Yes, and I think that's the problem. The infrastructure is actually a cost for Uber. It's better to have less infrastructure. I have sometimes the feeling the infrastructure team at Uber is trying to build the tower of Babel to touch the heavens or something rather than considering that the end goal is giving people rides and not building more infrastructure.

I think people should recognise that the taxi market has an advantage. It's a distributed system and a market. Taxis organise themselves.

If you're going to replace an entire market with a centrally planned system and a giant electricity and compute eating machine then you better have something to show for it in terms of efficiency.

Exactly. It's like measuring the success of building an airplane by how much it weights.

What's especially interesting to me here is how the landscape has changed since Uber launched 10 years ago. In 2010, you legitimate had to build a lot of your own stuff; at that point Amazon hadn't even launched SNS or Redshift. [1] Docker didn't exist. Etc, etc.

So the question for me isn't, "Can Uber justify their apparently large infrastructure?" It's more, "If somebody started an Uber competitor today, how much of the work could they get from open source, PaaS, and SaaS providers?"

A really interesting question indeed. While Docker containers are a blessing from many perspectives, their orchestration is far from easy (yes k8s I am looking at you). Another consideration of a CTO, when choosing buy vs build, would be the cloud vendor lock-in and pricing consideration. Big cloud vendors may be a good offering for startups, when you need to move fast, growth is more important than margin and vendor lock-in is not an issue. However, as you grow, these things become increasingly important. Just to provoke some constructive thinking, I urge you to consider what businesses would become possible if running cost of IT & online payments equaled zero :)

But their competitors like Bolt have figured it out and can do it cheaper.

They won't survive this pandemic..

"anywhere in the world" being the challenging part. If you're think about it from the perspective of a local taxi company, sure, it doesn't make sense. If you're a global service then it's probably different.

There's no such thing as a "global" taxi service. All cabs are local.

The only people who care about being able to use the same app in Bangalore that they do in Palo Alto are Uber investors and a tiny handful of globetrotting Davosians too lazy to install a new app or send an SMS.

Yes but there are plenty of people interested in having the same service in both Bangalore, Bombay and Ahmadabad, all three cities are quite far but people (including me) regularly travel between them. The local laws are completely different, but I don't have to worry about it. I know uber has figured out the cheapest fare, most convenient route from traffic conditions and the safest driver. If you think its a trivial thing or its somehow not needed then you are kidding yourself.

Also one thing I find is that taxis can be pretty dodgy depending on where you are. They're OK in my neck of the woods, but I've had some overseas that made me uncomfortable. I'd rather go with Uber.

Agreed. I do the same circuit (AMD/BOM/BLR) on a regular (read almost monthly) basis, and the ability to stick with ola or uber is a blessing that eliminates so much friction when I'm travelling!

I've never heard of "Ola" so it sounds to me like you're agreeing that a sub-global cab company in fact serves you fine.

Ola operates in 250 cities, that is pretty global I would say. Also it is the second choice for everyone I know and it is reflected in the fact that it operates in only 58 cities in India and still commands over 50% of the total market share.

edit: removed the royal we

The cabs themselves might be local cars driven by local people but in this instance the rides are being requested and serviced by the same infrastructure globally. That's a taxi company that has operations globally. The customers only travel locally but the company isn't limited to one geographic region.