They're a global company that operates in 900 cities. I don't understand why so many people on this site seem to think it should be a few programmers and some suits to sign the checks.
Many people are just tired of seeing glorified sales and taxi companies disguising themselves as tech companies.
The defining feature of a technology firm is reduction of marginal costs at scale. If you're adding human labour with every city you expand into you might have a problem on your hands if your banking on making facebook margins.There is an underlying exhaustion among some people, myself included, who want to see investments into basic research and real technological advances rather than yet another app delivering pizza being valuated at 50 billion dollars.
I think people should recognise that the taxi market has an advantage. It's a distributed system and a market. Taxis organise themselves.
If you're going to replace an entire market with a centrally planned system and a giant electricity and compute eating machine then you better have something to show for it in terms of efficiency.
What's especially interesting to me here is how the landscape has changed since Uber launched 10 years ago. In 2010, you legitimate had to build a lot of your own stuff; at that point Amazon hadn't even launched SNS or Redshift. [1] Docker didn't exist. Etc, etc.
So the question for me isn't, "Can Uber justify their apparently large infrastructure?" It's more, "If somebody started an Uber competitor today, how much of the work could they get from open source, PaaS, and SaaS providers?"
Is Netflix a tech company?
Is a company that sells ebooks a tech company? What about scientific journals? Are they tech companies?
Is Instagram a tech company? What about ad brokers?
Hatzichronoglou, Thomas: "Revision of the High-Technology Sector and Product Classification", OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers, No. 1997/02, OECD Publishing, Paris.
https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/revisi...
Page 7 specifically divides manufacturing industries (it doesn't address services) into four technology levels, high, medium-high, medium low, and low:
High technology: Aerospace, computers, office machinery, electronics-communications, pharmaceuticals.
Medium-high technology: Scientific instruments, motor vehicles, electrical machinery, chemicals, other transport equipment, non-electrical machinery.
Medium-low technoogy: Rubber and plastic products, shipbuilding, other manufacturing, non-ferrous metals, non-metallic mineral products, fabricated metal products, petroleum refining, ferrous metals.
Low-technology: Paper printing, textiles and clothing, food, beverages, and tabacco, wood and furniture.
Given J.S. Mill's wonderful definition of technology, 'the study of effects", there's little in human activity which is completely atechnological. There remains, however, much that is quite some remove from the cutting edge.
(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12004/12004-h/12004-h.htm#FNa...)
In the technology adoption lifecycle, high tech are innovators. An early-adopter firm is itself still not high tech itself.
(Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22884971)
I don't, either, but then again I never said that. I'm merely wondering how the jobs break down.