Lyft's Nice-Guy Strategy Leaves It Struggling to Catch Uber | Hacker News Reader

Lyft's Nice-Guy Strategy Leaves It Struggling to Catch Uber

nytimes.com

38 pointsmsoad43 comments

>"We were trying to figure out a way to reward Lyft for having better business practices and not violating our laws,"

You shouldn't need to particularly reward businesses for not breaking the law, surely. You should be able to punish those that break the law sufficiently harshly that breaking the law is not profitable.

On a different note, I wonder what the requirements are for a distributed marketplace. Extremely similar things are regularly built, is there enough common in the area of "request quotes/bids for services/items, set time limit, pick one" to become just an open protocol? I guess the harder parts would be dispute management and reputation, though they don't seem like impossible hurdles.

Heresy. Anything affecting Uber is useless red tape.

The fact that this is even uttered is troubling, a business shouldn't be able to intimidate any form of government so easily that the basic premises law and order gets skewed.

>>You shouldn't need to particularly reward businesses for not breaking the law, surely. You should be able to punish those that break the law sufficiently harshly that breaking the law is not profitable.

This point is very important. But why do we see people tempting to reward businesses which do not break law?

Because, we seldom see the ones breaking the law getting punished severely. What happened to Volkswagen? The CEO didn't even get the proverbial slap on the wrist, instead he got fucking multi-million dollars in reward! Was Volkswagen forced out of business? Hell no. What happened to Goldman Sachs and other such criminals? Nothing serious. Uber is getting free ride by breaking laws. What happened to it? Nothing.

So, people tend to think that way. Beyond that this is a very serious threat to free and open market economy and even the western democracies. As this is used by the covert and overt opponents and enemies of western free market economy based democracy to push forward their communist (or other equally bad ism) propaganda. It reminds me all that 99% vs 1% propaganda.

And unless, this is fixed, I guess, many general people in the western world will continue to fall prey to their vicious propaganda.

How is it propaganda if all that you said it's true? With all your fear mongering ideas of communism, you can't blame them for capitalism own weakness. Karl Marx[1] predicted this and that's why he postulated that capitalism would prey on itself. Everyone who tried to warn about this weakness and every call to fix this (just like your comment) was dismissed as communist and enemy of the western world. Communist might be a bad idea, but not everything should be treated "vicious propaganda".

[1]: Born in Prussia, part of the Western world AFAIK.

>>How is it propaganda if all that you said it's true?

That's a good question as it raises a very important point, namely, the weakness of capitalism. But what I think is this weakness of capitalism can and must be tackled from within the capitalism. Sadly, at this moment, at least in the US we are not seeing any serious efforts being done in this direction.

>>With all your fear mongering ideas of communism...

Time and again, communism and Marxism have demonstrated how vicious these ideas are: e.g. the mass killings and suffering of people in China, Russia. See these [1], [2].

The fear is not baseless, whereas the "free market economy based democracy" has been seen to be the best societal structure ever existed. I don't mean it can't be made better but that improvement can certainly not be brought by turning to Marxism [3].

>>but not everything should be treated "vicious propaganda"

I agree with you to some extent here as not everything should be treated "vicious propaganda". (That's why I upvoted it.)

But it can be seen clearly that communists and Marxists are trying to take advantage of such things by creating "propaganda" items like 99% vs 1%; and trying to sway the public opinion in their favor. This is vicious because they are trying to portrait everyone within the top 1% to be vicious while demanding "free rides" (in the Marxist style) for everyone within the 99%, whereas we can see that only some people at the extreme top are doing somethings wrong. And thus with such propaganda these people are trying to kill the very "free market economy based democracy" itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Marxism

Alot of people in this thread talking about how they won't use Uber for whatever reason. Those are the minority of opinion.

More people will use ride services when they are cheaper. Rides are a commodity. You will get there just as much with Uber as with Lyft. It doesn't make that big of a difference to most people. It's like the level of luxury in a car. I'm sure it's rare to find people not taking a Lyft or an Uber because the car didn't have leather seats.

I'm a daily user (to and from work, carless for over 18 months now) and I use the cheapest option. Historically it was Uber. Checked and for the past 4 months or so, it's be Lyft so I switched. Now it's back to Uber because of one reason, price.

The drivers on Lyft seem a bit happier and nicer but, it doesn't really make that much of a difference. I'm not using a car service for the quality of a 10 minute conversation with a random stranger that I'll never see again.

Funny. I'm exactly the opposite.

I use Lyft only because it is nicer. If I cared about the price, I wouldn't use either. I don't shop at Walmart for similar reasons.

Ultimately, I think that payoff from being nicer is with the drivers, not the consumers. How it plays out is going to depend on which side of the market is the limiting factor on growth.

I'm a pretty loyal Lyft user primarily because of the "nice" reputation and because when I ask drivers they usually tell me they like driving for Lyft better (even though they almost universally drive for both). I've only taken a few uber rides and they were all noticeably less comfortable.

> It doesn't make that big of a difference to most people.

It'll be interesting to see whether it starts to make more of a difference. Rides may be a commodity now, but so was coffee until Starbucks made people "feel good" about drinking over-priced burned coffee. Kimmel did a funny bit on this: https://youtu.be/HxlGI4OzeBk

If Uber has an Achilles heel it's branding. I like and use both Uber and Lyft, but every time you see Uber in the news it's because cabbies are rioting in some European city or because a driver sexually assaulted someone. Their recent logo redesign was cringe-worthy. It's all bad optics. Not sure that will ever make a difference, but history has shown that consumers are stupidly open to "feeling good" about their consumption, so we'll see.

I use Uber because it's the only good cab company in Europe.

That seems like a bit of a generalization considering Europe contains about 50 different countries.

Quite a lot of which have pretty much the same level of service (apps included) and are also legal.

In Poland I prefer cabs to Uber. Worse apps, but far better cars, and they can get anywhere. The wait times and reliability is similar.

For me the difference is a tie-breaker. I'll use Lyft if the customer experience is the same. So far it isn't, the app is more glitchy and it seems like it does a worse job of picking drivers that are nearby and giving them directions. I check in with it every couple times and if they fix it I'll switch.

Having a competitor so hot on your heels seems like a damper to Uber investors ultimate theory that they'll be able to exploit market dominance. I don't see how Uber ever can get to a point where it can extract a ton of consumer surplus.

5 days ago: Lyft gaining on Uber as it spends big on growth (sfgate) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11509461

Today: Lyft's Nice-Guy Strategy Leaves It Struggling to Catch Uber (nytimes)

Confusing world.

They are both propaganda pieces. The first was paid for by lyft, the second by Uber.

PG wrote an essay about this type of thing, but I can't seem to find it right now

Yup, I thought it was worth pointing it out. re: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Why don't journalistic ethics require you to disclose when a propagandist basically wrote your piece for you?

The story does't quite match the headline. The take-away seems to be that in the face of a substantially better resourced competitor, Lyft is holding its own and even gaining, in large part due simply to happier constituents.

It's interesting that these two companies are so competitive that they can't even work together in trying to win over regulators. Doing so would likely be mutually beneficial by increasing the size of the pie. Evidently it will require an even bigger threat, such as the one DraftKings and FanDuel face, to bring them together in common cause. I just feel like this rivalry has become overly personal.

I use Lyft (as a rider) exclusively, and have never been picked up by a driver who did not also have an Uber phone on their dash.

In SF it's quite different. Many Lyft drivers only drive for Lyft and those with both badges on the window typically favor one service.

I don't understand how that's possible. I thought Uber was about big expensive black cars with drivers in suits, and Lyft was about regular people giving you a lift in their hatchback. I've never take a Lyft, but I can't imagine the Ubers I've been in putting a pink moustache on their top-of-the-range Mercedes.

That is uberBLACK. Most rides are UberX

I knew about UberX but I thought that was just a side-project. I always thought Uber's tagline was 'your personal driver' and all the photos on the website used to be black cars.

Nah, at this point, UberX is Uber's main business, and is generally what people mean when they say they're "taking an Uber".

Uberblack is the side project at this point. The big money is in the majority of people that need to get from point X to Y cheaply.

You're a bit out of date.

I really hope that Uber goes under one day.

You are entitled to your opinion, but I am curious as to why you would say that. Based on business / ethical practices, or is it something else?

Not the same guy, but I feel like Uber is a pretty cutthroat company, and they are probably not an example of a sustainable model in a more freelance/gig based economy. I like that they're paving the way for a new way of doing things and I use them almost exclusively here in London.

I wouldn't say I want Uber to go under, I really don't. But if another company like Lyft can do it in a way I feel is more ethical, I would easily switch over.

In 2016, how exactly do you think Uber is unethical? I find the idea that trying to disrupt taxi monopolies as unethical is ridiculous. And sure they had some shady shenanigans back in 2013-2014 (as did Lyft), but that hasn't been the case since then. What have they done recently that is unethical?

For one, they keep on slashing prices making it very, very hard for drivers to make a living.

I'm not that bothered by them personally, but I would rather see these international taxi brands gone. They take away income and entrepreneurship from local economies.

The world is slowly becoming a boring homogeneous place run by multinational brands. It's like fast food outlets, coffee shops and so on, most of them are run from another country and look exactly the same - there's no character.

I feel you. I moved to Seoul, South Korea a few months ago, a city of many thousands of coffeeshops. Among the natives, Starbucks is really popular -- meanwhile I go out of my way to avoid going there, because it's frustrating to move 8500km and not feel the distance traveled after putting the effort into it. The rising popularity of IKEA, which arrived in Korea about two years ago, is concerning for the same reason.

It's really not about naively craving exoticism (which inevitably wears off anyway), it's just a desire for an environmental confirmation of a major life change, the absence of which is psychologically disconcerting.

Luckily there's still a boatload of little unique, charming. non-chain coffeeshops to go to, too.

If there's one thing I really missed during my time in Korea, it'd probably be Ikea. There's just no good alternative.

You can always play gmarket roulette ...

I'm hoping for Uber and Lyft to take over the world and put the traditional taxi companies out of business completely, to the extent that I dislike going to places where Uber isn't present.

Most recent example - Athens, Greece, where a 15 minute ride to the airport is 50 euro, in a stinky old cab, with driver not speaking English. I've already contributed a couple k to your economy, but you still need to fleece me on my airport ride? Will be avoiding that country in the future.

Sometimes it's really nice to see a multinational corporation. They can help reduce corruption and set higher standards for all sorts of things. Yeah, they sometimes displace local entrepreneurs, but the consumers generally benefit (though there are some downsides for consumers as well).

If you travel enough, everything starts to look the same, whether it's a multinational corporation or some local character.

Completely on their lack of ethics. There are far too many to recount.

If Lyft ever expands to Australia, I will make a concerted effort to use them over Uber.

I have only been using Uber for about a year, and haven't given Lyft a try because my credit card gives me 20% cash back on uber. That promotion ends soon, so I will probably try Lyft then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com