I'd like the think that eventually karma will catch up with Uber. Hard to think of a single positive thing to say about the company.
An UberX costs $24.30 right now and UberPool costs $14.30 right now. Additionally, I can summon the ride more easily and get better feedback about the arrival time, giving me more confidence/less anxiety that I'll have a problem getting to the airport on time.
As a consumer, by reducing my cost by 50-70% while providing a marginally better service, I can readily find one thing positive to say about the company.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/technology/uber-investmen...
It may even be viewed as a plus, influencing an American company to adopt Saudi values.
Meaning, more ethical investors (also known as: Board Members) might say "We need to do something about this."
any investor or board member whonis aware of the type of activity mentioned by OP would shut it down fast. their first responsibility is to protect the company, especially one about to go public, and that doesn't happen when you're getting sued repeatedly for hostile work environment and/or sexual harassment.
VC's aren't trying for all of their portfolio companies to be profitable - they're trying to fund 1 company that is going to be uber profitable. There's a saying from the dot com investment days - you either invested in Google or you didn't.
If your only concern is the sticker price, then that is a ethical choice that you're certainly entitled to make, but that also necessarily involves a choice not to account for what goes into that sticker price (parallels with e.g. Walmart), and thus is a pretty limited principle. Possibly limited to the degree that it is actually merely self-serving.
They've raised over $10B...
Just to take one example, Uber doesn't pay the same taxes as taxi companies. Localities will be losing out collectively on a lot of revenue. Aren't you affected if your city has to raise taxes to compensate?
Uber is proving that car service is not a natural monopoly. If the dominant provider is taking too many liberties with pricing, someone else will come in to right the market.
I didn't intend to start a massive defense of Uber subthread, but to say there's no single thing positive about Uber I thought was a substantial overstatement.
This is complete nonsense. Car services have never been a monopoly, natural or otherwise; in every major city there have always been multiple car services. Uber's valuation is premised almost completely on the hope/expectation that they can become a monopoly and start exploiting their market position to the detriment of everyone.
Seriously, check out the Naked Capitalism series linked above. It lays out in great detail why Uber is not in any way an example of someone "coming in to right the market". They're wronging the market.
Uber is losing money, believing they can make it up later somehow (presumably self-driving cars, possibly by taking a cut of a substantial percentage of the car service rides).
That's participating in the market, not wronging it, IMO.
As soon as Uber tries to become a monopoly, and raise prices, then Taxi cabs can start right back up again, and take back the market with lower prices.
Or ANOTHER VC company can come in, and subsidize prices, and knock Uber out.
As soon as Uber attempts to exploit the market, they are dead.
Except the twenty gazillion dollars you need to get started anyway, and the fifty ga-jillion dollar incumbent you're stacked against who already, again, has leveraged their death grip on the market -- which is presumably why you were becoming a competitor at all, right? To fight that?
The comparison with YouTube doesn't work, because videos are not fungible. If there's a video you want to see, and that video is on YouTube, your choice is to use YouTube or not see it. If there's a place you want to go, you can use any transportation service that covers the area.
I'm having trouble thinking of a good comparison, because there aren't many markets that are this easy to enter. Maybe house cleaning would fit. If Homejoy had taken off, would there be any fear of it abusing a monopoly position, when anyone can trivially enter the market and compete on their level?
It'd probably be leases, rather than sales - selling property gives the buyer more rights, which would make that sort of EULA problematic. Might be able to side-step it by a combination of forbidding commercial ride-sharing in order to keep the self-driving system up to date along with requiring up-to-date self-driving software to be road-legal.
If one company refuses to sell self driving cars to consumers/upstart ride sharing companies, then that means that ANOTHER self driving car company can makes 10s of billions of dollars by ignoring this rule.
Do you really think that not a single one of the multitude of self driving car companies would break the collusion agreement, if there is 10s of billions of dollars on the line?