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Comment by r29vzg2 | Hacker News Reader

While you're not wrong about most of this. uChat is actually built by a pretty large team

https://eng.uber.com/uchat/

> uChat is actually built by a pretty large team

Which is even more scary. Why isn't uber laying all these people off and paying cash money for a real chat application? What competitive advantage does uber have maintaining a chat application?

Preventing engineers who are working on it from working at the competition?

That's pretty stupid. If this was truly their strategy, they're just raising everyone's costs. They can't out-compete Google at this game.

Google has a chat app?

What's it called this week?

They might have to pivot into a chat company

"Uber Chat -- because that's one thing you didn't know you needed!"

Only profitable if they can ever find a way to make the chat self-driving.

Group chats all ready are:

You can take your hands off completely, even go and do something else, read a book, write an email, book some flights, and the chat will drive itself ... somewhere.

With more and more chat and email apps offering auto-generated/suggested replies (e.g. what Gmail offers) we're on our way there.

I might actually hire an Uber for the express purpose of having someone to talk to. In Germany, taxi drivers were often former "German studies" or Philosophy students who did not find a job, so it was kind of guaranteed that you'd have a competent, honest communication partner (albeit left leaning).

I think that's brilliant. I'm curious as to why it is not regarded as proper job. I don't think it's unique to Germany though. I think it is as honorable an occupation as any. And for the philosophical types it might actually be quite a good occupation as it may not be as taxing on the mind (apart from the time they spent thinking on their favorite subjects). That frees them up to study, research and write in their spare time. Secondly I'm curious as to why they tend to be left leaning...

Why doesn't Uber spend less on Engg and pay more to their drivers- which may actually help its business.

If they fired 1000 engineers, at $250k/year each, that would come to about $1.2/week more for each monthly active driver.

How is Slack not suing Uber for uChat? The images on the link look like an exact copy.

Check out some screenshots of Discord, that basically looks like "Slack with a dark theme."

And they all look like any generic IRC client with fatter margins and some other 2010+ fluff.

Would need to sue Discord too.

On what grounds would they sue? Not only is it completely legal to copy a competitor's design (in most cases), Uber isn't selling this to other companies.

I don’t understand why the above user is getting downvoted to oblivion by people who don’t understand legalities. Trade dress[1] is a form of intellectual property. This is what prevents a company from copying a competitor down to the pixel. Apple and Samsung fought an infamous and long legal battle over this. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_dress

[2] https://revisionlegal.com/trademarks/lessons-trademarking-tr...

It only matters for product you sell (hence the reference to consumer confusion). Ubers chat sounds like it's solely for internal use.

uChat is a fork of Mattermost, which looks like an exact copy too.

https://mattermost.com/

Constrained solution space > all chat apps look the same.

Except Snapchat, I still can't work out what that's about.

You think Slack came up with that design? Hah.

The post says they used an open source chat core called Mattermost.

Only companies with mega deep pockets (to pay the real winners ie the lawyers) would engage in these type of tom foolery.

I am talking about Samsung and Apple here..

Wow...that is pretty wasteful

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