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Cost will rise, their marketing budgets will balloon as costs to acquire customers spirals out of control. Then as a two horse race they will realise that if th

• disordinary 10y ago
  And then we will be regretting the fact that they killed off the taxi companies who, in some cities at least, were in a very competitive but sustainable market before uber came along.
  • dnautics 10y ago
    Competitive and sustainable? Tell that to the non-owners taxi driver suffering under exploitative commission structures and has to rent their car from an intermediary to even begin to make money.
    • cel1ne 10y ago
      Can both of you, give an example where classic taxi-drivers are in a particulary bad position and being helped by lyft & uber and an example where it's the other way round?
    • disordinary 10y ago
      That's why I said in many cities. In quite a few cities the Taxi industry is the only opportunity for immigrants and they're forced to work long hours in rented vehicles for very low wages. That's not good. In other cities the taxi industry requires quite a lot of education and is harder to get into. Where I live Uber drivers are often taxi drivers, they pull the taxi signs off their cars when they get an Uber pickup, despite the fact that we have a fairly exploitative taxi system they say that they get paid less by Uber. Ultimately there are dozens of taxi companies and one Uber, those taxi companies range from very large to tiny but none of them can afford to run sustained losses to knock out competitors like Uber.
• paganel 10y ago
  > their marketing budgets will balloon as costs to acquire customers spirals out of control. For what it's worth I saw a pitch-add for Uber two days ago during the French League 1 match between Lille and Saint-Etienne. I've never seen an add for an Silicon Valley company during an European football match before, and I've been watching this sport for 30+ years.