I had local services with an app before Uber, I'm sure. It's really not much of a shift from a phone call either.
But then, all Uber cars are the same as private hire cans anyway here.
It seems like the real innovation was being big enough to ignore the local rules. That and being able to say it's "ride sharing" with a straight face.
It is completely different. Before Uber, you had to call dispatch, give them your location or your closest estimate of it: dispatch would then manually try to find a car that was available and send them to you. This usually took at least 30-40m, if they arrived at all.
With Uber, I open the app, it looks at all available cars, finds the closest one available, and sends that car to my GPS location. Oh, and if that car gets stuck in traffic, it automatically picks another car and sends that over
Uber completely revolutionized taxi services and is absolutely nothing like calling dispatch on a phone.
Here, Uber is just another private hire taxi. They cannot pick up random people from the street (and be insured, anyway), so they would not be picking up random other fares on the way unless the dispatcher told them to. This is what has existed for a long time before Uber appeared, so replicating that elsewhere is not innovative surely?
And that’s what’s making you look like a dolt. Taxis in most of the world were (and mostly still are) unreliable gambles that vary from city to city. Calling on the phone and waiting for 40 minutes without live tracking and automatic rerouting for when the driver decides to stop for groceries is a completely different level of usefulness.
You just compared a flip phone to a smartphone (in more ways than one).
> This usually took at least 30-40m, if they arrived at all.
Not for me, I would and still do get cars faster using other firms. Uber says they're two minutes away and they come ten minutes later.
The only reason I use Uber is I get receipts I can push to my expenses.
If the innovation is being a non-terrible taxi firm, then I think I stand by my point that it's because they were big enough to ignore the local rules
No. Nor have I suggested anything like that.
If they're not the first to have an app like they started with, why would you describe it as innovative?
I think their important business decisions were ignoring local rules (as I've said) and building a brand.
"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"
Hacker News about Uber (2019):
"It's really not much of a shift from a phone call either"
I'm not saying the HN crowd didn't miss a $10B opportunity, but they also weren't exactly wrong.
Also, Dropbox was an early mover. That worked well for them in their early days, but the consumer space is saturated by better options. Dropbox (and Box) are often better suited to enterprise use, where some of the more advanced features (that regular consumers mostly don't care about) are important.
Also, yes, it's not much of a shift. I'm not arguing people rebuild it or have something together but the shift from:
Call cab firm and say where you are
to
App calls cab firm and says where you are
is not massively innovative. (edit - particularly when it has been done before)
I know it's fun and cool to be snarky, but you have clearly missed what I've said and equated it to something wildly different. Please put a little more effort in to your comments to make them more useful.
The Dropbox comment is amusing because that's a complex thing users would have to do and doesn't support what Dropbox supports. Switching from one app to another is really quite different.
If I order an Uber/Lyft, I'm nearly guaranteed a ride within a reasonable amount of time once my request is accepted. Yes, occasionally the driver will cancel and the app will find a new driver, which adds to the time. Sure, the time estimate itself is usually off by 10% or so. It's not perfect, but this experience is orders of magnitude better than it used to be. For the most part I only drive my car when I'm leaving the city or need to carry a bunch of things with me.
McDonalds didn’t have the first burger franchise, the innovation is very much in the reliability of an experience that is a better fit for the needs of the consumer than the alternatives.
I too avoided booking taxis due to bad dispatchers, even though I’m sure some good dispatchers existed in some areas. That doesn’t really do you any good when the use case for a taxi is generally that you need a car in a place that is not your home, and so you are unfamiliar with the area.
Uber not only gave you a reliable dispatcher, they show you with GPS that the taxi on the way, which greatly improves consumer confidence that yes, the ride really is on its way. If that existed pre-Uber for some areas, it hardly matters if you never visit the area and so don’t know about it’s existence.
So saying "the innovation is in the franchise" wouldn't make sense, right?
> That doesn’t really do you any good when the use case for a taxi is generally that you need a car in a place that is not your home, and so you are unfamiliar with the area.
The use case for a taxi is surely dominated by when you need a car but can't or don't want to drive? I've definitely taken more taxis near my home than away from it, purely because I'm here more often.
> Uber not only gave you a reliable dispatcher, they show you with GPS that the taxi on the way, which greatly improves consumer confidence that yes, the ride really is on its way. If that existed pre-Uber for some areas, it hardly matters if you never visit the area and so don’t know about it’s existence.
This seems like an odd description of innovation to me. "I didn't know about it so it's innovative"?
Remember, innovation is not the same as value. I'm not saying it doesn't add value to have these services elsewhere, but that the app is not innovative simply because it was not new.
I say this as someone who was downright flabbergasted that the iPhone was described as “innovative.” After all, I had been using a handheld PC with full Windows installed for years when the original iPhone came out, and it could make VoIP calls just fine! It took me awhile to accept that the incremental “new” people are talking about when they talk about innovation is distinctly NOT novelty. It’s a shuffling of the already existing puzzle-pieces in a way that, in the cases it is successful, we call innovative, and when it fails, it was simply “ahead of its time.”
I'm sure it depends. I've never taken an Uber near my house. (I do get driven to and from the airport but I use a private car service for that.) I don't actually use Uber/Lyft (or taxis) all that much when I travel either although I've started to do so a bit more often when I found I mostly rented a car to get to/from the airport to some destination and then just have it sit.
> ...the innovation is a consistent more reliable and timely experience, consistent across geographies, where it did not exist before.
This is in a major metro. Calling for a cab sucked if you weren't in a busy area, in which case you could just walk to a major street and hail one.
It seems the main thing they did was be big enough to ignore the rules that kept taxis in some parts of the US so terrible.
Back then, you had to know the phone number to call - I'd try to be diligent about keeping a taxi number in my contact list but it's invalid when I really need it when traveling in a different city.
Trying to hail a cab during a busy holiday? Good luck with that - cab splitting existed but nowhere near as frictionless as through apps + route-planning software. Plus phone calls usually didn't make it to the dispatcher during extremely busy times (walking out of a bar on new years).
Waiting for the cab? Better stay put where you are since they can't see your live location.
I won't say there's none, but there was a taxi app for me before Uber that knew where I was and let me book a taxi, that wasn't innovative.
> Back then, you had to know the phone number to call -
A benefit sure, but "being big" is not an innovation.
> Trying to hail a cab during a busy holiday? Good luck with that
Here when it's busy I can't get an Uber but I can book my local service. Uber is way less reliable here.
> route-planning software.
Every uber here uses Waze.
> Waiting for the cab? Better stay put where you are since they can't see your live location.
Hah! I've repeatedly had issues where Uber cars didn't seem to know where I was, their app put me in the middle of a lake once and I kept moving about trying to figure out where the hell I could meet the taxi because their position made no sense either. They cancelled on me and I had to chase them down a street and rebook, hoping it would connect to them.
Swing and a miss. Op is talking about Uber’s scheduling system for assigning drivers to riders.
- Knowing my location automatically via GPS. I don't always know where I am. I'm on a street near some bar. - Knowing how long it'll take for my cab to get to me. I don't have to assume it's on its way and wait or call the operator to confirm ETA. - Paying when I don't have cash. In NZ, not all taxi cabs take cards.
It's a major shift from a phone call. Not a fan of the company but it's certainly changed things with taxi companies now investing in their own apps and Uber alternatives sprouting up.