Wtf?

It is completely different. Before Uber, you had to call dispatch, give them your location or your closest estimate of it: dispatch would then manually try to find a car that was available and send them to you. This usually took at least 30-40m, if they arrived at all.

With Uber, I open the app, it looks at all available cars, finds the closest one available, and sends that car to my GPS location. Oh, and if that car gets stuck in traffic, it automatically picks another car and sends that over

Uber completely revolutionized taxi services and is absolutely nothing like calling dispatch on a phone.

Totally! The one and only time that I tried to get a taxi at my house, which is in a suburb of a major metro area in the US, I was told it would be a 45 minutes wait. I waited the 45 and nobody showed and I called again. 30 more minutes. No show. Now, I can have an Uber at my door in 10 minutes and I know what it will cost.

Agreed. In SF whenever I called cabs they often wouldn't show up at all. I suppose they found a fare before they got to me. So features like ratings and assigned cars and ability to check the status added by Uber are all huge improvements for my usage.

I've not anywhere argued that it hasn't been beneficial for people, but simply that it is not innovative.

Here, Uber is just another private hire taxi. They cannot pick up random people from the street (and be insured, anyway), so they would not be picking up random other fares on the way unless the dispatcher told them to. This is what has existed for a long time before Uber appeared, so replicating that elsewhere is not innovative surely?

>I've not anywhere argued that it hasn't been beneficial for people, but simply that it is not innovative.

And that’s what’s making you look like a dolt. Taxis in most of the world were (and mostly still are) unreliable gambles that vary from city to city. Calling on the phone and waiting for 40 minutes without live tracking and automatic rerouting for when the driver decides to stop for groceries is a completely different level of usefulness.

You just compared a flip phone to a smartphone (in more ways than one).

Before Uber there was an app I could use to book a taxi. That's one of the main reasons I don't think their app was innovative.

> This usually took at least 30-40m, if they arrived at all.

Not for me, I would and still do get cars faster using other firms. Uber says they're two minutes away and they come ten minutes later.

The only reason I use Uber is I get receipts I can push to my expenses.

That's fair, but understand that your city's taxi experience isn't necessarily typical, and also that Uber has the ability to make the experience nearly identical in all markets where they operate (that alone has value). For most markets, that turns out to be higher quality than the local option, but every now and then (like in your case), the reverse is true.

I've not said they don't have value, what I've said was the app wasn't innovative. To me it cannot be because something almost identical existed before, and it isn't a huge shift from telling someone where I am.

If the innovation is being a non-terrible taxi firm, then I think I stand by my point that it's because they were big enough to ignore the local rules

do you think big hits in tech are merely the first one to code the idea? proper execution and business maneuvering are arguably more important than being the first "app to book a taxi".

> do you think big hits in tech are merely the first one to code the idea?

No. Nor have I suggested anything like that.

If they're not the first to have an app like they started with, why would you describe it as innovative?

I think their important business decisions were ignoring local rules (as I've said) and building a brand.

Hacker News about Dropbox (2007):

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"

Hacker News about Uber (2019):

"It's really not much of a shift from a phone call either"

Hasn't Dropbox lost market value every quarter since they went public while growth has been flat and operating at a loss?

I'm not saying the HN crowd didn't miss a $10B opportunity, but they also weren't exactly wrong.

Dropbox's weakening position isn't necessarily an indictment of the idea, just that they're in a tough market when you consider both Google and Apple offer (comparatively cheap) cloud storage that is well-integrated into their smartphone platforms. Also consider that the success of Google's and Apple's offerings has proved out the value of the idea many times over.

Also, Dropbox was an early mover. That worked well for them in their early days, but the consumer space is saturated by better options. Dropbox (and Box) are often better suited to enterprise use, where some of the more advanced features (that regular consumers mostly don't care about) are important.

Uber's S1 is available. They are, for sure, losing shit tons of money. And they have no reliable view into what happens to demand if you broadly raise prices. Maybe that works, maybe not. Nobody knows.

Judging by your parent's comment, HN would've been wrong to assume that the reason for Dropbox's decline is a mass movement of users towards rolling their own linux hosting stack.

10 years is the definition of wrong.

Wow, there's a lot to process here. E.g., suddenly I remember how much HN doesn't go into the nitty-gritty anymore.

You have conveniently missed that there was already an app for ordering taxis before Uber for me.

Also, yes, it's not much of a shift. I'm not arguing people rebuild it or have something together but the shift from:

Call cab firm and say where you are

to

App calls cab firm and says where you are

is not massively innovative. (edit - particularly when it has been done before)

I know it's fun and cool to be snarky, but you have clearly missed what I've said and equated it to something wildly different. Please put a little more effort in to your comments to make them more useful.

The Dropbox comment is amusing because that's a complex thing users would have to do and doesn't support what Dropbox supports. Switching from one app to another is really quite different.

To me, the innovation isn't using an app instead of a phone call, it's the accountability and reliability. Before Uber, I'd have to call a taxi company at least a half hour before I want to leave. If they even answer the call, the response is always "20 minutes", regardless of how long you have to wait. At least a quarter of the time, the taxi will never show up. As a result, I'd barely ever take taxis anywhere. Instead I'd drive my own car, which meant finding/paying for parking and ensuring continued sobriety, else planning to leave the car and likely get a parking ticket the next day. I guess one benefit of the old way is that I'd plan ahead a bit better, so if driving myself wasn't practical I'd leave extra time to take transit or walk.

If I order an Uber/Lyft, I'm nearly guaranteed a ride within a reasonable amount of time once my request is accepted. Yes, occasionally the driver will cancel and the app will find a new driver, which adds to the time. Sure, the time estimate itself is usually off by 10% or so. It's not perfect, but this experience is orders of magnitude better than it used to be. For the most part I only drive my car when I'm leaving the city or need to carry a bunch of things with me.

So the innovation for you is something that has existed elsewhere before? Why is that innovative?

...the innovation is a consistent more reliable and timely experience, consistent across geographies, where it did not exist before.

McDonalds didn’t have the first burger franchise, the innovation is very much in the reliability of an experience that is a better fit for the needs of the consumer than the alternatives.

I too avoided booking taxis due to bad dispatchers, even though I’m sure some good dispatchers existed in some areas. That doesn’t really do you any good when the use case for a taxi is generally that you need a car in a place that is not your home, and so you are unfamiliar with the area.

Uber not only gave you a reliable dispatcher, they show you with GPS that the taxi on the way, which greatly improves consumer confidence that yes, the ride really is on its way. If that existed pre-Uber for some areas, it hardly matters if you never visit the area and so don’t know about it’s existence.

> McDonalds didn’t have the first burger franchise,

So saying "the innovation is in the franchise" wouldn't make sense, right?

> That doesn’t really do you any good when the use case for a taxi is generally that you need a car in a place that is not your home, and so you are unfamiliar with the area.

The use case for a taxi is surely dominated by when you need a car but can't or don't want to drive? I've definitely taken more taxis near my home than away from it, purely because I'm here more often.

> Uber not only gave you a reliable dispatcher, they show you with GPS that the taxi on the way, which greatly improves consumer confidence that yes, the ride really is on its way. If that existed pre-Uber for some areas, it hardly matters if you never visit the area and so don’t know about it’s existence.

This seems like an odd description of innovation to me. "I didn't know about it so it's innovative"?

Remember, innovation is not the same as value. I'm not saying it doesn't add value to have these services elsewhere, but that the app is not innovative simply because it was not new.

Innovate means to make changes in a thing that is established. The innovation here is that the thing is the same everywhere, you don’t need to know the local errata to rely on it.

I say this as someone who was downright flabbergasted that the iPhone was described as “innovative.” After all, I had been using a handheld PC with full Windows installed for years when the original iPhone came out, and it could make VoIP calls just fine! It took me awhile to accept that the incremental “new” people are talking about when they talk about innovation is distinctly NOT novelty. It’s a shuffling of the already existing puzzle-pieces in a way that, in the cases it is successful, we call innovative, and when it fails, it was simply “ahead of its time.”

>The use case for a taxi is surely dominated by when you need a car but can't or don't want to drive? I've definitely taken more taxis near my home than away from it, purely because I'm here more often.

I'm sure it depends. I've never taken an Uber near my house. (I do get driven to and from the airport but I use a private car service for that.) I don't actually use Uber/Lyft (or taxis) all that much when I travel either although I've started to do so a bit more often when I found I mostly rented a car to get to/from the airport to some destination and then just have it sit.

Regarding McDonalds, correct, the innovation was not in the franchise. The innovation was in creating the corporate and logistic structures necessary that every single McDonalds, everywhere, even though owned by franchisees, would deliver pretty much the same experience.

This

> ...the innovation is a consistent more reliable and timely experience, consistent across geographies, where it did not exist before.

Call a cab and wait and pray. Get a call 30 minutes later asking if you still want a cab. Wait 20 more minutes for a cab to actually show up.

This is in a major metro. Calling for a cab sucked if you weren't in a busy area, in which case you could just walk to a major street and hail one.

They said the app was innovative, it was not to me because I already had something similar, and what you're describing has nothing to do with the app. You're just describing a not terrible taxi company, which has existed in many places far before Uber.

It seems the main thing they did was be big enough to ignore the rules that kept taxis in some parts of the US so terrible.

Not at all, their main innovation was combining pricing theory in a way that worked. They got drivers on the streets during major storms to keep wait time down. Fascinating

Wait until they hear about Amazon vs. the Sears-Roebuck catalog

I'm critical of U/L, but it's ignorant to say there hasn't been any innovation.

Back then, you had to know the phone number to call - I'd try to be diligent about keeping a taxi number in my contact list but it's invalid when I really need it when traveling in a different city.

Trying to hail a cab during a busy holiday? Good luck with that - cab splitting existed but nowhere near as frictionless as through apps + route-planning software. Plus phone calls usually didn't make it to the dispatcher during extremely busy times (walking out of a bar on new years).

Waiting for the cab? Better stay put where you are since they can't see your live location.

> I'm critical of U/L, but it's ignorant to say there hasn't been any innovation.

I won't say there's none, but there was a taxi app for me before Uber that knew where I was and let me book a taxi, that wasn't innovative.

> Back then, you had to know the phone number to call -

A benefit sure, but "being big" is not an innovation.

> Trying to hail a cab during a busy holiday? Good luck with that

Here when it's busy I can't get an Uber but I can book my local service. Uber is way less reliable here.

> route-planning software.

Every uber here uses Waze.

> Waiting for the cab? Better stay put where you are since they can't see your live location.

Hah! I've repeatedly had issues where Uber cars didn't seem to know where I was, their app put me in the middle of a lake once and I kept moving about trying to figure out where the hell I could meet the taxi because their position made no sense either. They cancelled on me and I had to chase them down a street and rebook, hoping it would connect to them.

>Every uber here uses Waze.

Swing and a miss. Op is talking about Uber’s scheduling system for assigning drivers to riders.

So I used to call the local cab company a lot when taking work trips. Problems Uber solved for me:

- Knowing my location automatically via GPS. I don't always know where I am. I'm on a street near some bar. - Knowing how long it'll take for my cab to get to me. I don't have to assume it's on its way and wait or call the operator to confirm ETA. - Paying when I don't have cash. In NZ, not all taxi cabs take cards.

It's a major shift from a phone call. Not a fan of the company but it's certainly changed things with taxi companies now investing in their own apps and Uber alternatives sprouting up.