the article nailed it: for an "uber for x" to work, it requires (1) commodity, low skill service combined with (2) on demand scheduling. one thing it's 2x2 mat

the article nailed it: for an "uber for x" to work, it requires (1) commodity, low skill service combined with (2) on demand scheduling. one thing it's 2x2 matrix implies is that both taxi services and delivery services share a common appropriateness as "good" automatable services. but that's not true. they certainly differ on the scheduling metric - delivery is not nearly as on-demand as taxi service. but there is another, more important variable that differentiates these two: lcationality. while a taxi service can start and end anywhere, delivery services are constrained to start at particular locations, which makes logistics and routing the primary challenge to overcome. you have to get vehicles to the pickup point each time, which wastes time and money. delivery companies try to overcome this in a variety of ways: 1) trying to deliver "anything" (deliv, postmates) to approximate a more even geographic distribution of pickup points 2) subsidizing delivery through membership (amazon) 3) making delivery incidental to the core service (instacart is a marketing channel disguised as a delivery service) i'm sure there are dozens of other ways that companies are trying to overcome this inherent last-mile logistics problem, but it's a real differentiator between taxi and delivery.