> The real innovation was using a tsunami of cheap financing to engage in a predatory pricing war to gain oligopoly status and opening up being a taxi driver to

> The real innovation was using a tsunami of cheap financing to engage in a predatory pricing war to gain oligopoly status and opening up being a taxi driver to anyone with a car. I agree with that 100% but I wouldn't say that they "didn't change the game." The sheer availability of taxi services outside of a handful of densely populated urban centers was almost non-existent before Uber. They existed but I certainly wouldn't call them "on demand." In my relatively small college town it was basically impossible to get a taxi to pick you up in less than an hour from when you called the dispatcher (and sometimes they would just not show up at all....). Now I can have an Uber pick me up within 10-15 minutes basically anywhere at almost any time. As you said this is mostly because they are subsidizing all of this with huge gushers of capital and it remains to be seen whether they can actually operate that sort of service profitably.