Hacker News Reader

Comment by nichochar | Hacker News Reader

It's funny to me how Lyft positions itself like the poor little underdog that deeply cares about humans. People are so susceptible to marketing it's crazy.

They provide the exact same service, and Lyft cloned most of uber's features once uber had achieved the unbelievable mindshift of changing people's behavior.

Whatever people think, in a few years if Lyft is popular enough, guess what: they too will become the "big evil capitalistic entreprise" and some new venture backed company will send a christmas email to their users telling them they love them and should all dance together on the beach.

View on HN

Neither company has any stickiness with me. By that I mean, I can switch between them willy nilly with no real affect on my life. I like to tip when my work picks up the bill, so I most often use Lyft... If either of them offered a rewards program (like frequent flyer miles) I would probably use that one exclusively. I have no idea why neither has implemented that yet.

I find this kind of strange, given that both of them seem to be sinking massive amounts of money into subsidizing rides. Like, they're going to be all about user retention when people are only going to care about which option is cheapest. Google, or somebody, is gonna come in and mop up on the ecosystem they've created. They won't even have this huge ethical problem of laying off thousands of drivers.

Because its still about building an overall market for Uber to capitalize on later. Lyft is burning through their own VC money helping Uber build that mass with little possibility of actually beating out Uber in the long run.

Not aquiring Lyft was such a masterful move that I completely missed at the time.

FYI Capital One Quicksilver gets a free $15 credit after every 9 rides (it was 20% back last year, pretty great.)

Also if you link SPG you'll get 1 Starpoint per $2 spent on Uber (2/$1 when staying at a SPG hotel).

Unfortunately when I ride for work I have to use my company Amex, so I get no benefits... Maybe my situation is weird so they have not bothered making a program for people like me. It works well for the airlines and hotels though because while I do not spend my money, I can decide WHERE I will spend it.

Bummer, the Starpoints are earned no matter the payment card but may not work if you are using the Uber for business thing where you charge it to the company's account rather than their card directly.

Something like 2k points will get you a night in a low category Sheraton, 20k will get you the W in Singapore.

To be fair, either Uber copied the idea of ride sharing from lyft or both copied it from sidecar. Uber wasn't the first.

Zimride (Zimmer founder of Lyft) started the first carpooling site. I used it many times to offer rides to Tahoe.

Uber started their service with black cars.

Later Sidecar started the first service to allow non taxi/black car drivers the ability to drive their car and pick up passengers.

BlaBlaCar was first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlaBlaCar

Who is the first doesn't matter. Who does it best, though? That is the real question.

Unless they're perfect substitutes with no meaningful network effects, in which case the real question is: who is cheapest?

touche!

Edit: Well, I slightly disagree. Even if the product doesn't require mass-adoption to be useful, it could surely benefit from branding/marketing and viral adoption to make it the desired product, in which case, it does still depend on who does all of that better. Even if Starbucks or Macbooks are more expensive, they have won their audience and increased their effective marketing force.

availabiity might be the killer feature here. Who has more drivers and can get them faster to the customers?

Whoever does it better.

Evil Microsoft, Virtuous Apple

And Thiel and Ichaan, both Trump supporters, have massive stakes in...

Lyft.

Lol, a $5.5B company not "big evil capitalistic enterprise" for you?

So that I understand, if you were at the head of a $1bb company, would it by default become "evil"? Further, do you feel that capitalism is intrinsically bad?

You forgot some details... dancing on the beach naked banging on bongo drums and singing Kum ba yah.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com