Uber was not a surprise at all for me because I'd been complaining about the bloated and horrible taxicab system for many years. It was a market that was crying out for disruption. I remember in 2008 my local taxicab company had exactly two ways to hail a cab: phone or fax. They might or might not show up at the appointed time, and they'd certainly never send you any kind of updates. It cost upwards of $5 to step into the cab, and after that there were fees out the wazoo (per 1/6th mile fee, per 45 seconds fee, fee for having a bag, a fuel surcharge, a license surcharge, a regulatory recovery surcharge, and a couple others I forget). The cabs might have credit card readers but they were always broken so it was cash only. Drivers took weirdly roundabout backroads paths and always claimed it was fastest if you asked them about it, even though I knew the highway was not busy at 4am. Every single thing about the experience sucked. When they started crying later that Uber was killing their business my response was "good".
When I moved to the US in 2003, the lack of something like Uber was a surprise.
Not in the smartphone-app sense, of course (those didn't exist yet), but in the sense of regular-Joes-making-a-buck-giving-a-ride sense.
Back in Ukraine, there was no taxicab monopoly. You could hail a ride on the street simply by raising your hand - and someone would pick you up pretty fast. Some people did it for a living, some would use the extra income on the way to/from work if you were going in the same direction (not unlikely if you are standing on a major street going to downtown, for example).
The fares were unregulated and negotiated on the spot, but there was an equilibrium point for every route. (Unless you were a tourist, in which case you'll be almost surely ripped off - nothing any local would care about though).
And, of course, there was no rating system, which took away the incentives for drivers to go out of their way to maintain a nice appearance. Don't like it, don't take the ride; the next car is will stop by a minute later for you, the next passenger will be around the corner for the driver.
Other than the lack of ratings and fixed pricing, this worked like Uber works now in other aspects.
What might be surprising is that central pricing and ratings really don't make ridesharing much different from what I described. It made the system more accepted in the US, but the end result is pretty much the same: I can hail a ride anywhere from people I don't know. The system stabilizes at a price point and expected level of service.
And there's a remarkable similarity in the downsides of this system. My father made some money giving rides back in Ukraine between jobs, and while the short-term revenue looked great (compared to average monthly salaries), so much of it went into gas and maintenance that the whole gig was hardly worth it - and it took more time than a job.
This is what Uber drivers are discovering themselves right now. The ones who took out loans for their shiny cars are especially screwed.
These existed nationwide in the United States in the early days of the 20th century, until about WWII. In many cities they were called "jitneys." Some were organized enough to operate as simple, private, anonymous bus companies with fixed (but flexible) routes.
They started disappearing after WWII when most people outside the urban cores got a car, and municipal governments started taking over public transit.
These still exist in some places, but are mostly in ethnic minority communities and spread by word-of-mouth. (I know first-hand because I got hit head-on by one full of schoolchildren in the late 90's.)
It was initially a carpooling app. The original pitch was that regular drivers would just drive to their own intended location and have an ability to see people on route who wanted to go the same way. Much harder to pick that idea out as a future billion dollar company.
(I was at that conference: everything went wrong, but it was mostly super cold. Cars were stuck in slippery snow, so someone suggesting the idea of carpooling sounds odd, but I suspect anyone there would have loved to wait out the traffic inside a heated car.)
I was using VRBO a decade ago for vacations. AirBnB is more distinguished by a slick UI than business model innovation.
We still don’t know how price sensitive the average Uber customer is.
What surprised me was seeing a serious journalist like Wolf Blitzer regularly reading people's tweets on his prime time show.
“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” - Mencken (paraphrased)
http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/09/no-one-ever-went-brok...
I still remember finding it strange to see how Ashton and Demi personally wrote short messages, since every form of communication from famous people at the time were formal statements released via the press.
The one that I dismissed was Twitter. In fact I thought it was a joke when I first heard about it, something making fun of how long winded boring blog posts on services like Livejournal tended to be. I also thought Vine would be doomed to fail.