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> But that’s not the case in this example. I don't understand. Software has ultimate economies of scale. Also, they're not paying Uber a fixed cost, they're st

> But that’s not the case in this example. I don't understand. Software has ultimate economies of scale. Also, they're not paying Uber a fixed cost, they're strictly subsidizing the ride. They can opt out at any time, if I'm reading the article correctly. > Uber has a lot of expenses and complexity to handle corner cases that will never occur in this town – outsourcing is wasteful. That’s like building a heating system into a house in Phoenix. One of us is misunderstanding the point of software. Just because you're not using certain capabilities doesn't mean you're charged extra for them. To your point, did you waste money by buying your IDE if you don't use each and every feature, because outsourcing your dev environment is "wasteful"?

kuschku 10y ago
> Just because you're not using certain capabilities doesn't mean you're charged extra for them. But you are. Such a system for a small town doesn’t need native apps, it doesn’t need to look beautiful. You can use a single PhoneGap app for all OSes, also the same on the web. You can avoid the entire payment infrastructure, and have riders pay the drivers directly. Alternatively, use Square, and you won’t have to make your own payment system either way. A lot of uber’s costs only appear at huge scale. This town doesn’t need uber, it needs a simple ride sharing service like every town in the second or third world has – and those even work without any app.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  > But you are. Explain that last bit. Economies of scale work very well for software. Whenever there's a new security patch or a feature that Uber implements, you get it for free if you use Uber as a platform, in that you don't pay any additional cost. Also, you don't need to pay money for maintenance/servers. At this point I'm not quite sure if you're trolling or not. That'd be like advocating that a town's government use a home-coded text editor instead of Microsoft Word, because you don't need any of that fancy stuff that you get for no incremental cost.

kuschku 10y ago

> Just because you're not using certain capabilities doesn't mean you're charged extra for them. But you are. Such a system for a small town doesn’t need native apps, it doesn’t need to look beautiful. You can use a single PhoneGap app for all OSes, also the same on the web. You can avoid the entire payment infrastructure, and have riders pay the drivers directly. Alternatively, use Square, and you won’t have to make your own payment system either way. A lot of uber’s costs only appear at huge scale. This town doesn’t need uber, it needs a simple ride sharing service like every town in the second or third world has – and those even work without any app.

jimmywanger 10y ago
> But you are. Explain that last bit. Economies of scale work very well for software. Whenever there's a new security patch or a feature that Uber implements, you get it for free if you use Uber as a platform, in that you don't pay any additional cost. Also, you don't need to pay money for maintenance/servers. At this point I'm not quite sure if you're trolling or not. That'd be like advocating that a town's government use a home-coded text editor instead of Microsoft Word, because you don't need any of that fancy stuff that you get for no incremental cost.