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Comment by FiddlyPack | Hacker News Reader

...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.

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> 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.

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

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