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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> I knew Uber, Netflix, Spotify were revolutionary the first time I used them.

Maybe re-tune your revolution sensor. None of those are revolutionary companies. Profitable and well executed, sure, but those turn up all the time.

Uber's entire business model was running over the legal system so quickly that taxi licenses didn't have time to catch up. Other than that it was a pretty obvious idea. It is a taxi service. The innovations they made were almost completely legal ones; figuring out how to skirt employment and taxi law.

Netflix was anticipated online by and is probably inferior to YouTube except for the fact that they have a pretty traditional content creator lab tacked on the side to do their own programs. And torrenting had been a thing for a long time already showing how to do online distribution of video content.

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They were revolutionary as product genres, not necessary individual companies. Ordering a cab without making a phone call was revolutionary. Netflix at least with its initial promise of having all the world's movies and TV was revolutionary, but it didn't live up to that. Spotify because of how cheap and easy it was to have access to all the music, this was the era when people were paying 99c per song on iTunes.

I've tried some AI code completion tools and none of them hit me that way. My first reaction was "nobody is actually going to use this stuff" and that opinion hasn't really changed.

And if you think those 3 companies weren't revolutionary then AI code completion is even less than that.

> Ordering a cab without making a phone call was revolutionary.

With the power of AI, soon you'll be able to say "Hey Siri, get me an Uber to the airport". As easy as making a phone call.

And end up at an airport in an entirely different city.

There was a gain in precision going from phone call to app. There is a loss of precision going from app to voice. The tradeoff of precision for convenience is rarely worth it.

Because if it were, Uber would just make a widget asking "Where do you want to go?" and you'd enter "Airport" and that would be it. If a widget of some action is a bad idea, so is the voice command.

Easier, because you don't have to search for a phone number.

And they'll be able to tack an extra couple dollars onto the price because that's a good signal you're not gonna comparison shop.

Innovation!

You can book a flight or a taxi with a personal assistant app like Siri today. People don't seem very interested in doing so.

Barring some sort of accessibility issue, it's far easier to deal with a visual representation of complex schedule information.

"Do something existing with a different mechanism" is innovative, but not revolutionary, and certainly not a new "product genre". My parents used to order pizza by phone calls, then a website, then an app. It's the same thing. (The friction is a little bit less, but maybe forcing another human to bring food to you because you're feeling lazy should have a little friction. And as a side effect, we all stopped being as comfortable talking to real people on phone calls!)

Napster came before Spotify.

> innovative, but not revolutionary

The experience of Netflix, Spotify, and Uber were revolutionary. It felt like the future, and it worked as expected. Sure, we didn't realize the poison these products were introducing into many creative and labor ecosystems, nor did we fully appreciate how they would operate as means to widen the income inequality gap by concentrating more profits to executives. But they fit cleanly into many of our lives immediately.

Debating whether that's "revolutionary" or "innovative" or "whatever-other-word" is just a semantic sideshow common to online discourse. It's missing the point. I'll use whatever word you want, but it doesn't change the point.

Making simple, small improvements feel revolutionary is good marketing.

"Simple, small" and "good marketing" seem like obvious undersells considering the titanic impacts Netflix and Spotify (for instance) have had on culture, personal media consumption habits, and the economics of industries. But if that's the semantic construction that works for you, so be it.

> They were revolutionary as product genres, not necessary individual companies.

Even then, they were evolutionary at best.

Before Netflix and Spotify, streaming movies and music were already there as a technology, ask anybody with a Megaupload or Sopcast account. What changed was that DMCA acquired political muscle and cross-border reach, wiping out waves of torrent sites and P2P networks. That left a new generation of users with locked-down mobile devices no option but to use legitimate apps who had deals in place with the record labels and movie studios.

Even the concept of "downloading MP3s" disappeared because every mobile OS vendor hated the idea of giving their customers access to the filesystem, and iOS didn't even have a file manager app until well into the next decade (2017).

>every mobile OS vendor

Maybe half? Android has consistently had this capability since its inception.

Yes, but Google left that functionality half baked intentionally, letting 3rd party developers fill the void. Even now the Google Files app feels like a toy compared to Fossify Explorer or Solid Explorer.

> streaming movies and music were already there as a technology, ask anybody with a Megaupload or Sopcast account.

You can't have a revolution without users. It's the ability to reach a large audience, through superior UX, superior business model, superior marketing, etc. which creates the possibility for revolutionary impact.

Which is why Megaupload and Sopcast didn't revolutionize anything.

Is it a revolution if you needed millions of marketing dollars? How many ads did Napster have to run before the whole world knew what MP3s were?

> What changed was that DMCA acquired political muscle and cross-border reach, wiping out waves of torrent sites and P2P networks.

Half true - that was happening some, but wasn't why music piracy mostly died out. DMCA worked on centralized platforms like YouTube, but the various avenues for downloading music people used back then still exist, they're just not used as much anymore. Spotify was proof that piracy is mostly a service problem: it was suddenly easier for most people to get the music they wanted through official channels than through piracy.

DMCA claims took out huge numbers of public torrent trackers which was how 99% of people accessed contraband media. All the way back in 2008, the loss of TorrentSpy.com probably shifted everybody to private trackers, but it's a whack-a-mole game there too and most people won't bother.

DMCA also led to the development of ContentID and automated copyright strike system on Youtube, but it didn't block you from downloading the stream as a high bitrate MP3, which is possible even now.

> The innovations they made were almost completely legal ones; figuring out how to skirt employment and taxi law.

The impact of this was quite revolutionary.

> except for the fact that they have a pretty traditional content creator lab tacked on the side to do their own programs.

The way in which they did this was quite innovative, if not "revolutionary". They used the data they had from the watching habits of their large user base to decide what kinds of content to invest in creating.

> The impact of this was quite revolutionary.

In screwing over a lot of people around the world, yes. Otherwise, not really. Ordering rides by app was an obvious next step that's already been pursued independently everywhere.

> They used the data they had from the watching habits of their large user base to decide what kinds of content to invest in creating.

And they successfully created a line of content universally known as something to avoid. Tracks with the "success" of recommendation systems in general.

I strongly disagree about Netflix. It came out when I was in high school without a car. Being able to get whatever DVD I wanted without having to bum a ride from my parents--and also never have to pay late fees--was a major game changer.

> None of those are revolutionary companies.

Not only Uber/Grab (or delivery app) were revolutionary, they are still revolutionary. I could live without LLMs and my life will be slightly impacted when coding. If delivery apps are not available, my life is severely degraded. The other day I was sick. I got medicine and dinner with Grab. Delivered to the condo lobby which is as far as I can get. That is revolutionary.

Is it revolutionary to order from a screen rather than calling a restaurant for delivery? I don’t think so.

Honestly, yes. Calling in an order can result in the restaurant botching the order and you have no way to challenge it unless you recorded the call. Also, as someone who’s been on both sides of the transaction, some people have poor audio quality or speak accented English, which is difficult to understand. Ordering from a screen saves everyone valuable time and reduces confusion.

I’ve had app delivery orders get botched, drivers get lost on their way to my apartment, food show up cold or ruined, etc.

The worst part is that when DoorDash fucks up an order, the standard remediation process every other business respects—either a full refund or come back, pick up the wrong order, and bring you the correct order—is just not something they ever do. And if you want to avoid DoorDash, you can’t because if you order from the restaurant directly it often turns out to be white label DoorDash.

Some days I wish there was a corporate death penalty and that it could be applied to DoorDash.

Practically or functionally? Airbnb was invented by people posting on craigslist message boards, and even existed before the Internet, if you had rich friends with spare apartments. But by packaging it up into an online platform it became a company with 2.5 billion in revenue last year. So you can dismiss ordering from a screen instead of looking at a piece of paper and using the phone as not being revolutionary, because of you squint, they're the same thing, but I can now order take out for restaurants I previously would never have ordered from, and Uber Eats generated $13.7 billion in revenue last year, up from 12.2.

Again, the "revolutionary" aspect that made Uber and AirBnB big names, as opposed to any of the plethora of competitors who were doing the same thing at the same time or before, is that these two gained "innovative" competitive advantage by breaking the law around the world.

Obviously you can get ahead if you ignore the rules everyone else plays by.

If we throw away the laws, there's a lot more unrealized "innovation" waiting.

The taxi cab companies were free to innovate and create their own app. And we could continue to have drivers who's credit card machine didn't work until suddenly it does because you don't have any cash. Regulatory capture is anti-capitalism.

Yes, let's throw away the bad laws that are only there to prop up ossified power structures that exist for no good reason, and innovate!

Some laws are good, some laws are bad. we don't have to agree on which ones are which, but it's an oversimplification to frame it as merely that.

Were you not able to order food before Uber/Grab?

I am not in the US and yes, it is not a thing (though there was a pizza place that had phone order, but that's rather an exception).

Before the proliferation of Uber Eats, Doordash, GrubHub, etc, most of the places I've lived had 2 choices for delivered food: pizza and Chinese.

It has absolutely massively expanded the kinds of food I can get delivered living in a suburban bordering on rural area. It might be a different experience in cities where the population size made delivery reasonable for many restaurants to offer on their own.

Now if anyone solves the problem that for most cuisines ordered food is vastly inferior to freshly served meals. That would be revolutionary. Crisp fries and pizza. Noodles perfectly Al dente and risotto that has not started to thicken.

It's far from a perfect solution, but I applaud businesses that have tried to improve the situation through packaging changes. IHOP is a stand-out here, in my experience. Their packaging is very sturdy and isolates each component in its own space. I've occasionally been surprised at how hot the food is.

Hah. I went to find a picture and apparently they gave an award to the company that designed the packaging: https://www.directpackinc.com/2018-ihop-vendor-partner-year/

FWIW, local Yellow Cab et al, in the U.S., has been doing that for /decades/ in the areas I've lived.

Rx medicine delivery used to be quite standard for taxis.

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