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IanCal

You have conveniently missed that there was already an app for ordering taxis before Uber for me.

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

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.

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To me, the innovation isn't using an app instead of a phone call, it's the accountability and reliability. Before Uber, I'd have to call a taxi company at least a half hour before I want to leave. If they even answer the call, the response is always "20 minutes", regardless of how long you have to wait. At least a quarter of the time, the taxi will never show up. As a result, I'd barely ever take taxis anywhere. Instead I'd drive my own car, which meant finding/paying for parking and ensuring continued sobriety, else planning to leave the car and likely get a parking ticket the next day. I guess one benefit of the old way is that I'd plan ahead a bit better, so if driving myself wasn't practical I'd leave extra time to take transit or walk.

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.

So the innovation for you is something that has existed elsewhere before? Why is that innovative?

...the innovation is a consistent more reliable and timely experience, consistent across geographies, where it did not exist before.

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.

> McDonalds didn’t have the first burger franchise,

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.

Innovate means to make changes in a thing that is established. The innovation here is that the thing is the same everywhere, you don’t need to know the local errata to rely on it.

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.”

>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.

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.

Regarding McDonalds, correct, the innovation was not in the franchise. The innovation was in creating the corporate and logistic structures necessary that every single McDonalds, everywhere, even though owned by franchisees, would deliver pretty much the same experience.

This

> ...the innovation is a consistent more reliable and timely experience, consistent across geographies, where it did not exist before.

Call a cab and wait and pray. Get a call 30 minutes later asking if you still want a cab. Wait 20 more minutes for a cab to actually show up.

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.

They said the app was innovative, it was not to me because I already had something similar, and what you're describing has nothing to do with the app. You're just describing a not terrible taxi company, which has existed in many places far before Uber.

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.

Not at all, their main innovation was combining pricing theory in a way that worked. They got drivers on the streets during major storms to keep wait time down. Fascinating

Wait until they hear about Amazon vs. the Sears-Roebuck catalog

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