been tapped out along with all kinds of other stores of wealth which is the only way a recovery at the top could be expected possible in the fewest decades.
Capitalism is not the problem when it benevolently leverages innovation, the damage is done when it leverages greed. It does not have to be ugly if you can truly afford better, and have the conviction to carry it out.
But the more financial control and resources you have access to the more money you can always make doing carefully crafted financial deals involving existing wealth, most people in that position are less likely to accept something new anyway.
So you really need inspirational amounts of resources to permeate much deeper into the population because you need so many millions more people empowered to work more innovatively if they so choose, because that's where you find the potential to turn "nothing" into something to begin with. Very few will actually make the absolutely incredible breakthroughs, so you need millions to whom it is just plain more within reach.
Probably about like when a single-income semi-skilled paycheck could still support a homeowning or suburban family lifestyle. Even if it's not the suburban-living crowd you expect to be doing the innovating. Sheesh, that's about 50 years behind us too isn't it?
When Wells Fargo is sitting on kilos of gold, there's always going to be people who are so impressed that they can see no value in anything else. Especially not turning nothing into something, when there is so much wealth already accumulated there to desire or get their hands on in some much more expedient way. Even more so when almost nobody has any gold at all unless Wells Fargo shows up and puts some on the table. If there was ever really enough to go around, why you wouldn't need Wells Fargo at all anymore.
they absolutely did. the reason why they had no profit is because they reinvested every penny back in themselves instead of paying it out in dividends or hoarding cash
This is absolutely true, entrenched monopolies, or even a group a companies which have long since decided to stop competing with each other (e.g. canadian banks and phone companies) begin to charge more for less over time. Some of this is intentional too, like the way cities artificially limit the number of taxi licenses. Disruption can be good, but it only gives temporary improvements as a new monopoly will eventually take hold. It's a fundamental feature of the capitalist market system that over time industries consolidate into monopolies (or groups that act like a monopolies) because that's the best way to maximum profits.
Uber if anything makes taxis less productive and efficient, a big taxi company can take care car repairs in a very efficient way.
The magic of Uber is taking those hidden costs and pushing them on the drivers, now the cars get fixed in a much less efficient way, but the ones taking the risk are the drivers, so Uber wins overall.
This argument is my pet peeve. Taxi companies employed drivers as 'independent contractors' who were paid pretty similar to Uber drivers now- by the ride, not by the hour- and frequently forced the drivers to do or pay for their own repairs on the cars. They were often immigrants, they'd work 12+ hours a day, medallion owners issued them illegal fines or took an overly large chunk of the money they earned, etc. The taxi industry was known as notoriously abusive to its drivers for decades & decades before smartphones were even invented, much less Uber. I'm always a bit amazed at how people now remember the old taxi system as good for drivers, much less riders
> and frequently forced the drivers to do or pay for their own repairs on the cars.
I'm not saying the old medallion system was great, but I thought the cab companies back then owned all the cars. (Source: my in-laws owned a medallion company, and I knew a few other cab company owners in NYC in the aughts.) They would frequently make drivers take responsibility for routine care and maintenance (with the worst medallion companies really stretching the definition of "routine"), but they put up the capital and rented cabs out to drivers at exorbitant rates (e.g., $1500/week in NYC ~15 years ago).
Contrast this with Uber, which imposes the same or worse labor conditions and offloads all capital risk onto the drivers.
I don't like Uber, but it became popular because of convenience, not because of costs.
Pre-Uber/Lift in my city you'd have taxi companies that were operating like a cartel and giving a shitty service. Drivers were borderline rude. You had to call a dispatcher that was also usually rude and then wait 20 mins for a cab to show up.
Uber changed that process for the best by actually allowing me to get a taxi from an app in 30 seconds, they usually showed up much faster and the driver, fearing a 4-stars review, is usually incentivized to at least keep their car clean. It's a game changer and I wouldn't go back.
So no, the magic of Uber is not passing those hidden cost to the driver, it's actually offering a service that I want to use after +40 years of a corrupt industry that couldn't give a shit about improving.
Now that Uber gave them a big scare, they actually improved, but the idea that they would have evolved without an existential threat is madness.
Uber was undeniably a lot cheaper than a taxi for me in 2013. I don't use Uber much any more but I assume the same is true. They were able to undercut not just due to shafting the drivers but also all the VC money pouring in. The cost certainly did help with the popularity. It shifted the calculus from "eh, I'll drive and park" (at the airport or other destination) to "let's just get a ride" in a huge number of cases. So for me, it did not just displace taxi rides, it created new demand.
the previous poster makes a very important point - Uber re-externalized the costs for fleet maintenance and many other costs and push them outside their balance sheet.
I don't deny the externalities of Uber, but the previous poster wrote:
> Uber if anything makes taxis less productive and efficient
Which is blatantly false. Taxi companies were pretty terrible and only got better because of competition. Getting in a taxi and having no idea how much it's going to cost me was a bad customer experience.
It's undeniably more efficient to maintain a motor pool with a centralized mechanic shop.
I get that the taxi experience was not ideal for you, but Uber did introduce a lot of inefficiency into the livery market by decentralizing maintenance, procurement, and financing. Uber was able to do this while undercutting incumbents on price through a combination of fare subsidies, consuming external capital resources (i.e., asking industry outsiders with "excess capacity" (cars that weren't on the road 24/7) to wear down their own private vehicles), and having investors willing to tolerating large, upfront losses.
Yes, it’s just a bad point. Uber was popular even when just the black car service, which wasn’t externalizing anything that didn’t already work like that. No magic accounting there, no exploitation of confused drivers.
> Uber was popular even when just the black car service
Where was this true? This doesn't match my recollection at all, though I did live in a market with dense preexisting taxi and black car services (NYC and SF).
The flip side? They open up the pool of drivers substantially. Where I am it was impossible to get a taxi in the evening before Uber. Had I have access to Uber back then I wouldn’t need a car given my travel need. But I didn’t, so I had to get a car instead
The big savings is creating plausible deniability that lets the uber drivers get away without commercial insurance. They basically took the good ol' pizza delivery boy loophole and applied it to taxis. Vehicle maintenance is a drop in the bucket compared to gas and tires anyway.
My take on the productivity paradox is software is a form of literacy.
We have put a pen and paper onto every desktop and every pocket but almost no-one can read or write.
Edit: And those that can find that only a tiny fraction of the fold is written down (accessible through the virtual cyber world). Amazon's secret to success was forcing every service to live behind a "public" API.
I disagree that writing software is comparable to literacy.
I think it's more similar to any other profession, with a skillset you can learn if you're interested, or learn to get paid.
Not everyone is interested in writing software, and that's fine.
It has also never been easier to tinker with things, as root VMs are cheaply available, in comparison to 20 years ago, when you really were just given a cpanel interface, if you were on a budget.
Not writing software, using it requires software literacy.
How many people do you know that refuse to learn the software they use everyday? How many times have you helped a friend or colleague with some problem just by googling it even when you don't really understand what they do for a living?
It's not that we need everyone to create software, but it would unlock huge productivity gains if everyone stopped pasting screen shots into word. Excel might be the most important knowledge tool of our time, and almost no one knows how to use it.
> How many times have you helped a friend or colleague with some problem just by googling it even when you don't really understand what they do for a living?
I think sometimes it is also the case of knowingly what to Google for, and being able to pick out the correct answer.
For example, recently I was involved in a cache issue for an android phone. One of the answers on Google was to download some sort of cache cleaning program. Of course, I knew that this was likely to be a security risk, but others would have downloaded it.
People are naturally wary about this thing, so sometimes I don't mind if they'd prefer not to Google and implement a solution themselves.
Software used to come with big beautiful manuals. I remember getting Borland Quattro and the box was a cube because the manuals were so thick. I think there are a lot of benefits to printed references but for me the biggest was accidentally finding something cool while looking for something else.
I think learning has changed as well. It’s no longer a (traditional canonical) reference that’s most useful (though Microsoft surely has one on each version of excel) but rather “how do I formulate a search to help myself here?”
Programmers have been doing GDD* for a while. Other knowledge workers will catch up or be left behind their peers.
I use Excel weekly, but not daily. The last thing I remember googling in it was last week and it was (for the fiftieth time) “excel format as millions”.
Literacy is known at the top for things like the Iliad or the works of Shakespeare, but the major benefits are actually much more mundane, like allowing doctors to write prescriptions or being able to have instructions in a manual.
Similarly, you may never write an OS or a AAA game, but being able to just automate a teeny tiny bit of your Excel spreadsheet, that's where software literacy will benefit the most people.
The first uses of literacy seem to be enabling beauracracy. Taxes, business records, laws, standardising things. The art stuff seems to have come later.
IMHO software development is closest to research work. E.g. a software development company is much closer to a research institute or design center than an assembly line in a factory. Unfortunately in reality it's more often treated like a late-medieval manufactory, or at best a scriptorium in a monastery.
>I think it's more similar to any other profession
Could not disagree more. I run a small business selling used video games online, and come from a SWE/EEE background.
The fact that we've got processes in place that are built from the ground up to be scalable and automatable, as well as the simple Python scripts to perform this automation has basically tripled or quadrupled our productivity.
I could see much the same happening for a lot of workers who handle data, and as more people who have learned to code enter the workforce I'm not sure employers will continue to tolerate (for example) accountants who can't write their own report generators.
I honestly think what you're describing will take about 25-50 more years to happen, if ever.
Whilst people are getting smarter and more capable, HN is a bubble of people who'll put in the effort to do the stuff you're describing.
Systems like SAP/Salesforce and other mega ERP and management systems are filling that space.
I expect people will just be learning to live in ecosystems. Similar to whats happening with the cloud in the present day for developers.
In large companies, accountants already spend much of their time building custom reports for management. A lot are in Excel, but other specialized tools are also common.
If we're gonna talk about literacy, we need to talk about how many people receive college educations, yet have across the board weak literacy as operating, functional humans. Not just reading, but in thinking itself, as well as care of their bodies such that they can think at all. Critical analysis is no longer being taught, or its teaching is failing hard. I meet quite a few people that simply are incapable of stringing together logical ideas greater than 2-3 concepts. And the concepts they use everyday, they barely grasp and have no foundational understanding how such processes operate or even continue to be.
This a pure education issue, and that includes eradication of the false education taught by religious backed educational institutes. The magical thinking taught by religious backed schools and universities create mentally constrained individuals who live in a demon haunted world and are dragging down all of civilization.
I think you’re on to something there. Most software available today merely does what free software already does, but with specific marketing to make it seem like something people need. For example, all of the below software categories are easily handled with either the software bundled with your operating system or a simple open source download:
- budgeting
- to do / productivity
- book / music / video game / etc. media cataloging
- project planning
- event planning
- file storage
- etc
When someone remarked once that most SaaS products are a front end to a spreadsheet, I just thought, “they’re not wrong.”
Now if people had computer literacy they wouldn’t pay $20 a month for a service their computer already does.
I think what’s truly missing is that all those apps don’t make sharing easy, and operating systems all suck at sharing, or when they’re ok at it (airdrop), it’s limited to nearby people, or not across OSes, etc.
Almost all SaaS are about easy cross-device, cross-internet, sharing, which all traditional apps don’t even try to be good at.
I agree that's a valid point and it totally makes sense why people pay for certain things. I'd also observe that SyncThing* obviates it, again for free, but more people would have to know about it and use it.
That's a fun metaphor. I don't think it's _literally_ true :)
Adding software got easy because development evolved, and supply
exceeded demand. The "Internet of Trash" is my go-to example. Modern
engineering got so good, and we're surrounded by so much efficient,
durable technology that manufacturers ran out of ways to add
value. So they started figuring out how to:
1) add internet connectivity whether it's wanted or not
2) control and break things using software
3) extract profitable data from users
All of these just kick the can down the road toward more solutionism
without really innovating in the original engineering domain.
People have lots of things in their homes that they’re not experts at or even knowledgeable of. Most people have a hammer and nail sitting around, that doesn’t mean they can build a piece of furniture or build a house. I’ve got all the tools to make bread, but I wouldn’t even know how to get started without some practice. And the list goes on. I also have a real pen and real paper, but that doesn’t mean I can write a novel.
It does literally mean you can write a novel. from an early age you have been trained to write and construct narratives. You can write that novel. it yeah no one has trained you at Primary School to build furniture:-)
I heard the problem expressed as a good ideas shortage versus too much investment capital. Interest rates have been incredibly low since the 2008 banking crash, so where does the spare capital go? There's not enough innovative ideas around (that investors like) to absorb the money. So some of the cash is getting thrown at complete nonsense and the remaining good ideas are receiving excessive capital. So there's a lot of inefficiency in there.
We talk about these things like they are separate closed systems when they are not.
It is an innovation and banking problem. There are all kinds of feedback loops involved.
The ridiculous amount of liquidity in the global system changes and distorts risk preferences.
It also creates these giant sinks of brain power that are just moving money around. We have had amazing innovation the past twenty years in electronic markets, hedge funds, venture capital firms, cryptocurrency. Think of how much brain power is being wasted just modeling capital structures instead of something actually innovating because there is so much capital moving around that needs to be modeled.
How much brain power is being wasted at hedge funds? I have read hedge fund manager Jim Simons say he thinks he has the best research department in the world inside his hedge fund. It is not that much different than dedicating the best research department in the world to playing better poker. It is an utter waste of resources and we see it all around us with the complete lack of innovation.
I agree with that. Money seems to flow to "safe" products. Some minor iteration of payments, CRM, taxis or fitness.
How do you fix it when the incentives are skewed towards quick bucks? Government pushing certain industries has worked for China. There'll be a lot of opposition to that in the US I'd imagine.
That's not even remotely accurate. There's a huge amount of investment capital flowing to other sectors. Just because people aren't posting about it on HN doesn't mean it's not happening.
I don't know what you mean by banking problem but let me tell you the purpose of money once there are enough savings to fund every single investment. The money must be spent on something that is an end in itself i.e. consumption. All economic activity has the end goal of increasing the ability to consume. If you insist on saving and investing anyway then investment itself turns into consumption i.e. a recreational activity that costs money.
> In the US, food insecurity has become an epidemic on college campuses.
Difficult to the article seriously when reading this. (And I did follow the link to read the academic paper referenced. Though I am not in the field, I thought it was terrible. By defining food insecurity down and needlessly conflating categories it attempts to make a real problem seem worse than it is by viewing it through an ill conceived lens.)
They define "Low food security" as "reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet". Which sounds like a typical college meal plan to me: not particularly interesting or high quality. Calling it an "epidemic" seems to be implying something much worse.
Yeah, comments like this are why so many people have turned against techies.
A) There are plenty of students in the goldilocks zone of being from families to poor to afford a meal plan but too wealthy to qualify for free meals from their college. Some of these students are able to qualify for academic scholarships out of high school. The rest take on multiple jobs, including work-study, so that they can afford tuition and board.
B) When college campuses shut down for COVID, many shut down their food halls as well, which affected those students poor enough to qualify for subsidized meals.
Not everybody lives your life. Food insecurity is a real thing for thousands of college students.
> A) ... There are plenty of students in the goldilocks zone of being from families to poor to afford a meal plan but too wealthy to qualify for free meals from their college
As I understand it, public and private 4-year universities in the US usually include meal plans in the financial aid package. Colleges may even force students to purchase (expensive) meal plans to make them profitable.
You may get stuck with oppressive student loans and mediocre, overpriced food, but you shouldn't starve.
You're not entirely wrong about COVID though - it disrupted food services and made it harder for students to get meals. You see students with meal plans resorting to food hoarding and even theft, which they rationalize based on the cost of the meal plan and lack of access.
Agreed. And college campuses aren't exactly the most Uber-like place. While they experiment with online courses and some are really embracing them, the dominant vision is a pay-one-price, all-you-can-eat model. The colleges themselves bear plenty of similarities to the communist model thanks to need-based financial aid.
So the fact that kids are food insecure on college campuses suggests that it's not a problem with Uberization or the economic model.
Uber and Lyft have made life much easier in San Francisco, since the taxi service here is very poor. I was in Vancouver a few years ago, before they allowed Uber and Lyft, and we had an extremely hard time getting a taxi there too.
We do not have an economy built on disruption, we have an economy built on the myth of disruption. No better example than Theranos.
And we have an economy built on lock-in. No better example that Apple, or perhaps Google and Amazon. These are both ways to extract value from the economic system, not ways to improve it. The Apple Tax, Google Adsense.
It wasn't long ago that customers were locked in to IBM mainframes and DEC minicomputers. How did that work out? Eventually some new disruptive technology appears and the incumbents miss the market shift.
From “ Total Factor Productivity Growth in Historical Perspective” referenced in the article:
> Economists have long found that they can explain only a portion of economic growth by the growth of inputs to production, such as the number of hours worked or the amount of capital used. The unexplained (or residual) portion, which presumably reflects advances in production technologies and processes, is conventionally attributed to all of the production factors together and is referred to as total factor productivity (TFP) growth.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame Uber for the lack of economic growth for the entire USA.
In addition, the paper referencing the economic slowdown compares 1970-2006, 36 years, to 2006-2016, 10 years. And during those 10 years the housing bubble collapsed. The dates selected appear cherry picked to show the largest decline possible.
Disruption these days is mostly about playing by a set of rules you invent for yourself to get an edge on the competition and calling it innovation. It's rare that real innovation is used to disrupt.
Imagine disrupting any industry where some form of accreditation is required by making an app which allows any person to perform those services. Anyone could be a doctor, lawyer, notary, etc. with no license needed. That's not disruption, that's breaking the law until the company is big enough to bribe (lobby) to change the law to allow that. That's literally Über-style "disruption".
Amazon was not the first in e-commerce and they "didn't pay taxes" because they reinvested the money rather than taking it as dividends. Amazon won because of their efficiency and customer service. Even today, FedEx usually takes weeks to deliver while Amazon has same day or two day delivery.
Can we get an open source gig economy app where 75% of the profits go to gig workers? Then 7.5% would go towards employee rights and benefits of gig workers, 7.5% towards contributors improving the software, and 10% towards customer support and legal third parties.
Based on my limited experience, VCs could be dissuaded from investing in co-ops by:
1. No prospects of a big payout (IPO, acquisition).
2. VCs like to have a single point-of-contact (the CEO) and few other owners. In a start-up, the CEO is answerable and serves only the investors. Co-ops behave more like a member-driven organization whose obligation is first and foremost to its members.
3. No option for majority ownership. A co-op eventually has to be majorly owned by the employees rather than by investors.
If the purpose of the co-op is to ensure that profits go to the workers and not to company owners/investors, then either you plan to fail at that purpose or you're not interesting to the investors. If the lion's share of the operating profits would go to the investors, it's no better than Uber, if the lion's share of the operating profits would go to the drivers, then what's the motivation to invest?
Huh? Nothing stops gig workers as it is from organizing and just paying an app developer. The unions simply can't make inroads with them for whatever reasons.
The workers are independent contractors. Uber drivers and TaskRabbit workers and the like are not on employee time or property. So what behaviors are you talking about? Uber certainly doesn't have to sell the Teamsters ad space on their app of they don't want to. It's their app.
> The arrogance of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs seems so outrageous — and so childishly naive — that it is scarcely (sic) hard to believe. How could an industry that has produced so little in terms of productivity seem so sure that they’ve been “changing the world” for the better.
Let's take one fabulously successful/wealthy/arrogant Silicon Valley company – Apple – which helped to improve and/or popularize: personal computers (Apple II), GUI computing (Macintosh), laser printing (LaserWriter), laptops (Power/i/MacBook), digital photography (QuickTake, iPhone), MP3 players (iPod), Wi-Fi (AirPort), smartphones (iPhone), app stores (App Store), tablets (iPad), smart watches (Apple watch), etc..
Silicon Valley also helped to create many beneficial advancements in the areas of: microprocessors, digital storage, the internet, the world wide web, video conferencing, digital and online games, streaming media, automatic translation, etc..
I would imagine that the author appreciates at least a few of these technologies and would not wish to give them up.
Moreover, the claim that productivity has not been increased by computing and information technology seems to have been largely refuted:
However, the claim that Google and Facebook are disruptors rather than innovators is interesting. I don't think he's talking about disrupting AltaVista and MySpace, but rather disrupting the sale of advertisements and media (newspapers, magazines) that depended on those ad sales.
I’ve been using delivery apps on and off for the past few months. Between the promos I’ve received, I’ve gotten groceries delivered for less than the items cost let alone the gas and time to deliver them. I’ve had multiple food items delivered at a lower cost than me walking there and buying in store as well. Talking to a few drivers for the companies - its tough, but they make a decent amount in the city (4-7k a month)
It is so tough, like beyond just the general psychological toll of your rent being a gamified award, there is little reprieve. No vacation, no security at all.
I have had so many jobs, and being a GrubHub deliverer is perhaps the most alienating, and in long term, exhausting ones ive had. I used to think "well at least people can have flexible jobs, use their vehicles", but these days I just so no reason for labor to ever be like it for anyone. Its not a model that thinks about the actual worker at all.
I did grocery delivery for a while, and I agree that 'alienating' was a great term for it. Yeah, it was 'flexible', but I was doing it for money, so I ended up on a lot of 12AM-2AM runs for college students who wanted booze, since payouts were based on a.) how many drivers there were and b.) the cost of the order and booze meant more $$$$.
Those drivers are either unusual examples or they're lying about how much they make.
I've done gig driving work in the past and still pop in on driver forums once in a while. The majority of these people are lucky to make $10-15 an hour after expenses (less now with rising gas prices, which they don't get compensated for), and a large percentage of them are operating below that. The ones making actually decent money have either figured out how to game the system - which is a transitory phenomenon as operators figure out ways to claw that profit margin back - or found some kind of luxury niche which requires having an upfront advantage like an expensive vehicle.
The perks of 'setting your own hours' (which is basically a lie, if you're relying on this income you have to drive when there's demand) or 'not dealing with a boss/co-workers' (your clients are your bosses and plenty of them are horrible) really pale when you look at the overall reality. Such so-called perks are how they keep suckering math challenged drivers into a crap job with abysmal pay and no benefits, though, and despite the fact that they're an illusion it keeps working. There are huge numbers of drivers whose actual compensation is so low it would nauseate you.
I was you once, amazed at how badly the VCs had let me pull one over on them, and sure I'd stop if it became a bad deal.
That was probably tens of thousands in spend on overpriced delivery meals making them huge profits off the initial "investment" they made in this customer
Of course the promos dried up and the pricing became awful not too long into the process.
I think we will see crashes in food delivery eventually. As whole outside high margin items it doesn't make sense when you start to look at margin of restaurant, wage and operating costs of the delivery person and then the profit and cut for the platform, staffed by overpriced engineers, marketing people and executives...
It seems like so many of the apps that come to dominate just make up for shortcomings unique to the US that then, with money, take over the rest of the west for no good reason other than scale to get 25 people at the top of those companies rich.
I’ve never seen the need for Uber. Taxis have never been an issue in the UK and the most successful firms in the city I lived when Uber was starting out already had apps. Literally the only thing Uber had going for it was masses of money to undercut the market and advertise to younger millennials - basically their excess money allowed them to get better distribution and cheat the market.
I’ve used Uber three or four times in my life and each time was a worse experience than a taxi.
Absolutely disagree - taxis in the UK used to be awful, none of them had apps before Uber. Black cabs in London were generally good due to the high entry requirements but you could only get them by flagging them down somewhere fairly central.
Uber introduced competition which has massively improved all other taxi services. These days there's nothing special about Uber except its ubiquity so I don't care if it fails now. Ofc this doesn't excuse their illegal practices.
You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, but back in the day you didn't have mobile phones either so not much option really. I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different, and it's kind of an obvious thing to add once smartphones become popular.
I agree that Uber injected some fresh energy in a somewhat complacent market, but the real "innovation" with Uber is with its business model ("employees but not employees") and willingness to just ignore local laws. This I think is the real point of the article; for all the pompous bloviating about being "disruption" and "changing the world", the actual real change is actually not all that large, with many of the changes being of doubtful or even negative worth.
>You could just phone a cab, no? That's what I did anyway; it's less convenient than an app, [...] I don't really see how an "app" is fundamentally all that different,
It's more than just a substitution of tapping an icon vs dialing a phone number.
The Uber business model of non-medallion cars and geographic matching algorithm builds up a "distributed mesh" of drivers to serve passengers -- especially those who are not at typical taxi "hubs" like airports, convention centers, downtown hotels, etc.
Before Uber, getting from one suburb to another suburb using a taxi was unreliable. A traditional taxi dispatcher can broadcast a ride request from a potential passenger in the suburbs but drivers can ignore it and wait for the more lucrative airport-to-downtown ride for $50. Why? Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips and instead, incentives them to wait for the longer airport trips. So hub-to-suburb and suburb-back-to-hub is "dead time" the drivers are not paid for.
A traditional taxi company -- even with an app -- doesn't build that geographically distributed mesh to the same degree. The economic constraint was the taxi meter.
When I was stuck in some distant suburb and had to use taxi companies, the way I "hacked" them to reliably come was to tell dispatch to tell the taxi driver I will tip an extra $20 for the ride. Basically, a form of bribery so the taxi drivers wouldn't ignore the dispatch call.
> When I was stuck in some distant suburb and had to use taxi companies, the way I "hacked" them to reliably come was to tell dispatch to tell the taxi driver I will tip an extra $20 for the ride. Basically, a form of bribery so the taxi drivers wouldn't ignore the dispatch call.
I find this interesting because on the food delivery side, this is kind of mental gymnastics the worker needs to do. If it is a busy evening hour, do you want to take a (small) McDonalds order? Most likely not, unless there is a nice tip. You could do at least two deliveries in the time you wait for the McD order.
I imagine rider side is the same way as delivery. Every worker has to do this sanity check if whether something is worth doing.
If workers are taking low reward rides or deliveries, it is probably because they think they aren't missing out on something better.
> drivers can ignore it and wait for the more lucrative airport-to-downtown ride for $50. Why? Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips and instead, incentives them to wait for the longer airport trips. So hub-to-suburb and suburb-back-to-hub is "dead time" the drivers are not paid for.
Isn’t it the same for Uber? They don’t get paid to get to your location so the only advantage as a driver is being picking up someone in the area you drop off another passenger. Dispatch worked similarly but it had its limitations of its time.
One thing that was not possible that Uber does is ride sharing.
> They don’t get paid to get to your location so the only advantage as a driver is being picking up someone in the area you drop off another passenger.
That's why the GP talks about a "distributed mesh" of drivers. There's simply more Uber drivers than there have ever been taxis in most places. So in the age of Uber if you're in a suburban area there's a high likelihood there's an Uber driver near you. So there's a small amount of unpaid driving time for the driver. There's also a decent chance of them finding a return passenger at the destination thanks to a similar increase in the number of potential riders vs taxis.
> Because the taxi meter only runs when that passenger is in the car so it punishes suburb-to-suburb trips
Most taxi companies in the suburbs would be a flat rate that the dispatcher would tell you before you got picked up (or the driver would ask the dispatcher curbside), they often didn't use the meter.
You're absolutely right. I don't know what OP is going on about but no there were 0 taxis with apps at least in Birmingham.
I just checked with my friends too and not one person remembers using an app to call a cab before uber. It is possible that some company possibly offered it but it certainly wasn't a popular option before Uber and it was just awful using the taxis here.
In some ways it does though. Some industries corner the market through regulation. Ie it's impossible for a new competitor to start up that follows all the rules and it's that way by design. The only way to break into that market is to break the rules or buy out an existing business.
Maybe you were unlucky but I never had an issue at all in Essex growing up or Newcastle where I spent 15 years. Also Blueline taxis had an app before Uber gained market relevance in the UK and it was great.
Ditto: Panther in Cambridge have always been reliable for the 20 years I've lived in the area. Same with the Ely firms.
Last time I tried to get an Uber in central London in the early hours of the morning two or three drivers cancelled before one eventually showed up after I'd phoned Uber support to complain. I'm not sure the phone call is what did the trick - in fact I'm pretty sure it wasn't - but what triggered that call is I'd been trying to get a ride for 20 - 30 minutes by that point. It sounds like this kind of poor QoS might be a new problem though: I certainly wasn't aware of it before the pandemic.
Uber actively modifies the earnings of their drivers in real time, which causes the drivers to modify their willingness to accept rides in real time. The reason those drivers are canceling is because between the time they accepted the ride and arriving to pick you up, Uber modified their earnings such that it was no longer profitable, or simply worth the effort to pick you up. Uber is a terrible "employer".
If 87 in your nickname suggest your age then I guess you are not the target for Uber. I’m 10 years younger and almost all of my peers never used Taxi and take Uber/Lyft quite often.
That’s a bit of an absurd take. Uber entered the UK market in 2012 when he was 25 and you 15, surely he’d have been in the target demographic before you? I’m in a similar age bracket and everyone I know uses Uber rather than black cabs.
But Uber is horribly in the red financially. They disrupted a poorly ran industry, but didn’t produce anything that truly raised the economy… that’s the point.
That's Uber's problem though. Essentially their billionaire investors subsidized car rides for lots of people. Maybe it'll work out for Uber in the long run. Maybe not.
This game is over. There is no way uber is getting a monopoly on taxi service. The popularity of uber has had the wrong effect: taxi companies are getting apps now, and other ridesharing companies are trying to get a piece of the action. There will not be a monopoly except in the places that are truly unprofitable to service.
Are there any slide decks or investor material out there that confirm this is the business model? I hear it all the time on HN but it just doesn't make sense. The barrier to entry in the taxi market is too low. You can't kill off competition and start monopoly pricing. The competition will always reappear.
I think it might be kept implicit, so investors will not start questioning it.
I think the logic is to own the portal to taxis and become a gatekeeper, by being the only app that the user has installed for hailing taxis. So the barrier to entry becomes large because you have to convince people to install your app.
It's not like people would be stuck in the house otherwise. It's just that people would have taken public transport, their own car, or went by foot or bicycle before. I'm very skeptical of this claim that Uber increased mobility.
It’s hard to get empirical evidence for the general claim that Uber increased mobility after adjusting for substitution effects from walking etc. However, I think one can make the case from economic intuition that price reductions generally increase consumption in a category of normal goods.
E.g - a reduction in the price of wheat will increase food consumption even after accounting for people switching from other crops. Conversely, an increase in the price of Lego will reduce the amount of toys the average child gets, even after adjusting for the substitution to action figure etc.
“Taxis have never been an issue in the UK” is a statement that does not match my experience.
Living briefly in London taught me that you cannot reasonably expect a hailed taxi to take you from A to B no matter how hard it is raining or how obviously pregnant the person you’re with is, if the taxi driver doesn’t fancy going to B, even if B is still within 20m of A.
Living for far longer in Edinburgh taught me that the credit card machine is manufactured by the same company that sells McFlurry boxes to MickeyD’s. This was still true when I visited Edinburgh again 3 months ago.
Uber seems to me to be abusive to their drivers. And occasionally to their passengers. But there’s a good reason they were so successful early on. They made my life, as a customer, better, easier, simpler, less encumbered with bullshit.
I was born and live in the UK and will only take a non-Uber taxi as a last resort. Been ripped off one too many times by taxi drivers in my life. With Uber there is no opportunity to be ripped off.
The fact that I can often use Uber abroad is a massive bonus. It's almost a guarantee that you're going to be ripped off when using taxis in a foreign country.
I would only take an Uber as a last resort - even the few occasions I’ve used one it was flaky. I’ve tried another few times but there was never a driver near but and the one who accepted just didn’t show up, carrier on driving around doing their own thing.
If something was critical I would never use an Uber - I’d rather walk, or cycle if a traditional taxi wasn’t possible for some reason.
If that was a common experience, Uber wouldn't have grown to the size it has and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I don't doubt that you have had bad experiences with Uber, and also that other people have. But you would find it very hard to convince me that people have better experiences with non Uber taxis on average.
Looking at the app store reviews in the UK of Uber, sorted by most recent
1* - Lost my trust
1* - Has gone downhill
1* - Uber Scammed me
1* - Can't get an Uber anymore
1* - The worst experience I have ever had
2* - Uber is deteriorating
2* - waiting times have increased
3* - Cancelled rides
1* Deteriorated over lockdown
etc.
All referring to the same problems I see, rides accepted by drivers, then cancelled a minute or so later.
Going further back, full of 1/2 reviews:
A sad Decline, Slow at finding drivers, Getting worse by the day, Scheduled trips are canceleld, Getting worse & worse, Most unreliable, etc
Maybe the occasional 3* but going back 6 months, "Uber is dead, No Longer the no 1 ride in London, Drivers keep cancelling, Cannot get a booking, Never any drivers, Never turned up, 1 star is too much, used to be great", etc. etc, those were back to October.
I'm not sure how long it's been going on (the same complaints go back at least a year on the reviews), but Uber don't seem to exist any more, otherwise they'd be concerned and change something to fix it.
Those latest 9 reviews happened over the space of 5 days. If Uber was generally bad, given the number of trips they're doing, I'd expect to see a lot more negative reviews in those 5 days than 9.
I'm not surprised to see no good reviews. I can't imagine people going out of their way to leave good reviews for Uber at this point. Their overall rating is 4.5/5 though
Your argument is essentially that just because you don't need/like Uber doesn't mean it's useful? The problem Uber is addressing is not just a US problem - with Uber you essentially don't have to deal with all the shit taxi drivers pull, like refusing rides if they have to go to a slightly less profitable area, overcharging for rides for people new to the area/tourists, etc. Not to mention that with Uber you know exactly when the driver is coming, how much you will be charged up front, etc. You may not like how Uber is addressing these problems - and indeed there are fair criticisms, but ride sharing apps are most certainly solving a real problem.
Friends complain all the time that Ubers don’t show up, take forever to arrive and don’t allow you to plan ahead. I’ve literally never bad that problem with taxis. I can book ahead, they arrive on time, they take me where I need to go, charge a predictable price and if I’m in a town or city I can just walked to the nearest taxi tank and find dozens of taxis waiting to take me somewhere. Yes this is anecdotal but I just don’t see the problem Uber is solving in the UK
> with Uber you essentially don't have to deal with all the shit taxi drivers pull, like refusing rides if they have to go to a slightly less profitable area
A very bold claim. I am not sure about the finances of Uber and how it impacts shareholders vs employees and how many people are getting rich off it, but let me tell you that services like Uber have been a God send as a consumer. The haggling with old school taxi drivers is one of the worst experiences one can have, not to mention that you have no idea what the prices should be if you are not local.
Uber and similar apps remove all that nonsense. You can disagree with their business practices or even how much they charge, but I hope apps and services like Uber do not die, EVER. I don't want to go back to being harassed by taxi drivers.
Yes, in certain areas that huggling was very common and Uber did help customers avoid it completely. Quite often the hugglers were attacking Uber drivers for disrupting their business practices.
You click a button, someone comes to pick you up in a few minutes. You know exactly how much you are gonna pay. Even if you are just a tourist. Uber (and other applications like it) is so much more superior to taxis that you cannot even compare them (unless you want to frivolously whine). They brought insane amount of innovation and I am so thankful for that.
I already had access to this exact experience with a taxi firm in Newcastle where I used to live pre Uber - so yeh, I don’t see what benefit Uber brought. Also, the firm that had that app had clean cars, with driver in clean clothes and they knew the roads well.
>I already had access to this exact experience with a taxi firm in Newcastle where I used to live pre Uber - so yeh, I don’t see what benefit Uber brought.
It seems like the benefit of Uber was that it provided better service for many who didn't have the superior taxis in Newcastle.
If all the other replies (including some UK ones) in this thread contradicting your personal experience don't convince you, would that be a form of solipsism? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism)
The same can be said about people complaining how taxis in their cities were dirty, inconvenient etc.
Now instead of having this patchwork, we have one giant monolithic taxi provider (Uber) that threatens both the good and bad taxi services of old. And because Uber is more than happy to subsidize rides thanks to VC funding having an equal/superior experience is often not enough to compete.
Oh, you had exact experience with one taxi firm in Newcastle. Superb. I had this exact same experience with Uber in different countries and different cities. "I’ve never seen the need for Uber.". Well, you are one of very few, pal. I can tell you that for sure.
We had Blueline in Harrogate too. And there was Apple Taxis in Exeter with an app. Ideally Uber should just be an interface that ties these different companies together.
At least here in Berlin, when I book via Uber, I'm told more often than not that it won't be an Uber picking me up but a normal taxi.
You're sample is simply not representative. If we could go back in time to 5 years before Uber's founding, I could show you the taxi system on the entire west coast of the US was non-functional, from San Diego to Seattle, service, pricing, availability were all abysmal.
FWIW, I actually agree that the "Gig Economy" is riddled with problems, but at least in the case of Taxi's where Uber started, the existing system was rotten and in need of replacement.
Sure, but like I said - solving a problem in the US and then rolling it out across the globe just “because” doesn’t mean the rest of the world needed it, just mean you had enough money to outcompete even if your service is worse.
It would seem that many other folks in this thread disagree that Uber's service in the area you referenced is worse. I've never been to the UK, so I can't offer an opinion.
Most other countries have different companies like Ola DiDi etc which have localized models more suitable to the country theyre in. Uber actually failed to replicate its model in these countries
as a counterpoint, there were places like nyc where the cabs and black cars were very reliable, fast and cheap and there were both drivers and family owned black car bases that were keeping the overheads rather than see them sent elsewhere.
many drivers were first generation immigrants.. owned homes in queens, were putting kids through college, looking at their name come up on the medallion wait-list in a few years as a retirement.
The insanity was that medallions had monetary value in first place. Just imagine that you couldn't start software company unless you bought medallion from someone already operating one. Or any other business for that matter... As for each type of business there is very good reasons to limit amount of those...
that insanity was why there were professional drivers who were making a good living at the trade.
but i suppose if the only constituents you really care about are customers, the people getting rich writing dispatch/billing software and the people facilitating the construction of a massive venture capital fueled duopolistic takeover of an entire industry, this works too i guess.
again, in the nyc market, it was fine, if not very good.
most drivers i spoke to seemed to like the medallions as they offered some long term investment potential and a sort of seniority reward. there was of course big capital at play, but drivers could have complained to the tlc... what can they do now? file a support ticket?
For some people, yes. Black folks routinely had issues getting cabs to pick them up, cabs would ask where you were going before you got in and then drive away if the answer was Harlem or outer boroughs, of course you could barely find a cab in the outer boroughs, everyone's credit card reader was "broken", etc.
Meanwhile, many of those immigrants were working off of someone else's medallion for peanuts, so the medallion owner could book Nicki Minaj for his kid's bar mitzvah.
the issue with black people getting yellow cabs in manhattan was real, but tlc would also vigorously enforce any complaints.
i think total rent for a car was something like $260/day and $280/day with medallion. (i think this also includes insurance)
remains to be seen whether this is better than encouraging drivers to go out and buy a late model car on personal credit.
regarding the boroughs, you had to know how to live in the city. any bodega, bar or restaurant would have the number for the nearest black car dispatch and would often call for you... pickup was usually within 5 minutes.
anecdotally: yellow cab drivers often seemed like financially stable professionals who were often raising families and in a good financial position. uber drivers always felt like temps. black car bases throughout the boroughs were often small and family owned. again this is anecdotal, but i like talking to people.
In some places with expensive unreliable public transport, the quickest & cheapest way (a group) into town was by taxi. Minicab to precise. The five minutes away for 45 minutes variety. The cancel without any notice. The sorry I don't take card mate. How about the ones who got hopelessly lost to charge you more?
The old way was awful and Uber got a hell of a first mover advantage.
While I don't disagree with the article, I don't fully agree with it either.
The article cites a study on (USA) GDP as a metric measuring of productivity, however, GDP is a poor proxy measure of "things being produced". USA GDP includes financial services and consumer spending, so using debt to pay for things vs. producing more, can still boost GDP.
In the United States, pre-Uber around 2010, it was very hard to find cabs in certain cities and even neighborhoods in those cities. New York City had no problems, but as I had lived in Chicago and San Francisco with lower population densities compared to top tier cities in the world -- the only way to get cabs even a few miles outside the main downtown area, was to call taxi dispatch, if you knew their number -- it was even hard to look it up online -- and schedule a pick up, which usually took 30min+. The US taxi system was stalled at the time, and Uber forced it to start adapting to the smart phone era. The tragedy is that the people investing in and also running uber had their own pyramid scheme instead of pricing out the business correctly. They also didn't consider the social/gov implications -- places with good taxi systems didn't need them, as you alluded to with the UK, but they shoved into it anyways.
So Uber was an innovation, one that is trying to find its financial balance still. I'd never care to schedule another taxi pick-up for next morning, 16hrs in advance when I want to go to the airport.
But the article saying that uber innovation and having others try it on other industries is stymying productivity isn't completely correct either.
As decided by the people. They could have politically campaigned to change that, buy out all the medallions at fair market price and the redistribute them for free in sufficient quantity.
Fuck that. Medallions are licenses and the government can grant more licenses as they see fit. They don’t need to compensate people who already hold them for granting more.
They were available in London before Uber, and they had an entirely different model where they just franchised the technology for people in each city to use.
They were profitable, and were driven out of existence by Ubers blitz scaling, which still hasn't produced a profit :(
I would say a taxi app is a good though obvious idea, worth pursuing. What was a bit surprising was the sheer scale of it. That crowding out point in the essay is very relevant, we are basically allowing the bully with the big stack to raise everybody out of the poker game, no matter how good his cards actually are.
If we want a functioning market, let a bunch of little guys show what they can do, don't let one huge guy scare everyone else away.
Dumping of service should outside very limited promotional offers lead to massive penalties. That is multiple times the generated revenue. Possibly distributed to proven operators on the market.
Taxis in Shanghai were terrible. They weren’t much better in Ireland. They didn’t stop for foreigners (in Shanghai). They refused to take you if they didn’t feel like going where you wanted to go after you flagged them down. Uber and its copycats made the world better by making the “regulators” irrelevant. Taking a good taxi experience from a thing in some cities in some countries to everywhere they operated was and is massive.
> I’ve used Uber three or four times in my life and each time was a worse experience than a taxi.
Every time I call an Uber in London, an extremely professional and courteous driver shows up within a couple of minutes in a Mercedes S-class or equivalent, at a price only slightly above that of a black cab.
I doubt that you can find a better taxi service anywhere.
It's all sunshine and rainbows, while you are in your hometown and know which one is good, won't scam you etc.
I landed in India or Brazil a few times, with language familiarity limited to "bon día". Without local sim card. This trip would be orders of magnitude harder without Uber and similar.
It's incredible spending time in the undeveloped/developing world - all the problems and solutions that "gig" apps supposedly are good for live on to this day all over the world.
Need a place to stay? Ask around the village and someone will be more than happy for you to sleep in the spare room for $1/night.
Need a ride? Wait where the locals are, you'll get in a communal "taxi" with locals for 10 or 20 cents to the next town.
In the Western World there are apps for this kind of thing that funnel profits to mega corporations. In the rest of the world there are average people on the street doing it every day as part of normal life.
A big benefit of Uber is the fact it works in multiple cities. I was in a new UK city the other day, no idea where I'd get a cab from. Just opened Uber and booked one, and it worked.
Tried it again that evening and it failed -- multiple times the ride would be accepted, then cancelled. Ended up walking.
Looking at recent reviews for the Uber app it seems this is common, Uber has gone from being somewhere reliable I can get a cab, from Sydney to San Francisco to Singapore, to being something that can't be relied upon
Still way more friction than Uber where you setup a payment method in the app once and no actual payment is ever required to the driver, pretty much anywhere in the world.
Also:
1) how do you tell the driver where you want to go? I've found this to be a major PITA with many cab fares, especially if you drive to unusual destinations. I've met many a cab driver that simply are incapable of using google maps. Case in point: a month ago in a small European town where Uber is banned by the local thugs who run the town, I give my destination to the driver at the cab station, lo and behold, he proceeds to spending 10mn first asking and then arguing with his colleagues in the local patois how to get there. I tried to step in to show them on my phone, they basically ignore me, because they obviously know better. The fact that I;m in a hurry is the least of their concerns. Ugh.
2) How easily and quickly can you get cabs to pick you up exactly where and when you want, especially if we're talking less than 10mn delay? In a big city like LON that might not be a problem, but from experience, and I'm talking about European capitals, and smaller cities in the US or Asia, this is *way* worse than the Uber experience.
As a matter of fact, an Uber ride requires zero interaction with the driver other than agreeing that you're the customer and he's the provider.
Quasi-frictionless and immediate, which - in my book - makes it a winner in spite of them having a despicable corporate culture.
The price considerations are a different conversation, but AFAIC, I'm certainly ready to pay more for an Uber to get to that frictionless transaction.
The day a cab ride is as easy to setup as an Uber ride, I'll very gladly stop using Uber.
Excellent addition to the discussion there. My point of view still stands. I just don’t see how it’s better than the existing taxi systems I used in my country pre Uber. One even had an app showing where their taxis were and you could hail one with a tap of a button.
In India, the drivers at Uber Bikes(paid better than rapido), Rapido(bike ride startup) are paid sooo damn low by these companies that we have to give them 20-30% extra on top of the actual ride price. How low you might ask ? 40 cents to travel 3-4Kms in my city. One Gallon of petrol costs over 6 Dollars in India. They keep showing these ads that the price is low to attract the customers, pay the drivers even less and then The customer and the drivers have to make a deal outside of the platform before the ride is even initiated. I have no idea how will the drivers survive with the extremely low wage. I have switched back to public transport just like the good ol days before the uber era.
For some who might wonder how Uber attracts riders to the platform, it’s done through “bonus” payments. They give riders “goals” to achieve in terms of numbers of orders completed. Achieve these numbers each month and you get a bonus. The bonus is usually comparable to an expected monthly wage. Over time though, the goals go higher (Uber says the demand is more but fails to say the supply is more as well) and then the bonus goes down. Over time it just becomes an abusive relationship. But like a person trapped in a Ponzi scheme, many drivers believe they can do it if they work hard enough (they shoulder the blame) and they stick on.
I gather that it's even worse than that: I've heard that Econ 101 teaches those commonly heard things (supply/demand curves, inflation, etc) so that higher-level courses can then contextualize why they're so wrong and oversimplistic when they teach the "real" current theory (kinda like how we still teach the "electrons orbiting a nucleus" model in HS physics only for undergrad-level physics to say "that's all wrong: their position is described by a probability-density wave-function".
Gotta start somewhere, I guess - but I'm just afraid that because I'm nowhere near an expert that I'll be bamboozled by someone with legitimate qualifications, but without realizing that they're actually still not qualified to speak about the subject either.
I just find it really weird that there wasn't a thinktank in 2005 or so, that said "Okay, what are the next big phone applications?" and invented Uber and a few others. What is the point of these thinktanks if they can't predict 3 years ahead along our current technological advancement curve?
I have friends in South Africa who built a small business similar to uber in 2004 on SMS and future phones. Worked really well, however, at the end of the day an idea does not build a business like uber.
Extremely well executed startups does, which of course requires a team in just the right milieu and timing.
> I have friends in South Africa who built a small business similar to uber in 2004 on SMS and future phones.
(I assume you meant "feature-phone" there?)
You should tell your SA friends to reach out to some tech journos, they'd love to write a "Uber before Uber" story, and I'd like to know the reasons why their project didn't pan-out myself. SMS-based applications had a lot of potential in the mid-2000s, often the failures were elsewhere, and doesn't SA also have SMS-based billing too? that could have been an amazingly successful service...
Yeah, if I had to guess, it was so extremely hard for them to recruit taxi drivers in South Africa. The metered taxi industry has always been extremely untrusted (my personal opinion), and basically non-existent.
They approached these guys and also the hand full of companies that existed back then, but it really wasn't until Uber established a trusted driver experience that we really started using taxis on a daily / weekly basis. So they simply did not have the funding / momentum to establish such a large scale transition in transportation and consumer trust within SA.
For years prior to Uber, the segment for "upper / middle class" public transport was not served and for sure not accessible. You could phone a cab company in Cape Town and get a taxi, but then it was super expensive and that was basically the only option – service which was also not available in most other cities.
When Uber arrived, they (and other companies) helped jobless drivers secure funding for cabs and within a year or two there were thousands of drivers, cabs and Ubers in all metros.
For the first time, when I had to go to the airport, I could get a Uber instead of asking a friend to drop me off. Crazy but this was the reality.
I would guess they did not have the timing right with the advent of 3G internet with minimum viable bandwidth to be able to operate things like maps and GPS and payment processing in real time, combined with the advent of usable mobile phones with sufficient qualities of battery life, touch screen sizes, and computing power.
The 2007 to 2012 period was a perfect storm of bringing together connectivity with never before utility from newly developed devices, and if you were in the right place at the right time to stake a claim, then you had significant first mover advantages.
It was discovering new land that had not been settled yet, similar to when computing and society advanced to allow for computers in every home, and then internet connectivity, and then finally, 24/7 computing plus internet computing in your pocket.
Of course, having deep, deep pockets to hire the people at the forefronts of this land rush is also a huge advantage.
> advent of 3G internet with minimum viable bandwidth to be able to operate things like maps and GPS and payment processing in real time
I just realized that GPS was probably the reason: I remember my first time using Uber and it was the fact you could see the location of the car and yourself on the map in real-time, and so you could easily get to the car without the usual hassle of trying to locate and identify each other. That's just not possible with SMS (even if a phone did support GPS, I've never seen anything like "send coordinates by SMS" on a feature-phone, and even if the server could render a map it wouldn't be downloaded in real-time to be useful.
...though if it was a Java mobile app for each platform, that might have worked (even over GPRS), but considering how expensive mobile-data was at the time, hmm, yeah.
Sounds like you're unaware what a "thinktank" does: they are political propaganda machines with enough funding to impact the pop culture fringe of whatever industry funds the thinktank. In the US, most visible thinktanks are GOP/conservative marketing operations, such as The Heritage Foundation.
"A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture."
The first sentence of the wikipedia page for 'thinktank'.
They create research that is used by politicians to justify them creating a policy they'd already decided to create for political reasons. They manufacture consent.
What did Chuck Colson want to do to the Brookings institution again?
IMHO a bigger problem is equating innovation with digitization. In the end, living standards mostly stem from our interactions with the physical world, not digital. After all, rich people buy yachts and mansions, not Adamantium armor++ set
Venture capital ought to have it's hand on the pulse of technology. The most impactful tech of the last 5 years, with massive societal and financial returns, was mRNA vaccines. Yet I've never heard VCs raving about them. As soon it touches physical world, it gets shunned by investors
Our lack of research funding in the US over the last few decades has been appalling. It makes no sense to pull back they way we did after making such wild gains on the back of it.
Open source knowledge is literally the greatest thing since sliced bread. By some odd chance, a few people at Sun open-sourced Java and literally changed the world for the better. Look at the productivity and opportunity that is now available to everyone because of it. Look at how it spurred real competition and gave birth to new technology. It lit a fire under everyone's ass! One small example of how unleashing academic innovation can help lift everyone.
I think that is an unfair summarisation since all the Wright brothers did was fly a very non-practical plane for about ten seconds as a kind of "MVP". There was no market. Commercial airliners took that core technology, refined it, and used it to actually create an entire new service and market.
I am writing about Ryan air or Southwest those companies did nothing to on R&D for flights.
No one is accusing them that we don't have a Moon colony because they are doing what they do.
Author is accusing application operating company that there is not enough innovation because of them. So it seems author just took Uber marketing division where they shout about "innovation" seriously.
There are companies that are doing actual R&D and Uber is buying services/goods from them, so it is like Southwest buying Boeing planes is actually paying R&D costs of coming up with better planes.
Also author is making point that somehow there is not enough innovation - well I have different point of view - whole innovation happened and made it possible to operate something like Uber. Smartphones and mobile connectivity with GPS is the innovation that was not as widespread 20 years ago, heck even 10 years ago things were still starting up.
This blog post seems quite a departure from the author's portrayal of Silicon Valley in his two most recent books.
In the books he defines "innovation" as a novel solution to an important problem, but highlights that "important" is subjective. What one person think is important may be different from what another person thinks is important.
This subjectivity is exemplified in the top comment in this thread. The commenter believes "AI/ML research" and cashierless checkout from a single company are examples of innovation. This confused thinking is perhaps a contributing reason that today's faux "innovation" is able to gain traction. The top comment believes research is innovation. Further, the important problem to be solved in the opinion of the commenter is the existence of cashiers, not, e.g., how to increase their productivity.
Methods of increasing profits and solutions to important problems (=innovation) are not necessarily synonymous.
One of the most interesting insights to me about this dynamic of profitless, innovation lacking platforms came from reading a Varoufakis piece.
To him the reason platforms exist as they do right now is because they constitute a fundamental shift away from market capitalism to what he calls techo-feudalism.
Instead of thinking of companies like Uber as selling software and paying wage labour to generate profit, it makes much more sense to think of it as a fiefdom that extract rents directly from its users outside of markets, maintains unpaid or barely paid labour, essentially a techno-peasant class, and is funded by barons in the form of VC capital directly and the state indirectly.
Through that lens for the first time to me it made perfect sense why it isn't so absurd to have gigantic companies that barely make any profits, have no differentiated products or much of a workforce. The point of these new businesses isn't to dominate markets and sell things at great margins, it's to claim territory, extract value and then use that control to directly command users on your behalf.
The 3rd paragraph is incongruous with the 4th paragraph. If they are not generating profits then how come we accuse them of extracting rent and "maintaining techno-peasants"?
The major characteristic of feudalism was that power centers deteriorated and power was distributed to local lords insted of central kings. So how is having a single gigantic company more like feudalism?
Lastly, why come up with such convoluted theory when "too much speculation due to cheap debt" explains everything with much less gymnastics
> If they are not generating profits then how come we accuse them of extracting rent
Just as it was possible for a medieval king to have terrible finances by spending more on war/security than he collected in rent from Barons, a tech company can lose lots of money by spending more on customer acquisition/platform maintenance than collected in rent from suppliers.
> If they are not generating profits then how come we accuse them of extracting rent
because those are not the same thing. Feudalists don't extract surplus wage labor, they extract direct tribute from their subjects, and just like that the entire value of Facebook say, is in what its users produce on its platform. That experience is the actual rent they collect. Ever wondered why all of this stuff is free?
And power is deteriorating. Away from the state, which played a central role in organizing and managing the traditional market economy towards these private spheres of influence of which the principal unit is the tech-firm.
I feel like my mother posting about some cauliflower recipe would be much less useful tribute than a few kilos of rice. There must be some point to the tribute.
This stuff is free because Facebook is an advertisement company. I enjoy a good conspiracy as well but at least it must be somewhat entertaining.
I think this phenomenon is better described as indirect payment for platform services.
You could argue similar structures exist outside of tech in Walmart’s supplier relationships or Standard Oil’s railroad arrangements.
Also, the methods used by these companies to “claim territory” often does seem to create innovation. The gmail web app, WhatsApp etc create a lot of customer value despite being used for territory expansion rather the collection of direct revenue.
>>you can make a business viable by pumping a lot of cash into it, you can actually crowd-out a lot of good businesses with bad, albeit well-funded ones.
Yup
And in most of the gig economy, it appears that that the only winning move is to not play. The exceptions are only certain circumstances such as where one can do arbitrage between economies, e.g., computing nomad living in a very low-cost economy but selling services in the US or EU. Otherwise, every account I've read of Uber/Lyft drivers is which way they are losing the most money after being lured in by promises of good income...
Life pretty comfortable. Most of the stuff that generates discomfort is stuff that a company/individual likely can't change. Innovation dies Negaunee we're fat and happy and there aren't any problems that feasibly solvable.
For example, taxes. We already have tax software. It's still a pain. If we want to fix it, we have to fix the underlying government system of laws and regulation.
Another one is healthcare. There is innovation there, but again the laws and regulations dictate or allow a lot of the negative behavior
The loss of innovation has zip to do with the Uber Economy.
Try the fact that the middle class has been gutted by an unfair tax structure that shreds responsibility away from the wealthy and corporations and has created peripheral damage in high college cost and low public school expectations.
Bring back the tax rate where people making over 540k (the 1980 equivalent of the top tax rate $225,000) pay 50% on anything over that amount. In 1980 it was 70%. SEVENTY PERCENT.
If we raise the top tax rate, we pay for infrastructure, college, teachers that can teach critical thinking instead of how to pass a test. The middle class can chill out and raise a family, take a vacation, save for retirement, and not live pay check to pay check. We rebuild the middle class.
What happens if college goes back to a Pell grant and a part-time job cost? INNOVATION. People will have the ability to think freely and be creative. They won't be forced to figure out a career at 18-21 years old.
Guess what else we do? We start paying down the national debt for once and actually reducing the debt ceiling.
Our tax structure is insanely out of balance. That's the number one core problem in the United States.
Excepting star-power labor (professional athletes, entertainers), most of the income in the upper tax brackets goes to the owners of capital. When stocks pay dividends, the dividends are taxed as income. If you raise taxes on upper-tax-bracket income, you just promote stock-based compensation instead: compensation in stock options (which are taxed as capital gains when realized, not income), stock buy-backs instead of issuing dividends (again, capital gains rather than income), etc.
The long-term capital gains tax rate, for those in high tax brackets, is 20%.
Go ahead, set the income tax rate for high tax brackets to seventy percent. It won't actually make a difference.
Then you have to tax stock-based income. Any employee acquiring stocks must report it one time as income and get taxed on it. No capitalism back doors. However we figure it out, the wealthy need to pay more into annual tax revenues.
A functioning society requires a large and happy middle class, affordable liberal arts college, strong K-12 teaching, and time off.
Another option to address the same basic issue is to fix estate taxes, which might be an easier fix. (Among other things, change the cost basis for the estate taxes to be the price when the asset was originally acquired, not the price when it was transferred to the inheritor.) Either way, I agree that it's critical to close the routes to avoiding taxes.
Before the stock yields anything the corporation is taxed. To follow that, allowing unprofitable companies to be publicly traded is corruption. As others have mentioned above, we are also suffering from a lack of financial regulations.
The current president had been holding a position of power in Washington for 50 years. Same is true for many other top politicians. As long as you vote in the same people over and over again, nothing will change.
we have no choice. Only parties who support capital can muster the resources to run & win because of strategic voting made necessary by a first past the post voting system.
All problems are down stream of voting rights, gerrymandering, and first past the post / non-proportional representation
I don’t think that those are the problems. I think it’s the money from a tiny group of wealthy individuals.
Limit that to no more than $1000 per natural person per year and make it illegal for entities that are not natural persons to contribute any money (PACs, companies, etc).
Contribution to political campaigns should mostly be by time, volunteering to work for a campaign.
> Try the fact that the middle class has been gutted by an unfair tax structure
> Our tax structure is insanely out of balance. That's the number one core problem in the United States.
This is actually even worse in many places in EU. I completely agree with your diagnosis and would also like to see your solution implemented.
I have an impression, taxation here in Europe is used as a political tool to play middle class and lower class against each other. And whatever the crisis, the middle class is expected to foot the bill. All the while, the powers that be use handouts to lower class to pacify them (prevent a revolution?)
The huge difference is that in USA most of your taxes goes to the federation while in EU most of your taxes goes to your local authorities while EU gets very little of your money. People are more willing to pay taxes when they know it wont be sent thousands of kilometres away.
I can read and look up historical records. This isn’t rocket science. The combination of gutting our tax rates plus the GOP spending trillions on wars and tax breaks has killed the middle class. Look at everything Reagan did during his first 4 years. He decimated the middle class and waged war on black people and the poor.
Here's what I don't get - why is the existence of Uber proof of anything?
Yes, you're right, Uber is not particularly innovative. Neither is the pizza place down the corner. They're both a business that's trying to make money, albeit at different scale and via different products.
But the existence of the pizza place doesn't prove that there aren't companies creating innovation. Neither does the existence of Uber.
Perhaps there should be a study about how much of VC funding goes into companies that aim at “disruption” rather than “innovation.” If Uber, symbolizing the former, is more predominant over innovation companies, then the author has a point.
This article seems to have a primal understanding of how complex it is to run a company as complex as Uber - narrowed only to think of innovations as physical hardware, or software innovations. Easy to forget, the complexity of getting from point A to B efficiently and economically around the globe - with trust established against an unknown driver.
It is worth considering that the problem is too much debt and that people are missing the forest for the trees. Gambits like Uber still aren't profitable or sustainable, and we have no idea what sort of market it'll be working in once it tries to make money. By the books, it appears that Uber's "investors" have been burned quite badly. Putting in the hard work to build a profitable business is less rewarding by comparison to making a high-growth low-value-add play and trying to get money off people with access to big lines of credit.
And, ranting, it is still quite possible that Amazon/Google/Facebook are going to lose the super profits in the long term. Which to me means 2030+, 2040+ as the market matures. Google is probably a bit more secure in that they have to commit suicide to lose money (which they will eventually, every company gets bad managers sooner or later). AWS on the other hand faces a risk of being chipped at from all angles by specialised providers. They do not have a magical spell that can resist the market moving towards the marginal cost of production. Facebook lives in a world where staying power is the exception not the norm, they came after numerous other competitors that fell apart under the complexity of managing social networks. They are all but guaranteed to fall in time too, they are in a delicate position where it takes one bad CEO/Director of Misinformation or some Chinese upstart that won't sell out and the whole thing could fall apart.
Back in the day my cousin was driving yellow cab in NYC. He would work 6/7 days a week 12 hour shifts. He eventually took our a mortgage ( loan) to buy a yellow cab medallion. Cost was like $1M. And BAM! uber came on the scene and the value for his medallion DROPPED. X 10k yellow cab drivers and those who bought medallions with a ridiculous loan. What did uBER do? that was so innovating? they simply put guys like my cousin OUT OF BUSINESS and underwater on their loans. WOW. Poor guy worked 20 years driving yellow cab and thought he would have a future buying medallions. Technology should enable rather than destroy people or slice up an industry to squeeze the lifers who've been in that industry their whole lives. Thats just 1 story of what happened in NYC when uber came on the scene. May not apply to ALL start ups i don't know. 2-cents.
Indeed, one of the things Uber disrupted was many lifelong taxi owner-operator’s retirement plans. An NYC taxi medallion was a valuable asset. It was a promise for exclusive market access. Giant $1M loans were taken out to pay for this privilege. NYC just turned around and gave it all away to Uber. When the value of NYC taxi medallions fell, while Uber was heavily subsidizing fares, small business owners were going bankrupt. Several people committed suicide. Real people lost their livelihoods while Kalinick and his buddies congratulated each other.
Showtime made a show about uber" Super Pumped" on showtime rigth now. Apple made a movie about We Work ( Adam neuman). HULU made a show about Elizabeth Holms. "Theranos". Nobody made a movie about yellow taxi cab drivers who lost it all when their medallions went to the SH*T house after uBER decimation to the yellow cab medallion industry in NYC.
Both innovation and disruption are useful tools to keep in the chest.
A completely free market economy is rife with undesirable downsides, so it's necessary to introduce regulation. Regulations in a capitalist system is rife with regulatory capture usually used to artificially restrict supply. Regulatory capture needs to be disrupted. Disruptors quickly become rent seekers (nice system... shame if something should happen to it). The way around disruptors is to innovate, until the capitalists seek to capture regulations on the innovative.
It's a dynamic system constantly seeking equilibrium. It's not perfect but it seems to be working OK.
There is no real journalism, only perspectives trying to win mindshare. Those that believe, and may be able to prove in productivity gains are being actively shouted down by those better funded saying otherwise. The truth? There is no truth.
I believe this is not true. There are degrees of truthfulness. Some journalist do a better job than other. Such cynicism is the exact effect tyrants like Trump and Putin seek. It means they are free to do as they please.
Mostly the demand pricing model which is up to 5x the cost of other local services, the absolutely abhorrent non-existent customer service, the 25% of the time when you order an Uber and it gets cancelled, the transaction processing problems which seem to go in waves of plague and the buggy as hell app.
And don't even get me started on Uber Eats which universally delivers cold, damaged food which is twice the price of going in the store and their customer support is so bad that it's nearly impossible to get a refund from them now even though it was 2 hours late and looked like it'd been delivered in a washing machine on a spin cycle.
I live in Europe and I didn't have such experiences at all (when in very few cases a car didn't arrive, I got refund very swiftly without any problems). Try other applications (Lyft, Bolt or whatever).
In these conditions, it makes sense to pump as much money as possible into an early Amazon, Google or Facebook.
However this seemingly happy story has a few important downsides. First, to a large extent these technologies do not create new markets as much as they disrupt or displace old ones, which is one reason why productivity gains are so meager.
No. They displace old industries by introducing technologies and processes that made them more productive. People use them because they provide a higher quality service at a lower price.
And all three of the examples he provided: Amazon, Google and Facebook, have been enormously innovative, and created entirely new markets. I could write a long essay on the markets that had their emergence faciliated by any one of the three companies listed.
What's worrying is that such an obviously misinformed article could be held in such high esteem by so many on HN.
I'm shocked. Under capitalism people with capital choose who will win in the market? How it's even possible? It's almost like that under capitalism people with capital make the rules.
Having taken a $30 Uber to drive 15 minutes lately, when a taxi would’ve cost $10 or so, I don’t think they’ve ultimately created much value with their rideshare service. They’ve basically just moved the entities around, and now it takes a lot longer to get a taxi.
Ultimately this is an era largely of the conglomerate, it doesn’t matter who you are unless you’re one of the big fishes. Media, Advertising, etc. Its no longer small shops that are creating interesting and useful things, at least not at the rate they were. It’s more likely to be an expansion out of a big company into a marketplace trying to sip an audience than it is a disruptor changing any of the game. The disrupters that exist must get and stay large as fast as possible as well.
I’m looking for things that don’t scale. I think we’ve basically poured all societies money into anything that might scale. We’ve found we have run out of those things. And all the problems we have left are things like education, homelessness, lack of meaning, healthcare, etc. All problems so entrenched I’m willing to say at this point they can’t scale, and therefore won’t be solved. Maybe the next technological revolution will be a social dynamic. Who knows.
>Having taken a $30 Uber to drive 15 minutes lately, when a taxi would’ve cost $10 or so, I don’t think they’ve ultimately created much value with their rideshare service. They’ve basically just moved the entities around, and now it takes a lot longer to get a taxi.
You forget just how terrible the taxi industry was prior to Uber. I would walk for miles rather than take a taxi. I would gladly pay 2-3x more for an Uber than taking a taxi. There are signs that traditional taxi companies are waking up to their enormous service issues, but it only took their imminent demise.
I never had an issue with taxis in most European countries I have lived on, so reaching 50 it is quite a number of taxis, and still manage to this day without ever having taken an uber, which I refuse by principle due to the way their treat employees.
This must be regional. My experiences are from the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia. Terrible, miserable service. I hate the old taxi industry in a very visceral way. If you're seeing good/better service in your location, and they cost much less than Uber, I imagine they have no issues staying commercially viable and you'll be able to keep enjoying their services.
In Finland Uber lead to deregulating taxi market, which to no ones surprise lead to worse service, less skilled drivers, less availability on average and more expensive service... Then again I suppose the Uber lovers want exactly those things and an exploiting entity to leech money in between.
Interesting that you mention Finland, given that I was regularly there during my Nokia days almost 20 years ago, and they are for me the top reference, maybe only similar to the time I spent on Norway also servicing Nokia customers.
Do you have any examples what was better? Of the reasons I could think of that would constitute poor service, I've had as many Uber's just not show up as I've had taxis. I've had as many very poor drivers in Uber's as I've had in Taxis. The biggest thing I can think of is the average cleanliness of an uber is higher than a taxi.
But like, the taxi meters are just so damn cheap compared to what ubers are nowadays, and thats with $6billion in losses per year. $30 is too much to go just 5 miles in 15 minutes.
* "That will be $[some outrageous and clearly fake meter amount].
* "My meter is broken. I'll just estimate it."
* "There is a $10 surcharge for luggage" / "there is a $5 surcharge for that neighborhood" / there is a $10 surcharge for cards." Bonus points when they only tell you after you arrive.
* Driving me the long way. This happened ~25% of all of my trips. It was particularly egregious before mobile phone GPS became ubiquitous.
* Unsafe driving.
* Stinking / dirty taxis
* The cars took hours to arrive, and often never arrived at all. This is probably my biggest gripe. If there is one thing I require, it's efficient transport from A to B. If they can't even do this, they shouldn't be in business.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've had any of these issues with Uber. I do agree that the price gap between taxis and Uber is increasing, but I gladly pay it. As above, I would gladly pay 3x more for Uber, so until the price difference arrives there, I'm sticking with Uber.
That doesn't sound right to me. The only place where you're paying $30 for an Uber where 1. it would have been possible to call a taxi, 2. the taxi only costs $10, 3. it's a 15 minute drive, is in the middle of a big city. In that case, why are you calling an Uber instead of using public transit?
Yes, Ubers are more expensive than taxis in some cases, but in many other cases, they can do things that taxis can't.
You're right it is in a big city. A taxi meter except to/from an airport is almost always much cheaper than a rideshare. A cab that takes 15 minutes might require a 45-60 minute bus journey if you have to transfer.
It was $30 for the slowest uber or lyft before tip. Taxi fare is $2.60 + $1.70/km, so it would have been around $10 to make the 3.5 mile journey. There used to be enough taxi's in the area to just hail one.
I see that as pretty easy, ship pre-paid vouchers to participants or digital ones. Have them scanned and then billed to customer. Nothing complicated with big enough operators if they want to sell such service.
> And all the problems we have left are things like education,
homelessness, lack of meaning, healthcare, etc. All problems so
entrenched I’m willing to say at this point they can’t scale, and
therefore won’t be solved. Maybe the next technological revolution
will be a social dynamic. Who knows.
Hoorah to that!
We need a "cultural revolution" that let's us catch up with our
technological advances. New forms of digital literacy will change
the idea that any technological advance is good for its own sake
to seriously asking "what for?" of any technology.
Mere "efficiency" and "inevitability" will be seen as dumb reason and
forms of technological ignorance.
Intelligence amplification (IA) will usurp "artificial intelligence"
(AI), putting human agency ahead of laziness and "convenience".
For now I think we have to go through this runaway period of
technology, to get it out of our system. Let's hope it doesn't kill
us.
this is what the real web3 is actually going to solve.
out with globally centralized service dispatch and paupers doing the work on unencrypted user data siphons and in with decentralized identity, reputation and commerce systems that sell to small business.
tools so small business can be as good as uber, everywhere.
I think innovative idea is to get people think they make money when you rake rake of 20-25% and they provide the service for peanuts. And then they kicked out if they don't do it well enough.
But even if it did some good "disrupting", I think the article's point is it's not real innovation. Same e.g. with self booked travel, self scan groceries, etc, they are not really innovating, they just change a power balance.
So the it ends up being bad when all the capital is chasing these disruptors instead of "innovators" for some definition.
The thing it misses, I think, is that many of the big winners (or monopolies if you like) actually do end up funding massive amounts of innovation.
Facebook and Google have contributed huge $ to AI/ML research, Amazon Go I think qualifies as real innovation (and I think there are many amazon examples that are more than just an app). Tech is easy to pick on (I've picked on it a lot) and Uber may be an egregious example of a company that disrupted and didn't give back (though they don't make money either). But I think there has been some major innovation come out of tech companies, even if that isn't how they got rich in the first place.