To reiterate, I wish Uber to change. I don't wish them to fail.
Employees yes, drivers not so much. There's plenty of competitors that would love to fill that hole.
> and it would burn a lot investors, thus negatively affecting the funding landscape for years to come.
Maybe letting investors know that company culture of how people are treated has real negative consequences would signal to them that they should pressure these companies to behave in an appropriate manner. Burning investors for ignoring the writing on the wall about Uber's behavior (there's been indications of problematic behavior of executives for years) is exactly what needs to happen.
maybe voters will learn this too?
i was about to say that these events could make for a great teaching moment, but these are lessons we've been given many many many chances to learn. i'll settle for us once again avoiding eating ourselves alive as a species, and hopefully we avoid eating some scapegoat subset of us alive while we're at it.
Silicon valley alums of a top tech company are not going to be hurting for jobs in the near future.
It sets the example that bullshit like this is not workable and will bring you down. There are no net downsides to uber falling.
Maybe in the US. Elsewhere (e.g. Toronto), it's Uber or taxi.
In fact there are many smaller startups that keep coming and going. Bikes, autos, cabs. In fact there was a bus startup too that failed just because it didn't have money to play against the system.
There are rumours of a huge business house (with pretty much endless supply of money and extremely easy access to the central Govt - in fact the PM on a personal level) entering the market.
They brought a very Wall Street-esque aggressively cheat your way into becoming too big to fail, at any cost attitude into software. They were chummy with top-dollar lobbyists to get around pesky small-town regulations and unions. Some of those entrenched interests were bad, but even in defeating them, they weren't precisely taking from the rich and giving to the poor either.
The grass is always greener, but they do not resemble software heroes like Carmack or Stallman or (idiosyncratic pick) Newmark at all. When it comes to anti-authoritarianism and civil disobedience, I think Snowden not Kalanick. Even if you want a Randian libertarian, Jimmy Wales over Travis Kalanick.
Uber's endgame is self-driving cars, which will put a lot more good people (Uber drivers and non-Uber drivers) out of a job. That's only feasible because of Uber's aggressive attitude to growth and crushing competition in long-term-unsustainable ways in the hope that the technology will materialize soon. If they change enough that this isn't their endgame or they don't pull it off in time, I don't know if they're financially viable.
I think that that goal and that pressure is part of why Uber is as rotten as it is (see how HR repeatedly doesn't want to fire abusive people who are allegedly high performers; even if the rest of their team would do better without them, Uber can't afford to figure that out).
Meanwhile, if they fail outright, it seems like basically all Uber drivers also drive for Lyft, and the engineering staff can get good jobs at lots of other places. It'll also be a good precedent for future companies not to try the strategy Uber has, and hopefully prevent more problems along these lines.