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