There is a massive, profitable courier business in most cities that Uber hasn't touched. And food delivery is already being explored.
Beyond that, Uber's electronic-dispatch technology has the ability to optimize garbage pick-up and drop-off; police, fire and medical resource routing; small-vehicle fleet management for sundry specialized logistics companies; and all manner of other logistical processes presently centrally dispatched like taxis were a decade ago.
Uber is burning too much cash. But real-time electronic dispatch of variously-placed resources to randomly-distributed tasks is nothing to sneeze at. It's a difficult problem due to its myriad of edge cases, and Uber seems to have reasonably solved it.
But why is it going to be Uber providing those services? What's their moat? Google has an absurd amount of live data from shivers using Google Maps or Waze as they drive around a city, if they launch a "medical resource routing" service tomorrow it'll blow Uber out of the water.
They’re actually doing it. At scale, practically everywhere.
> if [Google] launch a "medical resource routing" service tomorrow it'll blow Uber out of the water
I’m doubtful. One, it’s Google. Logistics requires lots of customer interaction. Uber isn’t great at this, but it’s better than Google.
Also, being able to theoretically do something is different from actually doing it. The problem isn’t routing. It’s knowing which tasks to bundle in what order. It’s knowing where tasks which haven’t been ordered yet are likely to emerge. It’s knowing how long a task might take. It’s knowing which tasks require what, and who is best placed to accept it. It’s mediating disputes between the various parties involved, and properly incentivising them.
That's usually said when talking about Google's free services. In my experience when you're paying them money they're very responsive.
And I'm still not sure what makes Uber's tech all that notable. They simply have more drivers than their competitors do, it stands to reason the customer experience is better.
In my experience, they're 50/50. They're also totally unreliable as a commercial partner. You don't want to outsource your logistics to Google only to learn about the service being cancelled in a press release.
I'm the admin for a company gsuite. We can certainly get a google representative on the phone, but when they can't do anything for us, it doesn't qualify as responsive.
It took like 4 meetings to get invoiced billing. They wouldn't consider disabling links on email. They like to redesign the admin UI to make things take more clicks. There is no way to merge two G Suite accounts. I don't remember my other complaint, but they told me I had a good idea, but please post it in the customer forum to see if it would get done --- I've seen what happens to ideas in the customer forum, nothing, since I frequently end up there looking for how to do reasonable things that are impossible.
If all your product does is get you from point A to point B then I don’t care if it’s Uber or BobsRideShare.
Remember, Facebook and YouTube made big losses for a while, especially after the 'exit'. YouTube outlived Vine and started putting in more intrusive ads. Facebook IPO seemed like a flop, but it went very well and they acquired all their competitors instead of outwaiting them.
Facebook lost money for 2 years, right at the start. That's it.
Courier services are high-risk operations sensitive to reliability.
My guess is Uber's network wasn't optimized for reliability then. Food delivery has similar reliability requirements, but the stakes are lower. (Failed food deliveries produce complaints. Failed courier runs produce litigation.)
At least you could try to explain how you think it is that so many are mistaken about something so elementary that it fits in two short paragraphs.
The market is not perfectly rational. It's vulnerable to hype and there's a lot of money to be made by exploiting that hype and selling before the bubble bursts.
And even longer for Uber style use cases where you need to either be able to read street signs or know the parking rules in every street around the world. Not to mention that Uber drivers rely on breaking the law eg. Stopping in non stopping areas like bus lanes. Self driving cars going to do that ?
And confused how the economics are so better for self driving cars given that they are likely to be far more expensive.
Commodities do not have network effects. In general, if you are replacing labor with capital (in the form of automation) you will not get the network effects of a two-sided market - which is basically a market failure caused by our previous inability to convert capital into labor in a manner that scales. If you are replacing a two-sided market with automation you are going to need another moat.