Google Is Developing Its Own Uber Competitor
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
So, Uber really needs to start thinking about the mapping aspect. Perhaps they can incent their current drivers to start reporting back all the street info as they pick up their passengers. Of course, this would bring up problems if the drivers eventually realize that this data could be used to replace them. It would be interesting to see uber cars with Google StreetView style cameras on their hoods.
Most likely they would either start having drivers drive Uber cars with steetview-esq data collection gear on it, or pay a premium to drivers who mounted a tray on the roof of their vehicle that contained high resolution cameras, a laser scanner, and a controller to process and forward that data back.
I would not be surprised if Uber was looking at acquiring https://www.mapillary.com for this functionality.
Uber's efforts to shed itself of all liability and risk in terms of employees and assets is legendary; but they could still find themselves going up against the IRS on the question of whether drivers are employees or freelancers. Most especially with drivers that they referred to auto-financing. The theory being that having a requirement for a minimum standard of car and providing finance referrals would be similar to requiring "independent contractors" to wear uniforms.
It seems incredibly unwise to finance a $20,000 USD vehicle hedging on some third party (of which you have zero control over) to provide enough for you to pay it through.
If you then manipulate things such that they are effectively unable to meet their obligations because you are jerking them around they are certainly going to be able to find a lawyer who will take their case. Particularly if you were referring them to the auto-dealership and pre-qualifying them for financing.
https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...
And you can find examples from almost every car company. They all have projects going back decades looking at autonomous technologies. Some you see today e.g. parallel park assist, crash avoidance, lane/stop sign detection etc.
Today, unless your title is "Director of self driving car research" you can't just go take one for a spin. Again, they're coming, they are the future. Uber wouldn't have cleaned out Carnage Mellon robotics department if it didn't still require original research.
Majority (all?) of the road testing has been on fairly controlled roads with "normal" circumstances, ie. not a blizzard with iced roads, hydroplaning, debris falling in front of the vehicle at speed, etc.
Longevity of the vehicle - it's doubtful a driverless vehicle purchased today will still be on the road (and safe!) 10-15 years from now (there's an awful lot of computing and sensors in place, but would a computer that old still perform safely -- ie. would you use your computer from 15 years ago as your daily-use work machine? no - so why trust your life to it?), whereas majority of vehicles on the road today are 10-15+ years old. Sensors are expensive and prone to natural wear, etc.
What about sensors frizzing out and providing false-readings? Similar circumstances have destroyed $100 million spacecraft missions, let alone some $20K vehicle that's several years old and neglected by the owner. Even military-grade electronics and sensor arrays are not "fool proof" and totally "failsafe" -- and you know the quality, robustness, redundantness, etc.. of the electronics going into self-driving vehicles are not on par.
The moment the first human casualty occurs do to some software/hardware failure, there will be serious ramifications for the self-driving world.
Just want to add to the discussion a reminder that this is said about literally every new piece of technology that has ever happened- the first human casuality from riding a horse, first human casualty from driving a car, etc.
It's interesting to note that we're expected to lose our minds over the first human death with New Technology Y, when Old Technology X is typically killing humans all the time.
Also out of curiosity– re: longevity, why would a driverless car have to be on the road for 15 years? Why not just update/retrofit/repair/replace every year or so?
Spacecraft and military equipment are used in really extreme settings! Also can't driverless cars update themselves, go for repairs themselves, etc?
Also I'm guessing it wouldn't make a lot of sense for regular folks to own their own driverless car. They'll just use one at the touch of a button whenever they need to. When renting becomes THAT cheap, ownership makes less sense (for most people, at least).
My $0.02
Exactly, call me when they're killing 1.2 million people a year[1].
The number of people killed by automobiles is completely fucking insane and the only reason we're cool with it is it mostly doesn't happen to someone a large number of people care about and if it does we can hum, haw and then lay blame on someone (who is probably dead).
1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...
We're largely talking about only the US market here -- in which only (and I say that word relatively) 32,000 people died in any sort of automobile related accident last year (including siting in their driveway idling and somehow died).
To put this in perspective, the common Flu (a totally vaccinatable, preventable, and treatable illness) killed more than 52,000 people in the US last year alone.
In reality, automobiles in the US are the safest they have ever been since 1949, and automobile related deaths have dropped more than 26% since 2005 alone.
According to the CDC, automobile related deaths are not even in the top 10 leading causes of death in the US.
Last year, heart disease was responsible for 596,577 US deaths last year alone. Stroke claimed 128,932 US lives. Diabetes took 73,831 american lives. Suicide robbed 39,518 people their life last year -- in excess of 7,000 more than died by automobile related accidents.
In 2009, approximately a grand total of 2,436,652 died in the US of all causes (including natural causes). Of that number, automobile related deaths only accounts for 1%. Of the entire US population, we're talking about 0.0096%...
According to the CDC, in 2012, 10,322 people (or 31%) of all automobile related deaths were alcohol-related deaths. Another 18% of automobile related deaths are attributed to drugs other than alcohol in the same year. That accounts for just about 50% of all vehicle related deaths, leaving the true automobile related deaths due to accident at a shockingly low number (relatively) of about 15,000 people per year.
All of this is to say, relatively speaking, automobile related deaths are not a significant concern anymore. It does not make logical nor financial sense to do anything significant in this sector while ignoring or not increasing efforts in these other much more significant areas.
So, to counter your original assertion -- no, it's not "completely fucking insane"... the amount of people dying from the common Flu is.
Sources:
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
[2] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/09/guns-tr...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...
[4] http://www.businessinsider.com/top-causes-of-death-united-st...
[5] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit...
[6] http://www.cdc.gov/Motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impai...
Throw in the fact that Uber, whose relationship with lawmakers is best described as "it's complicated", is about the last company you'd want to be leading lobbying efforts to allow unmanned self-driving cars on city streets, and it's a fair bet they're not expecting their self-driving cars to be anything more than valuable IP at the time they exit.
There would become a significant cost burden to the owner if this was what was necessary. Most people can't afford to do multiple thousand dollar repairs to their vehicles every few years. Currently replacing the ECU in most modern vehicles will run you close to $1,000 after parts and labor, and these are the very "dumb" kind of car computers (comparatively).
> When renting becomes THAT cheap, ownership makes less sense (for most people, at least).
This may make sense to someone living in a big city, but when you shift to the suburbs or a more rural area, renting would become a significant inconvenience. In my experience, people living in big cities are the ones who often do not own vehicles and/or rent and/or use things like Uber/Lyft and/or Zip cars. Suburbians (which is where majority of our population lives in the US) would not be able to take advantage of this type of service for a number of logistical reasons.
The first iterations will be expensive, triple the cost of a normal car perhaps? that's ok if they get 10x the use. When you put in that kind of investment, it's ok to have dedicated staff for maintenance. You also get to learn a lot about failure modes, when and how to do upgrades, there's lots of good stuff that can happen there.
Google is in a pretty unique place. They have the data to make them work. They can afford a large staff to maintain the cars. They can afford flight data recorders for the cars. They can afford to create an insurance subsidiary. Insurance is cheap if you can prove robot cars never cause accidents. They can afford these things in dollars, technical talent, legal talent, and international reach.
Uber is lucky because it's not google's core business. They've got a lot of cash, but they don't (afaict) have the depth of resources to throw at the zillion problems that will inevitably come up. The only piece google lacks is the focus. It's google's game to lose.
Longevity might be a problem, but it's reducible to an investment decision, the vehicles don't necessarily have to last 15 years unmodified to be practical.
Vehicles are not "investments" as they diminish in value rapidly after the initial purchase. A 6 month old vehicle is not worth what a brand new one is. The reason we have so many older vehicles on the road (>10-15+ years of age) is simply because majority of citizens cannot afford new vehicles.
Replacing parts in modern-day "dumb" cars is incredibly expensive. If you radio goes out, you're looking at close to $1,000 just in parts and labor. There's few repairs that eat less than $500.
Most vehicle owners neglect their current "dumb" car, let alone a rolling piece of computer equipment.
Vehicles will last fewer years. They will be more expensive (in both initial cost and maintenance). Aged vehicles won't be reliable nor safe to operate.
These are the realities driverless vehicle proponents are simply not considering.
Uber could easily approach Volvo but then again there is no competitive advantage to. The car companies are interested in volume sales not building cars to niche specifications.
Map area by area - send out human driven cars if a customer requests a journey you can't cover with driverless cars yet..
Assuming they collect GPS traces, they know exactly what areas will cover the most of their business with the least amount of mapping.
That's a lot of trust on the self-driving cars, though.
Waze demonstrated how well a crowd sourcing effort can work.
It's also apparently possible for a small team to start doing sign recognition:
http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2015/01/27/traffic-signs.ht...
The TIGER dataset is fantastic, and certainly helps levelling the playing field by giving people somewhere to start from, but it's the cheap 80%, except in this case the last 20% doesn't take the other 80% of the time, but more like 800%.
As I say, it's a good starting point, but it's not in any way sufficient, and keeping it up to date is a huge amount of work, which has been reflected in the value of companies that have set themselves up to be able to keep up to date data sets of this.
That said, as I've commented elsewhere I do agree that Uber is in a good position, but mostly because they don't need full coverage. They need thorough and up to date information, but they need it in very tiny areas to begin with, and as you say they can rely on drivers to cover areas they don't currently know how to deal with. They can apply GPS traces to analyse exactly what areas are most profitable to improve map information for to make self driving viable first, and roll it out area by area.
I was definitely more focused on the 'current operations' aspect of things though, not the autonomous vehicles. If there's a human driver, the little disruptions to the road system aren't a disaster.
There is of course still the routing part.
Dense urban center, you have every bench and bin mapped. Go into the countryside, there is not even the buildings. It might not be an issue for a taxi company that is mainly operating in urban center though.
Google has added some decent additions to Google Maps but really 95% of what they had they purchased. For example Whereis/Yellow Pages data here in Australia.
Google does this [1]:
> Google employs a small army of human operators (they won’t say exactly how many) to manually check and correct the maps using an in-house program called Atlas.
A Maps app isn't just another app. Nobody gets killed if the Stocks app shows an incorrect price, but someone could die if the Maps app uses incorrect mapping information.
There is enormous brand value in thinking "I'll get an Uber" as a synonym for "I'll get a taxi, but right what I need it, and it probably will smell better." There is value of having that app on the phone, with credit card # already in place.
But perhaps more important is that Uber is building a graph of everyone who wants to go somewhere at any point in time. (And where they all wanted to go in the past) This is what's worth $40 billion. If two companies have automatic cars, the one who knows where they want to go wins.
Perhaps Google wanted to buy at $2 billion or $5, but not at $40.
Hrm. I see where you're coming from, but I can also imagine opening up Google Maps, clicking directions to go somewhere, and then when it says "press to be picked up by your driverless car", I'd just press that. If it were cheaper than Uber, I wouldn't bother subsequently opening up Uber to look for something.
Caveat: I'm a person who currently uses buses and trains because I can't afford Uber. I might not be representative, but I don't care about Uber. I'd be happy to jump ship, and I'm very used to using Google to search for things.
The key probably isn't price. I think it will be convenience. If Uber knows to have a car nearby you when you need it, you'll pay a dollar more to save 10 minutes. (Same with Google)
I wonder about other entrants... Perhaps Apple? Or Tesla?
Because Apple's other attempts at SaaS are going so well? You'll call an Apple Car but it'll go to Blackberry offices instead.
/s
I think for ME as a consumer, I will prioritize price over convenience unless I'm in a huge rush... so as long as the car arrives in 20-mins ish, I'll pick the cheaper option. But I suppose someone will aim to be hyper-fast, and someone will aim to be hyper-cheap.
Pretty exciting to be a consumer either way! (I'm probably being naive...)
I have to say, this is not a use case that any of my friends typically use when using Uber right now. Often it's people going to work or to meet up with other people (20 minutes makes you very late), going to a show or other event (same), or going home after some event/night out (waiting 20 minutes is a pain in the ass, since you're not at home). A 20 minute delay could be acceptable for running errands and such, but I think that is a pretty small fraction of Uber's current market.
This is particularly true because unlike Uber, Google hasn't been maligned by the perception of being a bully (the 'Dont be Evil' mantra is widely still held to be true by the general public).
Here in India, for instance, the Uber brand was tarnished heavily by a rape in New Delhi followed by utterly callous handling of the case by Uber employees (which included sending everyone, along with the rape victim, an email saying 'we are back!').
Google doesn't have that problem. As for payment information, Google already has that for a lot of consumers thanks to Google Play
Car service apps like Uber are headed towards commoditization. My local taxi company has one; it works almost as well as Uber but at half the price. Throw in self-driving cars (where Google has a technological advantage over Uber) and brand value becomes really important. The market will be completely commoditized if anyone with money can go buy a fleet of cars and build an app for $100k (replicating Uber would not be complicated).
Branding is the biggest differentiator in commoditized markets. CPG companies are the masters of this: Tide doesn't actually get your clothes any cleaner than the store brand, but you pay for it anyway. They may adjust the packaging too (pods versus powder versus liquid) but fundamentally, it's the same product. I would expect similar segmentation to happen in the car-on-demand market: one company will specialize in cargo, another in short-distance trips, another in trips to the airport, etc. There will likely be very little difference between these services other than branding/positioning.
Yes, and there is enormous value in "I'll Google it", but that doesn't stop people from using other search engines (and online services) as soon as a better one comes along, because the cost to the user of switching is small.
Name recognition does not, IMO, make Uber worth $40bn.
Uber has, or eventually will have, "User 1VB7X has hailed an Uber from 45th and 6th nine times out of ten when they were within two blocks. They are now 5 blocks away and headed in that direction." If you add this up for everyone who has the app on their phone, it becomes incredibly powerful for optimizing the motion of Uber cars.
I'm still not 100% convinced that Uber wins, but the value of the company is in their data, and the location signals they get from everyone who has the app.
They do have your search history. And if you've established addresses as "Home" and "Work" or others with Google Maps they have that too. They also have your social graph based on your emails if you or those you communicate with use GMail. And they probably have the addresses of those people you correspond with, over email, to use as destinations. And they have your emails to connect relationships across that graph when your Mom signs her email "Love Mom". And they may have your calendar to figure out where you may want to go on what date if you use Google for your calendar. They have street traffic information to let you know how long it'll take you to get where you're going. They may have your Uber receipts in your GMail to connect an Uber driver's use of Google Maps with your email receipt -- so they now may know at least some of the "who" was riding in which Uber at any given time.
Google likely knows WAY more than Uber does about its potential riders.
As for the trip data:
a) I don't think this is either worth as much or is as hard to get as Uber would like their investors to think. You only really need average bulk commuter flows in order to get a near optimal fleet distribution, and this is surprisingly easy to get surprisingly quickly, and especially easy to manage when you don't need to worry about the vehicle distribution constraints human drivers create.
b) Google have this data in spades through Android device tracking. It doesn't matter that it's anonymized and aggregated, because individual trips don't matter; only having your cars in roughly the right place to respond to specific demands.
I think Uber have grossly misrepresented the extent to which this market (personal transport using self driving vehicles) will be 'winner take most', and equally grossly misrepresented the extent to which their current position creates any sort of moat guaranteeing them the 'win'.
Kind of a good explanation why Google brought Waze.
I'll get an Uber, maybe I wont get raped
I'll get an Uber, maybe I wont be billed $200
As fun as the Uber-jerking is, the future, if not sabotaged by all the many different interests that have high stakes in doing so, will be one where there are few if any real competitors to one monopolistic offerer of autonomous transportation services. Obviously Uber wants to be that one monopoly and I expect they will continue with their dirty tricks to get there, but others will also try to knock the king from the hill before he can complete his castle. Lyft, Curb, now Google, they will all try to beat Uber to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Google can force install their app on any android device. And if they are first driverless car owners I expect very high google ranking for all of Uber controversies in their search engine.
Can't book a flight (ITA), order a taxi (this), book a hotel or chat with a friend (Gmail), or pay for dinner (Wallet) without generating an activity log with a single company.
Even if (and perhaps even probably) Google weren't doing this intentionally, they've already demonstrated through failing to encrypt their inter-DC connections how they're becoming a massive single point of failure (remember Snowden showed us the NSA were tapping Google's internal network already). Whether the end result is an intelligence service tap, or some legislative measure affecting the company done in the open, I'll simply never be comfortable with one company concentrating so much personal data affecting so many people.
So, I suppose I have.
But that is the point of Scientific knowlege, is it not? Falsability...
More seriously though (HN can't take a joke), what is the real concern here? NSA can't 100% trust the data they collect and it certainly can't be used in any court because plausible deniability (and past, known-fabrications/parallel-construction) will always trump whatever records or logs are produced.
Google loves data. But generally in the aggregate, not the personal. I've yet to see anything even remotely creepy of any kind from google advertising. "Hey karmacondon, we saw that you recently booked a trip to las vegas, took a self-driving cab to the Bunny Ranch and used your Google Wallet to pay for two hours with someone named 'Bubbles'. Can we interest you in some anti-itch creme?". That kind of personal intrusion just doesn't match anything I've seen from Google, and until that day comes I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
MasterCard and Visa know more about you than Google ever will. You can't book a flight or check into a hotel without using a credit card, which is directly attached to your name and is trivially subpoenable. If you're really worried, there are ways to live a cash only existence, but it isn't easy. Some level of trust is required to live in modern society. It's good to be skeptical, but it always comes down to the level of inconvenience you're willing to trade for privacy.
Google has knowledge of routes which you take to work everyday. Friends you are close with. Online services you are using. And you want them to have it. You don't want (atleast intentionally) MC/Visa to have that kind of knowledge about you.
If those 80% were redundant, why not repurpose them to dig a little deeper into other activities?
1) Government programs have been temporarily and/or permanently shutdown by minority parties in the past.
2) US Government exists at the leisure of the people within its borders.
You mean "buy from".
This is Google's core business. And I don't consider the NSA more creepy than Google's other customers.
> This is Google's core business. And I don't consider the NSA more creepy than Google's other customers.
Google's core business is keeping personal data and using it to target ads that advertisers pay Google to show, not providing that personal data to paying customers. Selling the data would be giving away the prime competitive edge Google has, which lies in selling services (primarily advertising) where Google has a competitive edge because of its unique access to the data.
So, unless the NSA wants Google to show you ads rather than wanting detailed information on you, what they would be looking for would not be what Google's core business involves selling.
https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/how-the-cia-made-google-e836...
if you haven't read this, it's a long but great read.
the best thing google ever did was create go (golang). huge props to robert griesemer, rob pike and ken thompson for getting it all going.
There is something about the automated dispatch at giant scale business which overlaps with the search as interface idea. "Get me to [wherever]" is a natural extension of what you might do after searching. Furthermore, the act of finding a driver is itself a search. Feed the driver information back into search and it gets entertaining, with queries like "What are the restaurants right now with 80% rating, tables available and will cost me less than $20 to get to?" That's a query you can only answer with the driver and price data. As such Uber have the hard bit and can grow the rest, Google face a move into a physical world full of people, which is pretty much their Achilles heel.
- Facebook had access to tremendous amounts of personal information, and it was assumed they could leverage this data to improve ads and search and beat Google at their own game.
- Everyone sat at their desktop computer staring at Facebook for hours on end, making it valuable ad real estate. Again, this cut into Google's core business.
So is Uber a comparable headache for Google? I don't see Uber as being a threat to their core business (their business is ads, not search; search just happens to be their best channel for ad delivery). Arguably it provides valuable information to improve their ad targeting, but it seems like a huge investment for relatively little payout in that regard.
My guess is that it's a natural extension of their work on self-driving cars. People have identified how Uber would be natural fit for self-driving cars. But I doubt Google wants to be reliant on a third-party company with reputation problems to introduce these cars to the world. That would introduce too many variables. So they're cutting out the middle man and doing it themselves, at least at first.
So how does this impact advertising? A nation-wide or global fleet of automated, networked cars would obviously produce a glut of valuable information (arguably their Uber-clone would too, but an automated solution could be taken to another scale). But really, I think the self-driving car is a disruptive enough technology that it could be completely orthogonal to their core business and still worth pursuing.
On a side note, can we agree yet that Facebook is quickly fading into irrelevance? It seems to have two important properties left (neither of which they developed): WhatsApp and Instagram. WhatsApp gives Facebook as much value as AIM gave AOL in its later years (which is to say, not enough to justify the company's size and market capitalization). Instagram took Facebook's best use case (looking at your friends' photos) and stripped away everything that made the experience suck: ads and Farmville (in other words, Facebook's business model).
I like what they're doing with React though.
This is a great point that may not be getting enough play in this conversation. You could easily imagine Larry being nervous that Uber won't not be evil (pardon the double negative). I know people can probably point to examples where Google has lost their way on the 'Don't Be Evil' front, but I'm sure it's still a big part of their decision-making process. I use Uber and love the experience, but you have to think there's some truth to the horrible reputation they're earning themselves; Uber doesn't scream 'Don't Be Evil' to me.
If that's their end game here, I'd be disappointed.
On the last flight I took with Delta Airlines they had all the TVs drop down and they played five minutes worth of advertisements on the screens and through the loudspeakers. I just refuse to deal with companies that are hostile to their customers.
Going out to the bar? Show the user a drink you know is slightly higher than you know what your user would normally buy.
Coming come from the bar? Show them late night snacking, you can drive them through wherever or they can order right from the interface and it will be delivered to your house.
It could use your spoken conversations to better do search result targeting on a geographical and user level. CGI + TTS can personalize a number of ads just for you "Hey Josh, I saw you bought a domain earlier today, would you like to spin up an instance on Google cloud?". The possibilities are near limitless.
I'm not saying Google wouldn't stumble and fall on something like this. I'm sure in the early days before advertisers craft ads for this medium it will be rough with repetitive ads that are more of an annoyance but advertisers will like having your credit card on file. Soon the advertisers will catch on and provide "rich ads" that allow for ordering/buying/subscribing/+1-ing through the ad (tap on screen to interact or through your phone/tablet/laptop, did I mention? Free WIFI of course, there is even a chromebook you can use if you need).
Maybe it's such that you owe $W for the ride but you can take off X% if you allow Y "permission" or complete Z assignment and there exists enough of Z's / Y's such that the ride can be free. I'm sure it won't be presented that way, it will sneakier, maybe they can even offer users to give them $X if they allow it all. I can see pollers loving be able to target specific areas with questions (and maybe get unique poll results, of course unique impressions does cost more, a lot more). Local businesses running ads during business hours to offer to give users no ads for the rest of the ride if they let the Google car bring them by to buy something, it's on the way to their destination and the next item on their schedule isn't until $X and they have time. Advertise a restaurant and let the user make a reservation right there, don't worry, we put it on your calendar.
There is lot that sounds terrible about that world but I'm conflicted. If it leads to extinction of (over a span of a reasonable number of years for the complete transition) car accidents/deaths (through the removal of both the impaired and just plain bad drivers) due to it's "free" price tag. If it leads to an increased mobility for the lower class now that they have access to transportation. If it push highly fuel efficient or ideally electric cars (even further ideally charged by a solar recharging station). If it does even one of these things then I'm not sure how terrible it would really be...
I'm sure that there will exist, for a time, a netjets-esque "netrides" that either Google or another player will offer that uses nicer/better-kept cars. I'd hope there were online exchanges (or smaller groups running software off github that runs on a Raspberry Pi 3 B :)) where owners of such cars could put their car in a pool of other cars that could be used for rides. You find a way to even out total milage over all cars and users can block out time (daily commutes, special events, vacations, etc). I do worry that Google could eventually choke out these groups due to convenience, cost, and apathy but I have hope. And frankly the car manufacturers only seem to care about driverless cars (no I don't care how long they say some of this has been in development, I'd bet it's underfunded or a joke until recently) now that Google has overtaken them. So while they may all develop driverless cars (or licence it from Google) I'm going to credit a lot of the potential benefits/gains to Google for pushing the envelop and getting them off their asses.
What I'm saying in this extremely long reply (Sorry, I love talking/thinking about this stuff), is that yeah it might be a little sucky but look at the potential gains and the potential alternatives to the "Google car" and see it's not all bad.
I don't usually go out on a whim to a restaurant when the taxi is $40 each way, but when the travel cost is dramatically subsidized by the venue or zero...
The way it occurred was that anyone of moderate level inside of Google could start a project involving some outside company. This was seductively easy because those companies always wanted the validation that came from working with Google. But the person could be just a run of the mill senior engineer type (of which there were many).
So this engineer and this outside partner start putting together a mashup, and it goes well. The partner is loving the Google traffic and the senior engineer inside of Google is thinking "Wow, this is going to look great on my next promotion request." So it grows and grows, largely unnoticed by the folks who are really the movers and shakers in Google.
Then it continues to go well, the engineer has recruited a couple more Googlers to help her work on the project and it hits an tipping point. It really needs a full time project manager and the amount of resources inside the Google cloud it is using has gotten to the point where you needed to allocate them specifically. Since everyone likes success this goes swimmingly and now lots of people in the world are using this mashup service. At that point it gets the attention of the 'big boys'.
What happens next is an interesting reverse slicing of the project to figure out what its business model is, how much revenue it is generating, how much it could generate. I always wondered, but never had confirmed if somewhere there was a meeting to look at these and decide on next steps.
One of the outcomes of this noticing could be "Hmmm, we have an advantage/key technology and could do this better if we recast this as a Google Product rather than being a provider to this Partner's product." And then there is some announcement of this new product initiative at Google and how cool it is going to be. Meanwhile the original partner now realized that Google isn't a partner anymore, rather they are at best a competitor and at worst a threat to their existence. At that point, depending on their resources they start scrambling to reduce their dependency on Google services in order to avoid that future.
I think for most people this is understood as a possible 'success' outcome of working with Google.
I can't imagine why you think this.
I'm picturing that you can order the Google autonomous car that has a 42" TV screen, a hot tub, and a magnum of champagne.
Or the stretch limo.
Or a flatbed truck. Maybe one without a passenger compartment.
Picture "PODS." Portable On-Demand Storage. Except the thing just drives to your house.
Picture ordering "Lightning McQueen" for your kid's birthday party. He shows up, and someone is doing the "Talk With Crush" thing, remotely animating Lightning's eyes, etc.
Picture ordering "Herbie The Love Bug" to drive your kid and his date to prom.
Or ordering the DeLorean from Back to the Future. Or the A-Team van. Or KITT.
Or a motor-home / RV.
Or a giant truck filled with Arcade Machines. Again, for corporate parties.
Or a portable kitchen. Stocked with ingredients you pick. Great for outdoor parties at parks, tail-gating, etc.
Or a micro-brew / mini-bar. Whatever bottles you open, you pay for. Stocked blender, ice, brews on tap, etc.
Cripes, if you want to test-drive a car, having one that can autonomously show up at your work, or home... Not that you'd necessarily buy an autonomous one, but the idea of bringing the dealership to you?
Or ordering a snow-plow. No driver. You click a button, pay $10, and your driveway gets plowed.
Or getting a Student Driver car. It sits there watching your kid learn to drive, and saves their ass if they do anything dumb. Gives them a report card. Lets you know how they're doing.
Or ordering a Sleeper car. Shows up at my house at 9 pm, and drives me to Chicago by 8 am. I'd order one every weekend.
Seems like a great way to handle people in my situation where I can only afford a small place but don't necessarily want to get rid of all my stuff just because my current location doesnt work for it
To me, if Google uses insider knowledge to copy Uber, then that would be huge mistake and credibility killer; if they want to build up their own competitor from scratch without any insider knowledge, then that's their business.
Through a paranoid lens, Google APIs are corporate espionage you sign up for. Since Google is a valuable and entrenched service provider, they can get away with it. What I could see companies doing in return is attempting to obscure their API usage by fabricating requests. For example, Uber could break the correspondence between API requests and trips by sending requests that look authentic but don't correspond to any actual trips. This kind of corporate information warfare sounds like something out of a William Gibson novel, but it certainly feels present and real when you look at Google's relationships.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/books/money-and-power-abou...
This is their way of getting a head start in that direction, and smoothing the transition of the technology to partners like Uber down the road.
(edit) The article suggest self driving cars, and by extension Google's ridesharing service won't be ready for 2-5 more years.
And Uber's customer-base is price sensitive. You can easily get into this market if you're willing to price compete with Uber.
Now, Uber is very willing to price-compete ferociously. It will absolutely drive you both deep into unprofitability. And Uber has quite a war-chest, and it can push around its smaller competitors this way. But as rich as Uber is, there are plenty of companies that are richer. Way richer. Orders of magnitude richer.
I think that so far, the really big boys have said, "Why do we want to get into a price war with Uber? They'll fight until the last breath, I don't see why we should launch a deeply unprofitable ride-sharing service."
Amazon might do it eventually. They have expertise in operating at high scale, low-margin, and they're big enough to destroy Uber. They also might want to use a ride-sharing service to deliver goods. I think that right now, they've mostly said, "We're unconvinced that there's a real logistics business here, and so we aren't going to get involved."
Google might do it for the data.
I can't see Apple bothering -- it's pretty far outside of their corporate comfort zone. But if, I don't know, Tim Cook gets hit by a bus and their new CEO wants to make major changes, they absolutely COULD do it.
Microsoft could maybe do it in an attempt to create a compelling entry-point to their ecosystem, but it's not very Microsofty.
I don't see that any non-computer companies currently have a reason to try it.
That's why Google has an advantage over everyone else - for them it's a one-sided marketplace, they don't need to worry about the driver. And that gives them a big cost advantage over Uber.
Neither Uber's passengers nor their drivers are deeply loyal. They are for the most part brought to the service by the value prop. Uber is of course an established brand, and that brand has some value, but the value is hardly infinite. A deep pocketed competitor could establish themselves.
This sort of cross-subsidy has a poor track record when used against well-capitalized opponents. (In many situations, it's also illegal: see "dumping".) Unless you can complete wipe out the competition and force them out of business, you're pouring money down the drain, and building nothing of value with it. Bing Cashback resulted in most people doing their searching on Google, identifying what they wanted to buy, and then buying it on Bing so that Microsoft would pay them.
You get very odd arbitrage situations that basically result in funneling money straight from the corporation that's being idiotic to a savvy consumer. If a company did what you suggest, I would immediately sign up with them, along with my fiancee. We would then use the app every time we took a trip together or picked each other up. Since one of us is the driver and one is the passenger and the driver earns more than the passenger pays, we'd be making money at this company's expense every time we drove somewhere. Now imagine every carpool, group of friends, or just random strangers who setup a business to exploit this arbitrage opportunity doing that.
And, just to be clear, that's what Uber does. Not in as simple and straightforward a way as you're suggesting, but at least large fractions of the time, it pays its drivers more than its passengers pay it (for example: it's constantly giving me $10 coupons. It has sign-up bonuses and income guarantees for drivers. Etc.) Of course, it's spending investment money, not money from its other non-existent businesses.
So if you and your fiancee want to try this business, you can do it right now with Uber. Or Lyft. I suspect you will find that despite the fact that there is theoretically a fair amount of money on the table here, they've made it obnoxious enough to get that you won't bother with it.
And now this. I guess google is like "well we got the hard part, self driving cars. Why not just go after this ourselves?"
What is the thing google really wants? Is it more valuable to try to directly monetize all this vehicle traffic, or be the platform every else uses? Google could set up rev share, get access to all the vehicle data (even if they don't use google maps), and set google as default software in the car web experience.
It seems greedy, arrogant, and unaligned with their core ways of making money. They're trying to be vertically integrated player which can work if you control all supply but once Google introduces the tech how long is it going to take for a rival to copy, parents aside?
I think they want a seriously diversified revenue stream. This gives them data, yes - but it's also directly monetizable. If they see personal transport as a winner takes all market, and they can branch into deliveries, and they do have the best self driving cars then they have a serious advantage in the market and a path to a serious new revenue stream.
I totally agree with this. If I were working at Google, the main thing that would keep me awake at night is the long-term dependence on a single-source of income, i.e. advertising. And there's a lot of reasons advertising is not a good business to be reliant upon. It's pretty terrifying when you look at their revenue stats.
I'm surprised they haven't already achieved this diversity yet, though. Surely at IPO it would have been their number one concern?
Added with Express to overload deliveries to maximize utility (maybe offer riders a discount if they can make an express stop along the way...)
but, sure, it would most likely be less.
At any rate, this eventual reduction in insurance is why I started by saying "Initially at least". With time, the cost of manufacturing self driving cars will also go down.
Electric vehicles would depreciate at a much slower rate than ICE vehicles, as the only components that wear would be moving parts (electric motor, fans for cabin comfort) and any degradation to the battery pack (Tesla has packs at 500K miles that still have 80% capacity).
"@business We think you'll find Uber and Lyft work quite well. We use them all the time."
But having said that, there is probably nothing stopping Google from creating a driverless car Uber rival, it would fall outside of the realm of being a true direct competitor as there are no drivers. But are driverless cars at a point where they can be rolled out on a larger scale? Seems there is a lot of regulation and process to abide by before that starts to happen, maybe a controlled rollout?
I am surprised Google haven't tried launching their own airline yet, it would probably be undeniably easier than a ridesharing network of driverless cars.
1. http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_23041939/san-jose-city-council...
"Signature's project includes seven hangars for corporate jets, with five of those hangars to be used by Blue City Holdings, its primary tenant. That company will manage aircraft for Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, whose private jets are now parked at Moffett Field, where their lease is up next year."
Why would they do that to a company they are invested in?
>> "if they execute on this."
There's the key. They are going to face the same regulatory problems as Uber. Worse if they go the self-driving car route as that going to require huge overalls to legislation worldwide.
Not sure the taxi companies would get in bed with Google, or cut rates accordingly, I'm just suggesting that driverless cars have certain advantages.
That said, theres a whole other can of worms of trying to pass regulation allowing pilotless cars, which I'd guess will be just as difficult as duking it out with TLC's around the country.
I'm not sure where all of this Google love comes from on HN (besides all of the engineers that work there). Google is just as evil as any large corporation.
They may surgar-coat everything with a "do no evil" mantra, but it's just good PR. When you peel back these layers, it's business as usual.
Let's not exaggerate. Google might not be perfect; nobody is, but their actions are great magnitudes in distance from the evil some other companies have done. I'd rather work for Google than any of the companies below:
- http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/10/1141724/-Walmart-fu...
- http://www.alternet.org/story/52526/rural_communities_exploi...
- http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/08/02/3466915/chiquita-c...
- http://philosophia.uncg.edu/phi361-metivier/module-2-why-doe...
- https://www.aclu.org/prisoners-rights/private-prisons
- ...just about any oil company.
- ...The diamond industry.
- ...and I'm highly suspicious of what goes on in insurance & credit card companies.
Most Android phones push you to put everything into the cloud. Do you know why? Oh yeah, that's right, so they can sell your data to advertisers.
Recently, they stopped putting organic search terms in referral traffic from the Google search engine to a website, effectively making it impossible to use any other applications except Google Adsense. Great company, right?
They have had a monopoly as bad and far reaching as Microsoft..yet I rarely hear the hatred that I used to hear about Microsoft in the late 90s.
It seems like all you need to do is support the developer community by giving out lots of free software/open source and the tech community will forgive you for pretty much anything (employing you at $100,000+/year also helps in this forgiveness).
Google hasn't done this. So let's not get worked up about a hypothetical.
Here in NYC I've found several streets mislabeled as one-way in the wrong direction, and not too long ago at that. If these major errors can be found by some guy just fooling around, in one of the biggest cities in the world, how useful is OSM for navigation?
No one has perfect data. At least when I update OSM, it updates relatively quickly as opposed to Google Maps which took months to get updated after reporting the errors.
You're right though, it would absolutely destroy the business, requiring them to redevelop their apps. Would be a huge service disruption.
which gives Google a fire hose of data about transportation patterns within cities
It seems that their investment in Uber was about getting someone to gather the data for them, perhaps it was cheaper than doing it themselves!
* "Chris Urmson of Google has said that the lidar technology cannot spot potholes or humans, such as a police officer, signaling the car to stop." [1]
* "Another big problem for Google is the current cost of its driverless car, which is reportedly outfitted with a whopping $250,000 in equipment." [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car
[2] http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/21/3-reasons-g...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/upshot/new-york-city-taxi-...
Anyway, I'm sure Google has enough money to support any failures (this point was made in a previous article about the multi-tool card). But, in the long run, how will Google prevent itself from appearing to look like a monopoly (such as Apple's iPhones in the earlier days)?
Not super related to this story, but I always have to wonder: why do powerful people join boards? What's in it for them? It seems like an awful lot of work, responsibility, and potential for conflict of interest. What do board members get out of it?
>Directors of Fortune 500 companies received median pay of $234,000 in 2011. Directorship is a part-time job. A recent National Association of Corporate Directors study found directors averaging just 4.3 hours a week on board work.
A new search engine from Google written with different goals and views of how things should be done would be very interesting and probably gain a good portion of Bing and Yahoo! Users in the process. This applies to a lot of businesses of course.
An Uber from Google could also be great too but their once clear idea of what they are is getting fragmented and that'll show in the implementation and UX of Google Cabs.
The "retraining" argument is nothing more than a tool for our kind to disingenuously dismiss the negative impacts that come with progress.
[edit] and in the time it took to write this post someone already responded to that effect, hurray HN predictability :)
Taxi cab drivers, in NYC, who own their medallions have taken out huge loans in order to obtain the right the drive people in New York City. They can't just "retrain"/find another job when they've got to continue driving 12 hours a day just to make ends meet and pay off their loan.
And even if they are magically able to obtain the funds and time and ability to retrain, what kind of environment do they then face?
Imagine if a taxi driver somehow got their hands on $20K and went to hacker school. What kind of treatment does a hypothetical 40 year-old ex-taxi-driver-turned-programmer face when interviewing for entry level programming jobs, in an industry infamous for its ageism and obsession with pedigree?
None of this adds up. In reality the loss of entire industries means chronic unemployment and under-employment for most. We can prop up the outliers who manage to successfully move to other fields all we want, that doesn't make the poverty and desperation that results any less real.
Now we can argue that the suffering of millions of people is a necessary part of progress, but pretending that these people will just magically fly off to other jobs is a level of classist lunacy that's only tenable for someone who has never stepped outside their little upper class white collar bubble.
Changing their jobs
Deleted comment
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987441
Oh well; there goes Uber's 50 billion dollars valuation...
Google wants to be everywhere, but it looks like it doesn't have enough good developers.
I think Uber has chance to overcome Google, even if Google really decided to compete in this area.
How hard can it be to implement an Uber clone? Like a week?
What's stopping anyone from entering this space? Is it technology? Marketing? Regulation? Trust? A secret sauce?
I'd love to understand.
"We also walk dogs."
Anyone game to take longbets on Google building a successful product internally and scaling it with their traditional approach?
I'm always doubtful.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/28/5758734/uber-will-eventual...
On the other hand, Google has only been successful with search and advertising and are known for terrible customer service. I mean, who are you going to call when your driver rapes you? You'll never be able to talk to a human.
If the self-driving car rapes you, you are probably a character in a scifi-horror movie.
I would presume, whether the driver was a personal acquaintance, a traditional taxi driver, an Uber/Lyft driver, or a "Google Rides" driver, the answer to that question would be ... the police and a personal injury attorney, and whatever physical and mental health professionals you thought were appropriate.
Of course, since the reports of Google developing a ride hailing service are that it is in conjunction with their autonomous car project, it seems at least plausible that that wouldn't even be physically possible with the Google service.
Are there any young sexy hipster actuarial startups? The bidding war starts now.