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>present a seamless experience to the customers/passengers There does exist a segment of users who are willing to navigate a less-than-seamless experience if t
by tnzm 6y ago
>present a seamless experience to the customers/passengers
There does exist a segment of users who are willing to navigate a less-than-seamless experience if that lets them avoid dealing with a less-than-ethical business. (And probably there's at least some PR effort involved in making their voices not count.)
Besides, the Uber/Lyft experience is far from "seamless", and developing a ride-sharing app that does _not_ aim to work on a global scale has different challenges from those outlined in that post.
>But a high-tech complexity business that's expensive to build is inherently too costly for a pool of drivers' savings to fund.
>Whenever you see "worker-owned", mentally substitute "capital-constrained" -- and it starts to make sense why many businesses domains don't have any coops rising up to compete with VC-fueled startups.
My favorite conspiracy theory is that VC is poured into software not to produce meaningful innovation, but chiefly to hypercomplicate the field in a sort of Cambrian explosion, so that the "capital-constrained" can't get anything done with the baroque frameworks and out-of-touch developers that the ecosystem produces.
Thankfully, people who understand how a computer works (and what it's good for) do exist outside of SV. Sometimes (shhh!) they're even motivated by other things besides short-term capital accumulation!
And better ethics can mean better efficiency - fewer politically driven kludges in software, less staff turnover, even the fact that people can and do accept to get paid a more average salary in exchange for working at a place that isn't screwing people over at industrial fucking scale.
That's how a cooperative can compete with a megacorpo, although realistically a more reasonable first goal would be to coexist in the same markets, or operate in markets that have demand but are deemed insufficiently profitable for the corp.
- sokoloff 6y ago> less-than-seamless experience if that lets them avoid dealing with a less-than-ethical business. True; this is why I started using Uber: to avoid the “oh the credit card machine is broken, you need to pay cash” only to find out it did work AND I’d paid cash.
- tnzm 6y agoYeah, it works both ways. Otherwise we wouldn't have competing alternatives to discuss (Uber, cooperatives, taxi companies, solo cabbies... I hear that in Russia it's customary to hail any car on the street and pay for a ride, with obvious safety drawbacks of course) What you're describing can happen anywhere there is a PoS terminal. I guess a sketchy cabbie has the benefit of being able to drive away before you realize what happened (and it could be harder to see the card machine when sitting in a car as opposed to e.g. paying at a desk in a shop?) Nevertheless, "we let users order and pay for rides with an app" is a part of the business model which is totally distinct from "we'll make sure users never get screwed by fucking with the workers". Which does have an obvious advantage in terms of customer retention though - especially if your customers are petty bourgeois knowledge workers who want to benefit from an "on-demand" lifestyle and to distance themselves from the people doing the actual gig. Not to mention, Uber probably has more data on your ass than what a single fraudulent transaction entails (for which you can at least issue request chargeback). It's up to them to handle it responsibly, and they have failed to do so at least once (the 2017 hack). Just like every SV company that keeps screwing up but people still love them because all those beautiful apps make their expensive smartphones a little less pointless.
- marcosdumay 6y ago> That's how a cooperative can compete with a megacorpo Hum... I guess you forgot about the main competitive force of cooperatives. On service based industries, they let the service providers capture most of the value, what should attract better service. (But some times it doesn't, those things are complex.) It's not about the IT people at all.
- tnzm 6y agoParent post explicitly referenced "a high-tech complexity business". Agreed that "high-tech complexity" is not essential to providing a service, indeed it's often antithetical to that goal. Does help with market capture though.