But surely people can see that the Uber pricing was unsustainable? The VC money was subsidising our transport (yay) but clearly that couldn't last.
So, as prictable to everyone , prices go up, drivers get less, and Uber are hoping riders will have grown so used to the convenience so as not to care.
Expect a flood of stories along these lines in the coming year.
Why is it WhatsApp can serve most of the fucking world with something like 100 people but Uber needs a huge staff?
Bandwidth plays a role. Updating driver positions constantly, at scale, chews bandwidth. As does broad-casting trips, acceptances, and so on.
I'm guessing Lawyers take a huge chunk. Uber is forever being sued especially in years past and they must have a pretty terrible legal bill. It was always part of the model to operate outside the law, so legal issues were inevitable.
Plus lobbying - at every level. Changing the model (which they have done) takes a lot of lobbying. More lawyers, at lawyer rates.
Marketing of course takes a chunk. That's to be expected, especially as competitors enter the market (riding on the back of their legal coat-tails).
By comparison WhatsApp has no legal bill, no marketing bill, no lobbying bill, and so on.
How could this chew bandwidth? It's just some bytes for the positioning, over some socket (probably a websocket), it really doesn't sound like it'd chew bandwidth to send an ID + coordinates every second or so if your connection is already established. Maybe a few more bytes for a signature to avoid tampering/spoofing when updating the position.
tldr - i don't think it's the staff that's the expensive part. Also, they do a bunch of non-trivial things with maps, etc, so not quite a simple crud app.
But I don't think it matters very much at all. If people are the problem, they can be quickly cut. But if their market fundamentally shrinks or is unable to pay for itself, you can't really fix that.
Uber is super convenient. And also (used to be) super cheap. Cheaper than taxis, because a) they used VC money to cover costs and b) because they moved vehicle costs to the driver.
Driving is fundamentally underpaid (it's basically unskilled labor) but if you ignore vehicle costs (which most drivers do) it looks OK. Factor In vehicle costs and it gets bad. Remove all job security and work-place benefits and it's, well, not good.
So uber loses money, the drivers lose money, (or, more charitably, are just badly paid) - the real winners were riders.
But the free money is over. So the prices are jacked - the first time to make Uber profitable, and likely the second time to keep drivers from abandoning the system.
Customers will bleat, but the -economics- don't lie. It costs a lot for the convenience of anywhere-to-anywhere-anytime-by-yourself transport. If it's not costing the rider a lot then someone us getting screwed.
Sure, removing labor will change thd equation (self driving cars), but I fear even then the ancillary effects of "riders with no adult supervision" will add a lot of overhead.