Why is the expertise they have built up in car-hailing directly applicable to other logistics problems, and what advantage will they have going in that creates a barrier to entry for newcomers?

I think there is one answer to this for Uber, and its the same strategy Amazon stumbled into: have your "main" business be breakeven, but provide the scale needed for a pure profit business. In Amazon's case, the main business is retail and the profit center is AWS.

In Uber's case, this would look like individual ride-taking customers providing the demand to keep a critical mass of drivers on the road. This business is breakeven at best, likely slightly money-losing (sorry folks, but an increases in ride costs will quickly stamp out demand to pre-Uber days).

Then, with this "infrastructure" of drivers on the road, they can leverage it into nearly pure profit areas like last-mile delivery.

There's a huge catch, though. Amazon just has to buy new machines every 3-5 years. Uber's driver turnover is much much higher, and is absolutely killing them. All the claims of profitability are deceptive, because they assume current demand with current set of drivers; those statements do not factor in driver recruitment costs next month, or tomorrow.

Unfortunately this appears on the surface to be a structural problem. Current pay with driver-owned vehicles is probably not a long-term or full-time possibility for most candidate drivers.

Edit: to save a step, the predictable response to my objection is always, "but... self-driving cars!"

That doesn't mean that they will, of course. I have a feeling that these platform-locked services like Uber and Lyft will not be able to compete with the scalability of an open auction network.

This is the non-profit I want to invest in.

> The cloud division’s sales rose 64% to $2.57 billion. While that is less than one-tenth of Amazon’s overall revenue, AWS generated about 67% of the company’s operating income in the quarter.

That's the only interesting thing about Uber. Sure they have delusions of grandeur and they certainly have no qualms about putting out glossy marketing material extolling how they will change humanity, but today they are a taxi company.

I've heard this argument before, but how can this be taken seriously? Take DHL, or UPS - they do orders of magnitude more (in transactions) than Uber does, and I know it's not exactly the same, but I'd even argue that any parcel service is a lot more complicated than Uber. Hell, even the tiny postal service of my country ships the same amount of packages each day as Uber has rides.

The tech side of Uber is (dare I say it!) trivial (well the 'ride sharing' part, not the AV research side). It's the regulatory and plain business model angles that must be costing them.

Amazon is investigating Uber-like delivery options [1]. If they decide that there's anything there (and I'm not totally convinced that there is), they'll build the service themselves and not pay Uber for the privilege. And if the service works well for themselves, you can bet they'll open it up to other people to use for a price, as they have for all of their internal infrastructure projects.

[1] Source for this claim: I worked at Flywheel, an Uber competitor. Amazon had a program to have our drivers deliver packages, and got fairly close to acquiring us, before deciding they would rather not. This was a few years ago at this point, information is not current, and I have no idea about the present state of Flywheel, as I do not work there any more.

Two words: network effect. More drivers means more users. More users attracts more drivers. This is precisely why we have eBay and Craigslist despite them both offering, by modern standards, objectively terrible user experiences. Suffice it to say I am extremely bullish on Uber, Airbnb, etc. sticking around for a whole.

In Europe small scale transportation is as competitive as cellphone market. Hmm now I am beginning to see the problem, in US you might not understand what a competitive cellphone carrier market looks like in the first place? :) Here you can transfer numbers freely between carriers, there are usually 3-5 providers to pick from and they all compete fiercely on price, level and quality of service. Changing companies is not a mayor ordeal, merely an ~hour of work to optimize your phone bill.