This is a great article. Wonderful detail on the totally bogus measures and nonsense non-GAAP accounting. I understand why investors placed a lot of hope here.

This is a great article. Wonderful detail on the totally bogus measures and nonsense non-GAAP accounting. I understand why investors placed a lot of hope here. There was always some tiny chance they'd actually solve self-driving, or individual cars would just go out of style and everyone would become totally reliant on a monopoly and who doesn't want to be on the ground floor of Amazon for transportation? But it seems increasingly obvious that won't happen now. I doubt we're transitioning into a 100% permanent work-from-home future, but I suspect demand for vehicular travel will remain permanently depressed and all the major office construction projects will look increasingly stupid. I remember a Uber building going up just a few blocks from me for years originally promised something like 70,000 jobs to Dallas and I don't think they're delivering any at this point. I agree with both the positive and negative takes expressed here. This was great as a consumer. It was fun while it lasted. App-enabled rideshare proved that consumer products can be wonderful for consumers when they don't need to make money. On the other hand, the part they played in promoting the gig economy and eroding labor rights, all while depressing demand for green public transit projects in an era where we may only be a decade from common mass-death events thanks to heat waves, is not going to be looked upon kindly by history. We as technologists don't want to be held accountable for the negative social impacts of our technology. We don't want the prevailing memory of us forever to be a blank thousand-yard stare talking about how we've become death, the destroyer of worlds. But we play our part. Then again, so do these accountants, except they actually regularly get sent to prison.