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Comment by Namrog84 | Hacker News Reader

If this turns out to be true, this does not bold well for a bright UBer future. I feel like I only hear bad things about them lately.

Anyone have any speculation as to what might happen to Uber if this turns out to be true?

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If it turns out to be a huge case ($$$$$) then I can forsee Google owning part of Uber if not outright.

Google at least at one point owned about 6-7% of the Uber[0]. They may still own that much.

[0]: https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Uber-does-Google-ow...

Google will acquire them. They already own shares from a Google venture round

Who would want to acquire a company like that. They'd have to fire all the employees and management to get rid of the bad seed.

The customer and driver network is probably substantially more valuable.

Ha. Probably 70-80% of both customers and drivers are doing business with Lyft, simultaneously. That's the rub of "contract employees".

Why crap on the employees for the lousy behaviour of the execs? You think the average programmer or office manage or designer at Uber is at fault?

The exec influence goes down to the employees. Expect most mid managers and the upper hierarchy to be modelled by the top.

Then about the bottom employees. Think a minute about what employees are left in that kind of environment and the psychological baggage they might carry.

That's silly - it's like saying you guilty of being a citizen of the US under Trump.

And about half of us are

You don't get to pick your president and you can't change it.

However you pick your job and you can leave it anytime you want.

Technically yes. Practically, no.

It isn't so much about crapping on the employees as recognizing reality. Nobody wants a piece of Uber for the office managers or designers.

Why, someone just paid a lot of money to train Uber employees on Google technology

They can rebrand it as Goober afterwards though

Problem is they did own part of Uber. They were (are?) invested in Uber.

Nobody cares about damages; the real meat is whether or not there will be an injunction. Damages could foreseeably go into the $1 billion range; an injunction would cost uber at least an order of magnitude more than that.

True, but my understanding is that an injunction in cases like this is very hard to achieve.

An injunction against what? Designing and building autonomous cars? An injunction like that might save Uber billions of dollars. I've never bought the idea they needed their own autonomous cars. Someday someone (very likely multiple someones unless our crazy patent system interferes) will build viable autonomous cars and Uber can just buy from them.

Their ultimate success will always be based on their brand and how well they provide their service. Until the last 6 months they did an amazing job at both, they had their apps on many times more phones than any competitor, and their app works amazingly well. Now they've tarnished their brand and might be losing market share, well before the market is completely built out. that's what they should be focusing on.

Some commenter on Reddit/here said that Uber doesn't have a way to profitability, self-driving is just to keep the investor money flowing in.

But the future of cars is really like servers, not ownership, but as a service, you'll just use an app to hail a self-driving car to take you anywhere. Whoever can sell their self-driving tech to car manufacturers will win, Uber probably wants to be the infrastructure that the car companies use to manage their CaaS, and if they win the self-driving first-to-market race, they can bundle their existing fleet management service as a bundle with the tech.

But if someone else wins the self-driving tech, a car manufacturer can buy that, and either self-develop their own fleet management or buy from someone else (it's a lot simpler than self-driving tech, obviously).

I struggle to understand how a service that costs pennies to deliver that earns Uber dollars from each fare can't find a path to profitability. I think people are too hung up on the awful financials they have now, and ignore the massive buildout they are doing.

And Boeing could easily compete with United and American right now, the extra costs of hiring pilots and crews are minute for them. But it doesn't make sense on many levels. I'm pretty sure car makers will focus on making the self driving tech, and sell it to customers like Uber. Uber will have to win like car rental companies do today, brand and location. If it is installed on the most phones that will winin the near term, at least until how we use our devices entirely changes.

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