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Comment by yalogin | Hacker News Reader

I still don’t understand the strategy for Waymo. After running that taxi service in phoenix for this long they resorted to partnering with Uber, it’s a huge failure. What does Uber bring to the table at all? An app that is easily replicable and with google’s reputation they can easily get customers off of Uber to their own platform. It’s a colossal failure. I was really hoping they would use Waze for this purpose. In fact it already has ride sharing and so thought that is the next natural direction. The ceo needs to go at this point. He is really taking the ship down.

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It's a signal that ride share apps won't be 100% autonomous anytime soon.

If you're a consumer and you want to go from point A to point B you don't want to have to think about whether your route will be in the AV coverage area, or if AVs are able to operate in current weather conditions, or if there are enough AVs available.

You just want to press a button and have some vehicle take you from point A to point B, whether that vehicle has a human behind the wheel or not.

Google had this with Google Maps showing the fare for your route on both Uber and Lyft, but I guess Google was getting some sort of kickback because Uber stopped [paying] to be on there perhaps over a year ago.

This makes so much sense - and why they'd team up with Uber. Google/Waymo don't care about non-coverage human-driver rideshare. However the users definitely do. So this partnership makes a ton of sense - if you're in a Waymo area, you could have a separate app, but having a single app for both types of rides is definitely a win for both.

> strategy for Waymo

getting their technology working profitably at scale is obviously the first step and it is taking much longer than expected.

> app that is easily replicable

Waymo already has their own app and will continue to. the problem is that if you only have limited service in one small market then nobody has that app installed.

business travel is a large and highly profitable segment of ride sharing and it is dominated by Uber because it has the largest install base.

> What does Uber bring to the table at all?

demand. Waymo only has to accept a ride request if it meets their profitability metrics so this deal is all upside for them. if they have more profitable demand through their own app then they use their fleet for that and if not they fall back to Uber and get some free advertising to Uber customers in the process.

Waymo is a technology provider. Uber has lots of existing users and no ability to do autonomous driving. This way, Waymo gets to enter their cars in Uber's app and make a similar kind of revenue as a driver would. All Uber does is take their cut and supply passengers.

So Waymo doesn't have to duplicate all of what Uber already does, Uber users just order their ride as normally and maybe get a little cost benefit out of there not being a driver or a need to tip them, and Waymo gets to focus on the cars and the driving and rolling out in more cities.

I don't see how Waze or Google factor into this. Not really a competitor to Uber or taxis in general.

I think they’re accepting the fact that it’s crazy tough to gain market share and requires MILLIONS in ad spending. Sometimes it’s better to have a small piece of a large pie, especially when trying to bootstrap its brand, instead of taking a much bigger slice of a minuscule pie

Given that Waymo looses $5bn a year that seems like a drop in the ocean.

Uber has saturated a lot of markets and might have a better legal foothold then Waymo/Google can spin up in a short time span.

Maybe this is just Google finally admitting it sucks at a variety of business processes and needs help.

Google doesn't even want to have human interaction, and Google's reputation for sure didn't help it in chat and social network spaces either. And I'm sure Google doesn't even want to work it with restaurants and drivers, because you can't just put an AI algorithm to deal with their issues. Small businesses go through a lot to just edit their own listings on local businesses, I wouldn't wish Google to be the middle man for my deliveries.

Just spitballing - I'm sure they can do the app part easily, but I think the harder part is legislation. And I don't know if Google is in much of a position to just start popping up in cities as transport competition like Uber did, whereas it might be an easier sell if it's just a new service in Uber which already exists that has the technology supplied by Google/Waymo.

I think you oversimplify what Uber has achieved in terms of tech and customer acquisition.

>What does Uber bring to the table at all? An app that is easily replicable

What? Building an app is the easy part of building an Uber. It's the difference between building a twitter clone (weekend project) and having it beat twitter (hasn't been done yet)

Uber brings the most successful marketplace for riders/drivers and operating with local regulations globally to the table

With Google's reputation, I'd expect them to provide terrible customer support and then also just let the whole thing stagnate after the initial splashy rollout and it had to be maintained.

Not sure if that is the case. Imagine all ride hailing and cab services in a few years are based on Waymo tech including Waymo's own fleet. Waymo would be the clear winner.

Yes, but this is about PR and the stock price for both companies

Taxi service that only runs in the middle of the night and a very narrow corridor

What about preventing anyone else partnering with Uber?

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