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Comment by codex | Hacker News Reader

The main selling point of Uber is the app--but eventually Yellow Cab, et al will also have slick apps. What's the long term competitive advantage, besides evading regulation? Self driving cars, most likely.

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That's a lot of "eventually." Uber is a software company that runs cabs, basically. Their competitors - the old school, that is - are cab companies who are now faced with the challenge of writing good software. The track record in general of industries where long-established players find that they have to become software companies and put out a polished product there, in addition to whatever they were already doing, suggests to me that the timeline for old-school cab companies putting out an app that doesn't look like total garbage next to Uber's, is likely to extend so far out that it might as well be never. They may turn around and subcontract the work of creating and maintaining the app, but that has its own problems that we're all familiar with.

Why couldn't some software company license out their app to cab companies? The Uber app is slick, but it's not exactly groundbreaking tech--somebody could clone it.

That is what Taxi Magic and bunch of other companies are doing.

This seems like a good business idea, but it would likely be fairly messy and hard to provide a uniformly good user experience. But I'm guessing that a lot of cab companies would pay for this software dispatch service, if you just sent them customers (perhaps according to bids they set?)

In Russia, a leading internet search provider rolled out an aggregator app, it's pretty good. There're multiple others as far as I remember.

I'd suggest that perhaps the entrenched culture of traditional taxi companies is negative in so many ways that even with the best software they'd be at a disadvantage. Pure speculation of course, but from reading the article it doesn't seem that farfetched.

Uber exists, primarily, because the slick apps didn't work. Taxi Magic, for example, was out years before Uber. It failed because taxi drivers, frankly, don't give a shit about dispatch. They just pick someone else up on the way.

If Taxi drivers had simply been willing to pick people up who call into dispatch (or book via Taxi Magic), Uber probably wouldn't exist.

Better accountability than normal cab companies.

Recently a (one of many) Swedish cab company had one of their more islamic drivers throw out a gay couple. Nothing has happened. No one got fired, no head rolled, nothing on Twitter.

Now imagine if a Uber driver did that....

Well, one advantage is having any competition at all. The taxi market has been so badly broken for so long that just being able to introduce new drivers and companies results in lower prices and better service all around.

I agree, but in the context of the comment you're responding to, this is subsumed in evading regulation. You are more or less saying, "Taxi regulations are bad because they reduce competition without corresponding advantages that outweigh the cost, so Uber's wins when it evades those regulations and reintroduces competition." But it's still "evading regulations." Although I'd prefer to think of it as avoiding regulations -- avoidance is legal and evasion is illegal.

Actually it is more like privatization of taxi regulations. Instead of paying for a burdensome and ineffective government bureaucracy, a libertarian would let private companies handle it.

The tricky part is avoiding monopoly and arguably, monopoly is at the root of the problems with burdensome and ineffective government bureaucracy.

This depends on where you are. A lot of "regulation" appears to me to be monopolistic pricing because there were no other choices. I'm in Australia so the below is my experience.

Moving to Uber as I have means I don't have to pay the ridiculous 10% to use a card. Originally the only way to pay card with a taxi was to use the company "cabcharge" who put their terminals in the cabs and the 10% was charged anytime card was used instead of cash. This has nothing to do with regulation and there has been an investigation started around it.

Further to this the cab companies are charging $2.50 (flagfall) + ~$3.00 (booking fee) if I book through them online or over the phone. The booking fee doesn't go to the cabbie, just to the company for picking up the phone. Uber charges me $3.50 flat. Once again, not regulation.

Not so much. The main selling points for me:

* no money exchange in the car * tip is decided and built-in * cleaner more comfortable cars * polite and professional-acting drivers

I get none of these from 99% of cabs. And even UberX is superior to the average cab experience.

The app is nice, but if the service sucked it wouldn't be enough to convince me to use Uber.

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