I don't understand. Software has ultimate economies of scale. Also, they're not paying Uber a fixed cost, they're strictly subsidizing the ride. They can opt out at any time, if I'm reading the article correctly.
> Uber has a lot of expenses and complexity to handle corner cases that will never occur in this town – outsourcing is wasteful. That’s like building a heating system into a house in Phoenix.
One of us is misunderstanding the point of software. Just because you're not using certain capabilities doesn't mean you're charged extra for them. To your point, did you waste money by buying your IDE if you don't use each and every feature, because outsourcing your dev environment is "wasteful"?
But you are.
Such a system for a small town doesn’t need native apps, it doesn’t need to look beautiful.
You can use a single PhoneGap app for all OSes, also the same on the web.
You can avoid the entire payment infrastructure, and have riders pay the drivers directly. Alternatively, use Square, and you won’t have to make your own payment system either way.
A lot of uber’s costs only appear at huge scale.
This town doesn’t need uber, it needs a simple ride sharing service like every town in the second or third world has – and those even work without any app.
Explain that last bit. Economies of scale work very well for software. Whenever there's a new security patch or a feature that Uber implements, you get it for free if you use Uber as a platform, in that you don't pay any additional cost. Also, you don't need to pay money for maintenance/servers.
At this point I'm not quite sure if you're trolling or not. That'd be like advocating that a town's government use a home-coded text editor instead of Microsoft Word, because you don't need any of that fancy stuff that you get for no incremental cost.
If anyone of you is a city and wants that: Email me under the address in my profile.
That's not a valid point. You're subsidizing a good. That's like me saying that since I'm willing to buy my friend a beer, then beer is free.
Development time is most definitely not free, and neither is software update, ops, or support. Things that Uber gives for free.
Just a lot smaller in scope. See Mercedes' ridesharing offering in the EU, it's exactly that.
Only a few dozen devs, yet cheaper than Uber, with similar features.
Uber has already built an app. The city is subsidizing people for transportation. There is no more software development that needs to be done.
You comparing cheaper services to Uber is like comparing a large industrial farm to a local farm. Sure, the industrial farm costs more, but you're not paying for it. You're just paying for food stamps.
Why would you duplicate effort that already exists?
I don't see any way this discussion can continue in a useful way like that.
That said, you're not the only one - although it might also be due to the SV mindset.
> Why would you duplicate effort that already exists?
Because it's cheaper.
I have single-time costs to pay for developing such a system, and afterwards minor maintenance costs.
Or I can pay every year for Uber, and create high profits for their investors for them to build golden castles. If an investor makes profit from taxes, something's already gone wrong.
You're still suggesting an economy based on leasing, but that's not affordable in the long term.
That’s a good argument. Especially once economics of scale come into play.
But that’s not the case in this example. The government is outsourcing something that would be massively cheaper if purpose-built for their town.
Uber has a lot of expenses and complexity to handle corner cases that will never occur in this town – outsourcing is wasteful. That’s like building a heating system into a house in Phoenix.