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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> Unity lit money on fire for decades to buy a market advantage that overrules the basic economic incentives that supposedly ensure free markets work best for customers. It was successful in doing that because it's very hard for a sustainable business to compete against one that is fine losing billions of dollars.

This right here is the most notable part of the article, and it is entirely correct - it has been for years. Venture capital is fine to use for actual ventures, to create new markets or hell, to break into a market with entrenched powers... but when it is used on a long time purely to undercut and destroy legitimate prior businesses (taxis/Uber, hotels/AirBnB, game engines/Unity), authorities should step in.

It's time to revive anti-trust, anti-dumping and other anti-predatory politics.

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This part of the article needs a citation. Unity has been setting money on fire, but it hasn't been buying a market advantage. It's been burning money on highly, highly, highly questionable (at best) acquisitions like buying Weta and Iron Source as well an insane hiring spree and then paying those people for years for work and churn that Unity never actually manages to ship in the engine.

The other elephant in the room is that the owner of Unity's main competitor is quite a bit larger than it is. I can't say that anything Unity buys would give it a market advantage.

Second place and the niche for mobile which is lucrative and ‘XR’ which isn’t but could be isn’t too much to sniff at. I think it’s a mistake to think a healthy market is two companies or that the only thing spending buys is absolute dominance.

I don't disagree. Please don't take my statement as a defense of Unity. The intended implication was, "A market sans Unity is not a robust and competitive space, it's Unreal as a monopoly."

I don't know if there are many other options for mobile, but for XR (in this phase where UX norms are being hashed out), I really hope that people look beyond the two, and even dark horse Apple, to what Snap is doing. Even further: look at what people are doing with Dreams on the PS4/PS5 (https://twitter.com/MartinNebelong).

Part of why this hurts is that we let ourselves be taken in by a singular platform... again. Maybe standards with plenty of authoring options instead of cottage industries, next time.

Unreal isn’t anywhere close to monopoly space. Especially not in mobile

Mostly because Unity exists.

Cryengine, lumberjack, godot..

They are trying to buy market advantage for their Iron Source acquisition - if you agree to use it then the per download fee's magically go away.

Uber isn't a good example. They came up with a business model that literally required customers to get into strangers' cars. Eighteen nanoseconds later, the taxi industry was dead.

There is no other possible conclusion to draw, except that the taxi industry had it coming.

Fast-forward to today. The venture capital has long since run out. Taking an Uber costs at least as much as the taxis ever did. Yet, do you foresee any way for the taxi industry to make a comeback, except by holding the rest of us at gunpoint?

That’s a decent amount of revisionism.

Uber used VC money to heavily undercut the taxi rates, heavily inflate driver pay and decided to speedrun breaking as many laws as possible

As for getting into strangers’ cars, getting in a taxi is no different.

Do you think Uber was able to become as ubiquitous as it is if it didn’t heavily subsidize both sides of the equation and abide by the laws?

I doubt it.

Like you aptly describe now the fares as on par if not more than taxis, because now that they’ve attained dominance over the market by burning VC money, they can squeeze the customers and drivers alike. I’m not even sure if they’re turning a profit yet.

> I’m not even sure if they’re turning a profit yet.

Uber recorded its first ever operating profit last quarter:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/08/02/uber-just-report...

Is it legit profits?

Iirc Uber had some creative accounting practices in the past offsetting loses from one quarter to another, and making a single quarter look good.

No idea. I don't really keep track of Uber at all, I just happened to remember their recent announcement about it.

> now that they’ve attained dominance over the market by burning VC money, they can squeeze the customers and drivers alike

Lyft still exists. To say nothing of local upstarts, like Revel in New York.

I suspect it's still cheaper than Taxis would have been without it existing especially counting for inflation.

But then, the biggest issue being solved wasn't price it was availability. You could call for a Taxi at a craft-beer pub in Texas in 2010 and it was a crap shoot the thing ever arrived or if it did maybe an hour later.

"Getting in a stranger's car" also describes taking a regular taxi...

In New York getting a Taxi Medallion took essentially getting a mortgage.

It's like picking up food at a restaurant vs some random guys house: technically they're both strangers, there's no guarantee the restaurant is clean either... but only one is a stranger to serving customers food.

Most didn’t own their own medallion, but were employed by large companies that owned them.

No, most were owned by individuals and financed by PE.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/nyregion/nyc-taxis-medall...

> Instead of lending directly, the big banks worked through powerful industry players. They enlisted large fleet owners and brokers — especially Neil Greenbaum, Richard Chipman, Savas Konstantinides, Roman Sapino and Basil Messados — to use the banks’ money to lend to medallion buyers. In return, the owners and brokers received a cut of the monthly payments and sometimes an additional fee.

The big players knew what was happening, they exploited individual drivers to quickly offload their liability. They weren't directly exposing themselves to the risk.

When prices collapsed PE swooped in and bought them outright.

In 2012 only 18% of Medallions were owner-operated.

https://slate.com/business/2012/06/taxi-medallions-how-new-y...

> putting most medallions in the hands of big taxi fleets or brokers who simply rent them out.

https://www.nyc.gov/site/tlc/businesses/brokers.page

Brokers can't rent: only "leasing" (on an asset they didn't own) and financing both with regular payments, an interest rate, and forfeiture if you don't pay in time, just like a mortgage.

I'd argue the opposite, in terms of safety. Rapes and sexual violence were (anecdotally) way more common back in the taxi days.

Whether or not there's data to back that up, Taxi's also existed for about a century prior to smartphones, which are a great deterrent to victimizing strangers from your car.

Taxi regulation, let alone the prohibitively priced licenses people are referring to elsethread, are a much more recent development from what I understand.

> Yet, do you foresee any way for the taxi industry to make a comeback

Since the taxi industry is far from dead in a whole lot of places, absolutely. In my city, taxis offer a superior experience to ride-sharing companies and they're doing just fine. Uber and Lyft aren't grabbing much market share from them. I've been in many other cities where the story is the same.

When Uber started it was black cars only. Very, very different experience.

The immediate follow up question is can corporate support of open source projects count as product dumping?

We live in very interesting times while all this unravels.

> The immediate follow up question is can corporate support of open source projects count as product dumping?

For what it's worth, I'd classify true open source as the only exception to anti-dumping laws. If you want to burn money to fuck over everyone else, give up your competitive advantage.

> The immediate follow up question is can corporate support of open source projects count as product dumping?

It can when the competitors are dead, and the patron yanks all funding and support from the project.

I can't imagine trying to prove that in court though.

They have won "market share" I'm not sure exactly which competitors they've undercut in the process? Are there any examples of a legitimate competitor that failed because they couldn't compete on price?

Everybody points to uber but uber won against taxis because they had an app and taxis had a phone number that often wouldn't even accept a downtown cross st.

As a seattlite who got tired of hunting for a building that still had a street number just to get a cab on 5th and Jackson or what ever I'm glad uber killed taxis

This is exactly it.

It would be like if no pizza place had mobile ordering and a new one started that had it; that was the killer feature.

Everything else (I personally believe) was hyped up by Uber so that the taxis wouldn't realize what the real competitor was until too late.

Now there may be taxi hailing apps, but nobody knows the name of them, and they're different for every city.

In Austin ~2012-ish, we had Austin Cab.

It had an app. It was like Uber, but worse in every way you can possibly imagine and outrageously priced.

I don't like an Uber monopoly either, but it doesn't mean the status quo was better before.

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