Was WeWork Ever Going to Work?

Re:Was WeWork Ever Going to Work? by thanatos_dem on Saturday October 05, 2019 @11:10AM (#21165940)

Did you take a taxi any time before uber came along? Unless you’re in a major city (NY, LA, London), or are somewhere like an airport, you’d need to call them, potentially hours in advance in rural areas, and organize a pick up. Knowing if you should tip or not was always confusing, the fares were expensive, and you had no real way to address grievances against the driver, unless they do something illegal and get pulled over.

Nowadays, almost every taxi company has an app, which emulates all the same functionality as Uber. Uber’s way of changing the world was one of user experience and logistics. Not the actual transportation, which as you call out, existed long before.

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Re:Was WeWork Ever Going to Work? by wpietri on Sunday October 06, 2019 @09:50AM (#21171993)

Sure. Uber definitely did better taxi dispatch. But if Kalanick had kept working on Red Swoosh, does anybody really believe taxi dispatch today would be just like it was in 2005?

I'd say no. The cab industry was already tracking vehicle GPS circa 2005: http://www.taxi-library.org/mccurdy.htm

Google Maps Android launched in 2008. It doesn't take a genius to say, "What if..." And people did. Like this 2010 paper about experiments with Java apps to do taxi dispatch in Singapore: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/dddc/21e65523932240164d2bb4...

So people are giving Uber credit for something that would have happened anyhow. And they're doing that because Kalanick was the one most willing to burn money and break laws, not because he was such a creative genius.

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