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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

> "Uber isn't putting me out of business," Kim said, speaking hypothetically. "What Uber is making me do is retool -- and given the same rules, I'll beat them all day long."

I appreciate his spirit, but I don't think he's fully estimating what it would involve to beat Uber at its game. He'll have to hire more drivers, have lower prices and still be up against a huge network effect wall. He seems jazzed with Flywheel, but they could stop sending him business tomorrow.

One of my favorite parts about Uber is that it's in so many cities and has consistency (easy to see pricing, if there's a problem I know who to contact, etc). I'm never going to seek out DeSoto Cab Co on purpose.

Basically, if the rules tilt towards the Uber model there is no reason for Kim to exist. He's a middle man in a business that is going the opposite direction.

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> Basically, if the rules tilt towards the Uber model there is no reason for Kim to exist. He's a middle man in a business that is going the opposite direction.

Not at all. Maybe though, he's a local middle-man in a business which is going toward global middle men.

After all, Uber and Lyft are nothing if not middle men.

Google is just a middleman between you and webpages, Facebook is just a middleman between you and sharing your stuff. Everything is a middleman.

Downvote me all you want, but I just realized is even more true than I through at first, because the main revenue model of Google: Adsense/Adwords, is just a middle men between webmasters and advertisers; the only reason those two groups don't talk directly to each other is because they don't trust each other:

- They don't know each other (lack of contact method)

- They don't know how much they charge.

- They don't know if they are trustworthy.

- They don't know if they will maliciously overcharge or if they won't honor the contract.

The completely exact middleman work that Uber does between drivers and passengers.

I also think that's not always a dead end. There is also an opportunity to grow. For instance, I know Uber exists, but since I only take taxi occasionally I don't own an Uber account.

In NY, the Chinese and the Korean community have their own network knowing how to reach the Chinese/Korean-speaking car service and shuttle service. Uber or alike cannot beat this system. These locale-specific service operate with just telephone. Very school but effective! No app, no Internet access. Pretty reliable and cheap.

So all he need to do is to find a community to target at and find drivers willing to join him.

Translating their app would allow Uber to encroach on such communities. That is likely already in progress.

I will just make my raw observation and prediction that the reach into certain community for certain use case is likely to have little success. For example, if you want to travel between Flushing and Chinatown, or between Brooklyn and Chinatown, or between Queens and Chinatown, there are specific "bus station" for people to wait at. For car service it's also a single phone call and you can get a quote within half a minute. There is usually a single number you dial and you can get a quote on the ETA so you can wait at home and go on the shuttle van when the time comes. The reason technology hasn't beaten this old school system is because of the low cost to run and the low entry to barrier for both the business owners and users. Typing can be quit slow and ineffective and sometimes Internet access is just not available.

It's basically a community lock-in. So a Uber-like clone will have to break this "monopoly practice" not by just translating the app, but actually knows how the community works.

Uber is translated into a ton of languages already, I see that it gets updated very frequently and often times the only changes are various localizations.

Considering you can put your destination address in the app, it should be a huge improvement to anyone who doesn't know the language (or with disabilities).

What do you mean by "Network effect"?

I don't really see how it applies in this situation. (e.g. you can use uber today and a taxi tomorrow and suffer no loss of value).

I think "mindshare" was the term he was looking for.

Uber already has a ton of users and more importantly, drivers. If I visit SF what reason would there be to use this guy's cab service vs Uber? I already have Uber on my phone.

Uber has some drivers in a city, and some passengers - not very valuable. But, Uber does something special, like drop prices, and all of a sudden, there a lot of people who hear about the low cost of UberX, and so they put the App on their iPhone/Android, and start calling vehicles. Drivers, hear about the incredible demand for UberX drivers, and start adding that network to their vehicle. Passengers discover there is always a Uber vehicle close by and so they start using it more often, which creates more demand.

Eventually, you get a network of users/drivers - each new driver is available to many customers, and each customer will make themselves available to many drivers.

It's not a perfect N(N-1)/2 mesh, but then neither were fax machines (not everyone wanted to fax everyone else) - but the same concept of network value exists.

What Uber has going for it is convenience, transparency, and quality. By the time the industry itself settles, who's to say Uber could keep up the high standard of quality? Or if they move toward a monopoly, they might hike the price, allowing smaller, local-focused services to differentiate themselves and flourish.

We have no idea what the future hold, and remember Uber is the new kid on the block here.

Right, his thinking sounds a lot like what we heard from 2000-2008 or so from the newspaper industry. There's always some new app they think might turn the tide to conveniently mention in interviews, but at the end of the day these taxi companies are all on their way to a different, lower station in the marketplace.

What do you think Uber is but a middle man?

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