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There may come a day when Uber is winning because of their data, but that day is years away. Until then, back in reality, Uber is winning by spending investor m

There may come a day when Uber is winning because of their data, but that day is years away. Until then, back in reality, Uber is winning by spending investor money to pay customers to use their service. I tried DuckDuckGo and did not find the results to be excellent, so I switched back to Google. But I literally can't tell the difference between a Lyft, an Uber or a Fasten cab, it's just a sticker on the window as far as the customer is concerned. Price is the only significant discriminator.

adventured 9y ago
> Price is the only significant discriminator. No, availability / scale, is also a massive discriminator. That's at least as important as price in the equation of succeeding as an Uber competitor. Lyft has some scale, however that requirement keeps out other new competition in a extremely big way. It'll have cost Lyft billions of dollars just to try to stay in the game with Uber and to get to meaningful scale; no VC is throwing another $2+ billion at the Nth Uber clone (particularly when you still have to compete with an existing Lyft). Few customers will keep track of a dozen Uber-clone services, and remember which ones have good city-by-city availability / representation. I live in SF, I'm going to Dallas, I want to have one Uber-like service that I can use in both locations without having to think about it, it just works in most or all major cities. That one issue will keep out most competition (as though the billion dollar cost of trying to dig into the market, trying to take share away from Uber & Lyft, isn't enough).