give me 3 good software developers and I can give you an Uber app maybe in 3-6 months? but what I can't give you is uber app being on every iPhone in the country.
> you can, but I am used to using uber app to call an uber.
yes, waze had 100M+ users and still failed to have a successful launch with waze carpool.
part of the problem is Google is too successful.
If a business makes USD 10M a year and takes up a month worth of attention every year from the Alphabet CEO, they will probably shut it down before we can say Google Product Graveyard.
When I worked at Google our team came up with a data product that would have been pure margin and $75m/yr with customers lined up -- and I couldn't find a VP interested in cashing the checks because it wasn't on their annual OKRs.
Google is a great company but it has never been truly hungry because it has never faced an existential threat.
It's not just OKRs. That $75m/year consumes attention all up and down and across Google. Lots of things that are slam dunks at a small or medium company are just more trouble than they're worth at most really large firms.
What's an example of something for consumers that Uber 2023 does a lot better than Uber 2010, if the drivers behave entirely cooperatively? (since we're talking autonomous vehicles here)
route planning / fleet management i think is a huge optimization problem. perhaps you can cut it for MVP but it would require having a big multiple of drivers to provide the same service
another big deal is gps accuracy in cities, which is a pretty non trivial problem but at this point a consumer expectation https://www.uber.com/blog/rethinking-gps/
Ahhh yep. I remember Uber 2010 unopinionatedly just setting the pin directly on whatever the reading was from GPS. Stale or inaccurate GPS readings led to so much confused communication between drivers & passengers.
That's a good one. I remember lots of shenanigans about putting pins next to airports & then contacting the driver to get picked up at the airport on early Uber.
Not sure this particular one would affect Waymo if they were going it alone, since their rollout to each service area would involve designation of pickup & drop off points at airports and collaboration with airports, which they'll have to do either way, but it's definitely a significant difference between Uber 2010 & 2023.
Uber is losing money and is frequently accused of undervaluing the deprecation and maintenance of the drivers' vehicles.
If Google was to enter a market at a loss in an effort to use its market dominance in Android to drive out a competitor that would potentially be something that would be considered anticompetitive and US regulators would likely be interested in it.
I don't believe that Google can compete with Uber losing money as it is nor that Google has an appetite for purchasing the necessary vehicles and maintaining them outside of a few test cities for a technology demo. Having driverless taxis also means that they would need to do a better job with end user support (compare the urgency of "help, I'm locked out of my email" and their current resolution time to "help, I'm locked in a car and can't get out!").
