Took a few last year on a trip to San Francisco and it felt like the future. It's not lost on me that enshittification will take its toll, the fleet will get nastier over time, prices will increase, etc. I'm also torn about more money being given to mega corporations. But purely from a service-enjoyment and technology-appreciation point of view it was amazing!
Is it that you feel it's amazing, because San Francisco never had the European-style, cheap and elegant taxi that gets you chaffeured around in a Mercedes E-class by a shirt-wearing, well-dressed person who helps you with your luggage? You can call them with an app.
For me, Waymos are a downgrade in the same way Uber was, too. I'm not even going to expand the conversation to German/Swiss/Dutch-style clean, fast and cheap public transportation. Waymo is basically good public transportation to places which don't have public transportation and don't want it. I have no doubt this comment won't really land with those who have not experienced the European-style taxis or public transportation.
I think the lack of any person involved is part of the appeal for a lot of people. The lower cost does also help, I think it will be interesting to see if the notional price advantage from the lack of driver will bear out over time, though.
Enshittification is only when there is a captive/sticky audience that has high switching costs. “Drive you from A to B” has no moat and they will continue to have to compete on merit and price. Here in Vegas there are 3, soon to be 4+, driverless taxi services currently operating.
Also, you can’t praise an amazing service that takes insane amounts of r&d money to bring to market in the same breath as complaining about giving money to massive corporations. No two guys in a garage are starting a self-driving car company or a supersonic jet company by themselves. Massive capital is required to launch satellites, build cars, build datacenters, etc.
>Enshittification is only when there is a captive/sticky audience that has high switching costs. “Drive you from A to B” has no moat and they will continue to have to compete on merit and price.
No, in this case enshittification will be driven by the cost of entry for a new player. That'll create enough of a capital cost hurdle to prevent a duopoly or triopoly-type situation from entering a natural state of complacency and degradation.
How many tens of millions would you be willing to spend to launch your own fleet of self-driving cars in a city (just one for that price! and that's with no R&D!) just because the Waymos are dirty, smelly, and noisy?
Not true. Enshittification also happens when they cut the quality of the service to improve their margins which they need to do for whatever reason (competition on price, profit improvements etc). Thats why the cheapest tier the quality of the vehicles will be worse and all services will run like that because that’s all you can achieve at that price point (unless they figure out how to have automated distributed cleaning stations and even then that’s tricky because the car is still out of commission and losing you money to get cleaned even if it’s only a minor detour).
Not necessarily. It also means segmenting the market to extreme lengths so that even a marginal increase in quality is combined with a significantly greater price. It’s about pushing the most price sensitive customers to have the worst quality while the less price insensitive you get a marginally better product for an outsized increase in cost.
I remain convinced that while value extraction is higher in this model, the world people generally want to live in is one where the ability of businesses to price discriminate in this way is not so unbridled.
Enshittification is generally an exploitation of market efficiencies in some form, be it lock-in effects or market dominance in an area with a high barrier to entry. It's an explicit goal of a lot of investment: pick one company in an area, invest so much money into it no-one else can compete, corner the market by offering a better product than anyone else, then once you own the market, turn up the price and turn down the quality to get as much money out of it before someone builds a competitor and your customers can leave.
The best examples of enshitification are in airlines and electronics. Those are highly competitive markets where manufacturers are free to charge high prices for high quality, but they realize customers won't buy it.
