I see this argument a lot, but Uber is spending a lot to effectively lower the barrier of entry/switching by eliminating legal restrictions and changing people's expectation of car services. If I were at Uber, I'd be very worried about customers and/or drivers switching allegiances en masse.

They've tried

http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/19/technology/innovationnation/...

https://www.insideretail.com.au/blog/2014/08/26/uber-deliver...

Seeing how those articles are from 2014 and we're not currently reading glowing reviews of direct-from-store Uber deliveries, my guess is that their unit economics didn't work out.

Amazon and others are trying this with food delivery, package handling, etc, and either the industry is smaller than the newcomers think it is (food delivery) or the industry is already so low cost that it can't be scaled well unless you have a certain amount of volume consistently transiting your infrastructure, which Amazon and DHL have been unable to hit nearly anywhere.

DHL at this point is just for same day business deliveries (where they have done an excellent job too!) and Amazon is just trying to break even on this being their own shipping company business, which is not going very well.

And in the mean time, us consumers get to take advantage of ridiculous free same-day shipping on low-ish cost items, get cheap taxi rides in many places, etc etc.

How do you dominate a market that is :

* with a very low entry cost since anyone car develop the same software that you do now that it's been tested and proven

* extremely highly regulated so you're highly dependent on government's good will

* live in a world where competition is a religion

> with a very low entry cost since anyone car develop the same software that you do now that it's been tested and proven

Cloning the current state of UBER is a really hard task. Anyone cloning them must invest in building brand, convincing drivers and building everything else. Not trivial and all + very expensive to do. UBER is much more than a few UI widgets in a native app. They have 8000 engineers. Do you think they sit all day around and play Doom?

> extremely highly regulated so you're highly dependent on government's good will

True, but they seem to get away with it in most countries. Many old businesses were unregulated for a time being 100 years ago.

> live in a world where competition is a religion

Still, close-to-monopolies exists. Google currently dominates search in world where competition is religion.

Edit: 2000 engineers and 8000 repos

http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/10/12/lessons-learned-f...