Uber's Dark Descent: How Abandoning Innovation Hurt Drivers and Gouges Riders | Hacker News Reader

Uber's Dark Descent: How Abandoning Innovation Hurt Drivers and Gouges Riders

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26 pointskermatt20 comments

I don't see the long term vision for Uber rides. Waymo and their ilk are already here, with three primary friction points

1) building trust & abundance of caution - this will continue to compound and at some point it will reach a tipping point 2) scale - Waymo doesn't have enough cars on the road yet. pickup times are long. 3) high price - Waymo in my area is slightly more expensive (and takes longer) than Uber/Lyft.

They could easily halve the price tomorrow and blow Uber/Lyft out of the water. There's no way to compete because Waymo variable costs are so much lower. Waymo is growing smart - they're building the trust, scaling slowly, and when it's time, they'll cut prices & go for the jugular and it won't be pretty for Uber/Lyft.

> Waymo and their ilk are already here

Self-driving, already almost here for 10 years. Rolling this out to all cities, other continents will be the 10% that's the 90%, if at all possible without additional major innovations.

Waymo has 4 cities, Uber 10.000 - not counting all local competitors.

The Uber model is here to stay for a long, long time.

My son has an Uber Teen account, but has always been hesitant to use it. A couple weeks ago, my car was in the shop, my wife had the other car, but my son was supposed to be dropped off at a birthday party. I fired up Uber and put in the address - $35 for me to take Uber (round trip it would have been $70 to drop him off). I scheduled the ride, and then remembered he had an Uber Teen account. Cancelled my trip for $5 and had him open his Uber Teen app. The same trip for him was $12! 1/3rd the price. Different vehicle, but going to the same destination. I was happy to save almost $60, but pissed me off on how much Uber thought it could gouge me… and amused at how their algorithm does dynamic pricing between users on the same account. Now, I should have fired up the Lyft app to see how much it would charge me, but I suspect the two companies spend the majority of their time trying to deduce the other’s pricing algorithm to just slightly undercut the other a fraction of the time. It feels like pricing collusion via algorithm.

This doesn't mention the key issue, which is that they expected to have self driving cars working already. The drivers were going to be a problem that went away, and presumably, it would let them offer a better price.

Drivers will always want better pay & conditions. They lack the power to make demands, and bleeding out all over the media won't change a damn thing. They need to unionize.

Khosrowshahi's incompetent. Uber had the opportunity to be Amazon in retail transport. It's more akin to Walmart

By all means Walmart is a very successful company with many loyal customers. What's wrong with that? Also, being the Amazon of anything doesn't really strike me as a positive.

Walmart's success today is based on its legacy SCM, which is arguably the best. But it didn't succeed in global markets. Fundamental premise is that Walmart could've been Amazon in online retail

And amazon can't succeed in physical retail, so what's your point?

99.99999% of businesses on this planet would kill to be “more akin to Walmart…” what on earth was this comment meant to say?????

Uber has become too greedy these days. Lyft came and it was good, then it turned same like Uber.

I don't understand why every app become Enshittification once they become popular.

Shareholders.

Also weak regulators.

But regulators have it tough; the Uber business model isn’t viable so if it was properly regulated there’d be no Uber - and since regulators represent their constituency that’ll never happen because the public quite like their affordable rides. Affordable transportation makes cities work, so public transport is taxpayer subsidised in most of the world. Another reason the price has to stay low.

Because their Saudi benefactors stopped being ok with subsidizing every ride and meal. Now we pay what it costs.

They can’t make money at the original price point, that’s the problem. The whole goal is 1) disrupt the market, 2) become the market, 3) raise prices to become profitable, thus becoming the incumbent provider and bringing us back to the same place we were in before.

Same but different place. The new place has the disrupter at the top of the pile, and that's the entire point.

In Eastern Europe, Bolt is absolutely fantastic and super cheap. They have not gone public yet, and I assume it will end up the exact same way.

In India, Namma Yatri is zero commission and does lots of great initiatives. Uber drivers request me to install it and enjoy the win-win. Too bad the VC funded competitors are losing money to keep us on the enshittification treadmill.

Behold the Github containing their source code: https://github.com/nammayatri/nammayatri

Anecdata, but I've been in Romania for a couple of weeks recently and Uber was cheaper than Bolt for all rides except one. I think I only used Bolt while I had 40% off voucher active, and sometimes even with that it wasn't much cheaper than Uber.

But I believe in the past Bolt used to be cheaper than Uber indeed.

Taking any profit-making endeavor to the limit is to get infinite money input for zero output. Enshittification is every companies business model eventually.

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