Uber and Lyft Have Become Indistinguishable Commodities

Ride sharing will become like airline travel: a huge industry which greatly benefits the consumer, while suppliers struggle to make a profit on very thin margins.

When I worked for Lyft they did almost no brand training anyways. I'm a big fan of brand identity, so seeing the company slack on this almost makes me want to use Uber. Being lazy with one's brand makes it hard for people to take any company seriously.

Once the VC is burned through, profits will normalize close to zero as they compete on price. Uber is hoping to avoid this by getting access to Google's self driving car tech.

this applies to many of the "sharing economy" businesses.

airbnb seems to have a monopoly at present but as their listings become shown on competitor booking sites with lower fees customers will soon follow and the whole thing becomes commodified, and eventually peer2peer or non-profit/non-fee networks will win out.

the supreme type of monopolies enjoyed by facebook/ebay/amazon will not occur in these style businesses unless they can enforce exclusivity, and most (non-US) states won't allow this.

Uber will buy Lyft. Not that I want that to happen, but it seems likely.