I think the important question to ask here is if people continue to want to pay & hail taxis from their phone? If the answer to that is yes then Uber will be fi

I think the important question to ask here is if people continue to want to pay & hail taxis from their phone? If the answer to that is yes then Uber will be fine so long as they're one of the apps that people continue to use to hail taxis. Personally I don't see taxi hailing apps going anywhere and I don't see Uber losing significant market share to its competition if they price competitively. 100% agreed. It wasn't that long ago that Amazon was starting to catch on in large part due to its (and more broadly the Internet's) reputation for low prices. Nowadays that's no longer the case, and yet here we are. Where I think you have a point is in regards to Uber's potential operating margins. Is it reasonable to assign Google / Facebook sized margins to a company like Uber? Probably not [...] I'd argue taxi hailing apps (as they currently exist) are basically commodities. I would also have to agree with this. I've long since used Lyft and Uber interchangeably depending on current local prices; a third-party app could easily go further to consolidate every major ride sharing service and automatically book the cheapest ride at any given time. I see the trajectory of Uber and Lyft more as consolidating the market share of the taxi industry into a handful of owners than really creating a novel market or economics. The economies of scale and massive VC-backed war chests could make for viable stepping stones to bringing production-ready self-driving tech to market, which would change the economics, but last I heard it seems like Waymo is leading the pack there without the albatross of a massively unprofitable service business.