Aggregators and Jobs-to-be-Done

stratechery.com

30 points·bun_at_work··5 comments

After a few chaotic weeks/months the bicycles for rent disappeared from Vienna.

Now we got Birds and Lymes everywhere. How come they popped up at the same time? Looks suspicious to me. Do they want to create the illusion of choice?

Anyways, I see broken and beeping scooters everywhere. At night, I see a teenager collecting 10 of them at a time and recharging them in a storage renting store. Is he "stealing" the storage electricity? Have you ever seen someone drive on 10 scooters at once.

This gag economy is hilarious and I wonder when the rollers will disappear again.

It doesn’t matter how many words people write and how many times they say “disruption” Uber is still just a taxi company.

It's really not. Its closer to a sms app or craigslist and a payment processor. Its a communication app two people use to find each other.

I really want to agree with the GP post — it’s the classic business school formulation after all — but you are right.

The nuance I would add is that to the end user Uber is an alternative to a taxi (fits the ecological niche better for the wealthy customers). However your formulation is correct for the drivers, and most importantly for the investors. It has an economy of scale that taxi companies done.

And there’s the “for the wealthy customers” part: taxis have to serve pretty much everyone by law in most places. Uber drivers are free to not pick up customers in neighborhoods they don’t want to. Which is why I can get an Uber at 4 am in Palo Alto but not in Queens.

No it's not. The user communicates with Uber. The driver communicates with Uber. Uber matches the two. Uber charges the user for the fare. There is not even a little bit of peer to peer activity going on.

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