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I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber obviously cannot spin up an org to repli

I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. However, Uber obviously cannot spin up an org to replicate self driving vehicles in a few months. By that logic I would say Waymo has all of the power since they could develop their own app and undercut uber on pricing. The customers would instantly leave as it is a race to the bottom with ride share.

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bartwr 3y ago
Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing in general, and autonomous vehicles) onto an entity which is already "hated".
- vasilipupkin 3y ago
  give me 3 good software developers and I can give you an Uber app maybe in 3-6 months? but what I can't give you is uber app being on every iPhone in the country.
  - JB_Dev 3y ago
    If my ride-sharing app charges riders half the price, I think we’ll get quite a few riders in a short amount of time. Uber won’t be able to compete.
    - shagie 3y ago
      Uber is losing money and is frequently accused of undervaluing the deprecation and maintenance of the drivers' vehicles. If Google was to enter a market at a loss in an effort to use its market dominance in Android to drive out a competitor that would potentially be something that would be considered anticompetitive and US regulators would likely be interested in it. I don't believe that Google can compete with Uber losing money as it is nor that Google has an appetite for purchasing the necessary vehicles and maintaining them outside of a few test cities for a technology demo. Having driverless taxis also means that they would need to do a better job with end user support (compare the urgency of "help, I'm locked out of my email" and their current resolution time to "help, I'm locked in a car and can't get out!").
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    No but if you're Google you can put it on literally every android phone quite quickly.
    - newleaf 3y ago
      Not just that, but you can put it in front of every Google Maps user.
      - vasilipupkin 3y ago
        you can, but I am used to using uber app to call an uber.
        mcny 3y ago
        > you can, but I am used to using uber app to call an uber. yes, waze had 100M+ users and still failed to have a successful launch with waze carpool. part of the problem is Google is too successful. If a business makes USD 10M a year and takes up a month worth of attention every year from the Alphabet CEO, they will probably shut it down before we can say Google Product Graveyard.
        dweekly 3y ago
        When I worked at Google our team came up with a data product that would have been pure margin and $75m/yr with customers lined up -- and I couldn't find a VP interested in cashing the checks because it wasn't on their annual OKRs. Google is a great company but it has never been truly hungry because it has never faced an existential threat.
        stickyricky 3y ago
        What's the product? Asking for a friend...
        ghaff 3y ago
        It's not just OKRs. That $75m/year consumes attention all up and down and across Google. Lots of things that are slam dunks at a small or medium company are just more trouble than they're worth at most really large firms.
  - somsak2 3y ago
    with those resources, you can give me the Uber app from 2010. consumer expectations are much higher than 13 years ago and that's not going to cut it.
    - jfoster 3y ago
      What's an example of something for consumers that Uber 2023 does a lot better than Uber 2010, if the drivers behave entirely cooperatively? (since we're talking autonomous vehicles here)
      - STRiDEX 3y ago
        airport terminal maps and regulations for every major airport in the united states
        jfoster 3y ago
        That's a good one. I remember lots of shenanigans about putting pins next to airports & then contacting the driver to get picked up at the airport on early Uber. Not sure this particular one would affect Waymo if they were going it alone, since their rollout to each service area would involve designation of pickup & drop off points at airports and collaboration with airports, which they'll have to do either way, but it's definitely a significant difference between Uber 2010 & 2023.
      - somsak2 3y ago
        route planning / fleet management i think is a huge optimization problem. perhaps you can cut it for MVP but it would require having a big multiple of drivers to provide the same service another big deal is gps accuracy in cities, which is a pretty non trivial problem but at this point a consumer expectation https://www.uber.com/blog/rethinking-gps/ https://www.uber.com/blog/rethinking-gps/
        jfoster 3y ago
        Ahhh yep. I remember Uber 2010 unopinionatedly just setting the pin directly on whatever the reading was from GPS. Stale or inaccurate GPS readings led to so much confused communication between drivers & passengers.
  - Gunnerhead 3y ago
    The good old “I can build that in a weekend”.
  - squokko 3y ago
    >give me 3 good software developers and I can give you an Uber app maybe in 3-6 months LOLOLOL
- alsodumb 3y ago
  It's not like Waymo/Uber can roll in with autonomous taxis in every city just because Uber figured out the local regulation - many cities would have explicit regulation for anything driverless. I think it's the later point - they want to stay in the shadows until they are super confident. I wonder what will happen to Uber eventually though. It'll be interesting if Cruise ends up partnering with/acquiring Lyft. Although Cruise seem to be still betting on their Origin vehicle.
- jefftk 3y ago
  > Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits Is experience doing this with human drivers all that helpful for building a driverless service? I'd expect the legal and regulatory questions would be very different?
- bushbaba 3y ago
  Don’t forget regulatory pressure of buying Uber. That might not be approved.
- riskable 3y ago
  > Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. This is nonsense. Google has more than enough legal resources to handle this. So much so that it would be nothing more than a regular 3-6 month project that would be assigned a small team of lawyers inside their org. It's no different than any other regionally-regulated product launch at large companies. Not only that but Google has enough money that they could just hire away some folks that work at Uber/Lyft to get a huge jumpstart on any such project. Even if they didn't need such expertise they'd probably still recruit and hire those people just to be safe; to get the perspective of people with experience. Big companies have big legal organizations and they don't actually operate that differently from the IT orgs that so many of us on HN are used to. For example, they would probably divide up the task on state-by-state basis with lawyers certified to practice law in each respective state assigned as SMEs or to-be-SMEs. They would do their research and for bigger states they might even have county-level SME lawyers or at the very least paralegals that focus on that particular region. Big cities would probably be assigned their own teams of SME lawyers as well. It's like any given complex programming task: Divide and conquer. Rolling out a new highly-regulated product across a large region is a highly parallelizeable procedure.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Big companies have big legal organizations and they don't actually operate that differently from the IT orgs that so many of us on HN are used to. Well, if you are referring to IT organizations in firms in the tech industry where that’s the core business (i.e., a value center) you are wrong, they are run more like IT orgs in non-tech firms (cost centers), vigorously minimized to be a bit smaller than they should be to handle routine day-to-day needs effectively, with new, emergent, and non-routine work outsourced.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    Sure, technically that's correct. But it's google we're talking about. The company with a tremendous list of failures that should have been easy slam dunks.
  - 3y ago
- FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
  > figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Hm. This is like -- It's not 1066 any more, there are property rights now. The original regulatory capture. Step 1: Ignore the law; establish a fait accompli. Step 2: Sanctify the new status quo. Sad for a rule-follower to figure out that this is how things work. On the other hand, I guess rule-following is low risk. For each William the Conqueror there were thousands of warriors who just got killed on the battlefield. And I'm sure the guy had to work really hard, you know, like nights and weekends.
- chris222 3y ago
  It’s not trivial at all. Do you work in the space at all?
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  Black Wolf [0] has been all over the news lately, and seems to be doing this. [0] https://blackwolfapp.com/ https://blackwolfapp.com/
- edude03 3y ago
  Realistically though they don’t have to figure out the legal problems immediately, they could and likely would start in their own backyards and expand from there
- moralestapia 3y ago
  >figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits But this will be different for robots though. This is not a moat for Uber.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits They could follow Uber's startup model: ignore/break laws and provide false information to regulators.
- worik 3y ago
  > Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Nonsense It would be a huge job. Even for Google
- hackernewds 3y ago
  > Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. as someone who has worked at Uber, this is a gross misstatement. It takes a lot to run Uber, far less even to run it at scale globally and with viable unit economics
shagie 3y ago
... and as soon as it started losing money Google could cancel it (Uber has never made a profit - https://fourweekmba.com/is-uber-profitable/ https://fourweekmba.com/is-uber-profitable/ ). ... and the government would (again) look into Google using anticompetitive tools to expand its market reach and stifle other companies in the area. ... having a "use Google/Waymo ride hailing" only in a few cities would lose a significant part of the network effect that Uber has (you can likely use Uber in any city - not just a limited few).
wartijn_ 3y ago
Yes, Google can copy Uber, but can they make it successful? Uber has a lot of users and drivers, and Google has to convince them to use their app instead of Uber or one of the other existing apps in this space. Getting into a new market didn’t work for videos so they bought YouTube, it didn’t work for their social network, and it didn’t work for a ton of other cancelled projects.
- nindalf 3y ago
  Replicating Uber is hard because it's a 2 sided market - you need to convince both users and drivers to sign up and neither will if the other isn't there already. But that's not a problem for Waymo because they control the driving side. They simply need to get users to sign up. When you have something unique and useful, people will sign up.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  There are no drivers in self driving cars
krebby 3y ago
I think you're underplaying the difficulty of what Uber has built. Uber is an operations-heavy business. Determining pricing strategies, handling incidents, and working with local governments is at the core of its service. Google has traditionally shied away from businesses that require big operational investments in real-world assets the way that, say, Amazon or Airbnb have. These take time to build properly, and is a big piece of the puzzle that I can't see Waymo wanting to take on. It makes sense for them to want to partner, especially now that Uber has spun out Aurora.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  Waymo already has to deal with local governments.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    Yes, in a couple of small geographies where the local governments have been particularly accommodating. Can't you see why Google may not want to do this for dozens of places and handle customer service for rideshare, etc, at scale?
  - worik 3y ago
    > Waymo already has to deal with local governments. Which is one reason they want to tream up with Uber. They know how hard it is
anaganisk 3y ago
The power of Uber doesn't lie in it's app, Google famously has been forever trying to have a chat app and we all know how many times it's failed. Then comes Google+, Google's attempt to get into social networking. Unless Google came up with something novel or something different from incumbents it never ever succeeded. Any SWE worth his salt can build a ride booking app in a month or two, but the traction and confidence in using that app both by riders and drivers is what drives its success.
- kibwen 3y ago
  > The power of Uber doesn't lie in it's app I'm not sure what else Uber could possibly have. Name recognition? More people know Google than Uber. Install base? More people have Android phones than have the Uber app. Drivers? Uber is trying to eliminate its drivers, as this deal shows. Uber is defenseless against Google.
  - andruby 3y ago
    Name recognition and installed user base in a 2-sided marketplace. That's huuuge. Google owns the action "to google something". Uber owns the action to "get an Uber". Also, don't underestimate the value of a working business. Google has only ever been successful with a search engine and an ad platform. They've never been success in a consumer product/service. I don't think their corporate structure and business culture makes them likely to succeed in B2C. Uber has it's flaws, but they've been very reliable as a consumer. And have responsive and helpful support. Imagine having to rely on Google to provide support to a stranded user or resolve a dispute.
    - lukeschlather 3y ago
      The idea is to make it a 1-sided marketplace. Uber's entire business model is focused around squeezing vendors - now they think they can squeeze Google if Google becomes their vendor instead of a bunch of independent contractors who are legally inhibited from collective bargaining? Uber has no idea how to be successful when the seller side of their marketplace is organized and plays hardball at the negotiating table.
015a 3y ago
> I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. Like how they can "just spin up" a messaging app? Building companies and customer bases is really, really hard. Microsoft tried like three times to build a Github competitor. They still have at least one of those attempts (Azure DevOps). They still bought Github. An interesting product technically, sure, but: its where the people are at. It was worth it.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Spinning up a messaging app without a compelling differentiation is hard. It's much easier with a compelling differentiation. Waymo could just set prices at half of Uber and boom instant market share.
  - paulcole 3y ago
    Instant market share if they're willing to lose 2x the money that Uber is losing. It's not like drivers are going to be falling over themselves to sign up if it's a 50% paycut.
    - darkwater 3y ago
      Waymo is about driverless cars aka robotaxis
  - shagie 3y ago
    Using Google's dominance to expand into other sectors (at a loss) is a perfect example of anticompetitive practices that regulators would likely take a keen interest in investigating.
    - bryanlarsen 3y ago
      Using robots to cut costs and thus prices is not anticompetitive.
      - 3y ago
grumple 3y ago
You're pretty wrong. No organization can just spin up large international companies. I don't know where you'd get such an idea from. Even the technical parts of Uber alone would take years to replicate. The app frontend? Sure, with manpower you can get that out in a few months. The backend, supporting infra, legal systems, customer support, relationships with users, restaurants, etc? Years to decades. Google could never do it, they are too big to move fast. Think, when is the last time Google successfully launched a project of even a fraction of the scale of Uber?
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Trivial compared with getting regulatory approval for self-driving, with which it has a lot of overlap.
fizwhiz 3y ago
Obligatory: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
nashashmi 3y ago
The customer network is the hardest thing to replicate
- kibwen 3y ago
  There's no network effect from having the Uber app. All Google would need to do is push a notification to every Android phone that has Google Maps (so, all of them) that says "book your next trip through Google maps and the first ten rides are free!" and they're in business.
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  - ghaff 3y ago
    I mean, I use mostly Lyft in the US. And if there were another app or two that had a reputation for being cheaper or better service even if they didn't service everywhere, I'd be installing that in a minute. Brand has some value and I don't want to be installing one or more apps for every city I visit. But it mostly works when someone is as good or better for most purposes.
  - nashashmi 3y ago
    That would be an anti trust problem.
londons_explore 3y ago
> I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. The app, sure. But Uber also has the aggression necessary to expand across the world and bulldoze/ignore/skirt/rewrite local taxi laws fairly successfully. There is no way waymo/alphabet would manage that. They'd nicely ask permission, and in most cities permission would be denied by incumbent taxi operators and uber drivers who don't want their jobs taken.
EddieEngineers 3y ago
Uber had to fight tooth and nail to get permission in numerous countries - Alphabet will not want that battle. Add to that battle they suddenly want to be autonomous too and they will really struggle rolling out. Also, would you trust an Alphabet Uber? It'd be torn down within a year like usual, based on precedent - looks at Stadia controller annoyed.
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sidcool 3y ago
Uber is not just the app and the APIs. It's a more complex operation than that. It's like saying Google is a web scraper.
nunez 3y ago
They tried this in Israel with RideWith, renamed Waze Rider; shut down in 2022.
temporalparts 3y ago
That's what they thought about Google Video, but then Google decided to buy Youtube. Technical advantage (which Google has in strides) does not always translate to business advantage (which Uber has done remarkably well for itself).
- afavour 3y ago
  I think you’re right here. You can recreate the technical aspects of YouTube relatively easily. You can’t recreate the brand. Just because it’s big doesn’t mean Google will inevitably succeed. Look at Google+, Allo, Duo etc etc. to my mind there’s no guarantee a Google rideshare app would capture mindshare.
- bruceb 3y ago
  YT was relatively cheap and much stronger network effects. Uber does not. Google is so much more integrated in to people's lives than 15+ years ago. Google Maps + Waymo or "Google Taxi" would have millions of customers immediately. What Google did to Yelp is what might happen to Uber. I think the main point thing stopping is what others have pointed out. Is it worth the reputation? Instead of running their own service just take a nice cut from Uber and let them deal with bad headlines. Especially when the headlines will read Uber "fires" poor single parent uber drivers in favor of robot cars.
wmf 3y ago
Y'all are talking as if the Waymo app doesn't already exist. https://waymo.com/waymo-one/ https://waymo.com/waymo-one/
fairity 3y ago
> I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app Google has already done this. Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving customers already in Phoenix, AZ. Completely driverless - nobody but the passenger in the car.

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bartwr 3y ago

Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing in general, and autonomous vehicles) onto an entity which is already "hated".

vasilipupkin 3y ago
give me 3 good software developers and I can give you an Uber app maybe in 3-6 months? but what I can't give you is uber app being on every iPhone in the country.
- JB_Dev 3y ago
  If my ride-sharing app charges riders half the price, I think we’ll get quite a few riders in a short amount of time. Uber won’t be able to compete.
  - shagie 3y ago
    Uber is losing money and is frequently accused of undervaluing the deprecation and maintenance of the drivers' vehicles. If Google was to enter a market at a loss in an effort to use its market dominance in Android to drive out a competitor that would potentially be something that would be considered anticompetitive and US regulators would likely be interested in it. I don't believe that Google can compete with Uber losing money as it is nor that Google has an appetite for purchasing the necessary vehicles and maintaining them outside of a few test cities for a technology demo. Having driverless taxis also means that they would need to do a better job with end user support (compare the urgency of "help, I'm locked out of my email" and their current resolution time to "help, I'm locked in a car and can't get out!").
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  No but if you're Google you can put it on literally every android phone quite quickly.
  - newleaf 3y ago
    Not just that, but you can put it in front of every Google Maps user.
    - vasilipupkin 3y ago
      you can, but I am used to using uber app to call an uber.
      - mcny 3y ago
        > you can, but I am used to using uber app to call an uber. yes, waze had 100M+ users and still failed to have a successful launch with waze carpool. part of the problem is Google is too successful. If a business makes USD 10M a year and takes up a month worth of attention every year from the Alphabet CEO, they will probably shut it down before we can say Google Product Graveyard.
        dweekly 3y ago
        When I worked at Google our team came up with a data product that would have been pure margin and $75m/yr with customers lined up -- and I couldn't find a VP interested in cashing the checks because it wasn't on their annual OKRs. Google is a great company but it has never been truly hungry because it has never faced an existential threat.
        stickyricky 3y ago
        What's the product? Asking for a friend...
        ghaff 3y ago
        It's not just OKRs. That $75m/year consumes attention all up and down and across Google. Lots of things that are slam dunks at a small or medium company are just more trouble than they're worth at most really large firms.
- somsak2 3y ago
  with those resources, you can give me the Uber app from 2010. consumer expectations are much higher than 13 years ago and that's not going to cut it.
  - jfoster 3y ago
    What's an example of something for consumers that Uber 2023 does a lot better than Uber 2010, if the drivers behave entirely cooperatively? (since we're talking autonomous vehicles here)
    - STRiDEX 3y ago
      airport terminal maps and regulations for every major airport in the united states
      - jfoster 3y ago
        That's a good one. I remember lots of shenanigans about putting pins next to airports & then contacting the driver to get picked up at the airport on early Uber. Not sure this particular one would affect Waymo if they were going it alone, since their rollout to each service area would involve designation of pickup & drop off points at airports and collaboration with airports, which they'll have to do either way, but it's definitely a significant difference between Uber 2010 & 2023.
    - somsak2 3y ago
      route planning / fleet management i think is a huge optimization problem. perhaps you can cut it for MVP but it would require having a big multiple of drivers to provide the same service another big deal is gps accuracy in cities, which is a pretty non trivial problem but at this point a consumer expectation https://www.uber.com/blog/rethinking-gps/ https://www.uber.com/blog/rethinking-gps/
      - jfoster 3y ago
        Ahhh yep. I remember Uber 2010 unopinionatedly just setting the pin directly on whatever the reading was from GPS. Stale or inaccurate GPS readings led to so much confused communication between drivers & passengers.
- Gunnerhead 3y ago
  The good old “I can build that in a weekend”.
- squokko 3y ago
  >give me 3 good software developers and I can give you an Uber app maybe in 3-6 months LOLOLOL
alsodumb 3y ago
It's not like Waymo/Uber can roll in with autonomous taxis in every city just because Uber figured out the local regulation - many cities would have explicit regulation for anything driverless. I think it's the later point - they want to stay in the shadows until they are super confident. I wonder what will happen to Uber eventually though. It'll be interesting if Cruise ends up partnering with/acquiring Lyft. Although Cruise seem to be still betting on their Origin vehicle.
jefftk 3y ago
> Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits Is experience doing this with human drivers all that helpful for building a driverless service? I'd expect the legal and regulatory questions would be very different?
bushbaba 3y ago
Don’t forget regulatory pressure of buying Uber. That might not be approved.
riskable 3y ago
> Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Many countries and cities regulate ride sharing pretty heavily) in a sane timeline is close to impossible. This is nonsense. Google has more than enough legal resources to handle this. So much so that it would be nothing more than a regular 3-6 month project that would be assigned a small team of lawyers inside their org. It's no different than any other regionally-regulated product launch at large companies. Not only that but Google has enough money that they could just hire away some folks that work at Uber/Lyft to get a huge jumpstart on any such project. Even if they didn't need such expertise they'd probably still recruit and hire those people just to be safe; to get the perspective of people with experience. Big companies have big legal organizations and they don't actually operate that differently from the IT orgs that so many of us on HN are used to. For example, they would probably divide up the task on state-by-state basis with lawyers certified to practice law in each respective state assigned as SMEs or to-be-SMEs. They would do their research and for bigger states they might even have county-level SME lawyers or at the very least paralegals that focus on that particular region. Big cities would probably be assigned their own teams of SME lawyers as well. It's like any given complex programming task: Divide and conquer. Rolling out a new highly-regulated product across a large region is a highly parallelizeable procedure.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Big companies have big legal organizations and they don't actually operate that differently from the IT orgs that so many of us on HN are used to. Well, if you are referring to IT organizations in firms in the tech industry where that’s the core business (i.e., a value center) you are wrong, they are run more like IT orgs in non-tech firms (cost centers), vigorously minimized to be a bit smaller than they should be to handle routine day-to-day needs effectively, with new, emergent, and non-routine work outsourced.
- waboremo 3y ago
  Sure, technically that's correct. But it's google we're talking about. The company with a tremendous list of failures that should have been easy slam dunks.
- 3y ago
FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
> figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits (it's not 2010 anymore! Hm. This is like -- It's not 1066 any more, there are property rights now. The original regulatory capture. Step 1: Ignore the law; establish a fait accompli. Step 2: Sanctify the new status quo. Sad for a rule-follower to figure out that this is how things work. On the other hand, I guess rule-following is low risk. For each William the Conqueror there were thousands of warriors who just got killed on the battlefield. And I'm sure the guy had to work really hard, you know, like nights and weekends.
chris222 3y ago
It’s not trivial at all. Do you work in the space at all?
hunter2_ 3y ago
Black Wolf [0] has been all over the news lately, and seems to be doing this. [0] https://blackwolfapp.com/ https://blackwolfapp.com/
edude03 3y ago
Realistically though they don’t have to figure out the legal problems immediately, they could and likely would start in their own backyards and expand from there
moralestapia 3y ago
>figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits But this will be different for robots though. This is not a moat for Uber.
JohnFen 3y ago
> Spinning up the legal structure, figuring out all the local regulations and getting permits They could follow Uber's startup model: ignore/break laws and provide false information to regulators.
worik 3y ago
> Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. Nonsense It would be a huge job. Even for Google
hackernewds 3y ago
> Spinning up the Uber App is most likely trivial. as someone who has worked at Uber, this is a gross misstatement. It takes a lot to run Uber, far less even to run it at scale globally and with viable unit economics

shagie 3y ago

... and as soon as it started losing money Google could cancel it (Uber has never made a profit - https://fourweekmba.com/is-uber-profitable/ https://fourweekmba.com/is-uber-profitable/ ). ... and the government would (again) look into Google using anticompetitive tools to expand its market reach and stifle other companies in the area. ... having a "use Google/Waymo ride hailing" only in a few cities would lose a significant part of the network effect that Uber has (you can likely use Uber in any city - not just a limited few).

wartijn_ 3y ago

Yes, Google can copy Uber, but can they make it successful? Uber has a lot of users and drivers, and Google has to convince them to use their app instead of Uber or one of the other existing apps in this space. Getting into a new market didn’t work for videos so they bought YouTube, it didn’t work for their social network, and it didn’t work for a ton of other cancelled projects.

nindalf 3y ago
Replicating Uber is hard because it's a 2 sided market - you need to convince both users and drivers to sign up and neither will if the other isn't there already. But that's not a problem for Waymo because they control the driving side. They simply need to get users to sign up. When you have something unique and useful, people will sign up.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
There are no drivers in self driving cars

krebby 3y ago

I think you're underplaying the difficulty of what Uber has built. Uber is an operations-heavy business. Determining pricing strategies, handling incidents, and working with local governments is at the core of its service. Google has traditionally shied away from businesses that require big operational investments in real-world assets the way that, say, Amazon or Airbnb have. These take time to build properly, and is a big piece of the puzzle that I can't see Waymo wanting to take on. It makes sense for them to want to partner, especially now that Uber has spun out Aurora.

amadeuspagel 3y ago
Waymo already has to deal with local governments.
- mlyle 3y ago
  Yes, in a couple of small geographies where the local governments have been particularly accommodating. Can't you see why Google may not want to do this for dozens of places and handle customer service for rideshare, etc, at scale?
- worik 3y ago
  > Waymo already has to deal with local governments. Which is one reason they want to tream up with Uber. They know how hard it is

anaganisk 3y ago

The power of Uber doesn't lie in it's app, Google famously has been forever trying to have a chat app and we all know how many times it's failed. Then comes Google+, Google's attempt to get into social networking. Unless Google came up with something novel or something different from incumbents it never ever succeeded. Any SWE worth his salt can build a ride booking app in a month or two, but the traction and confidence in using that app both by riders and drivers is what drives its success.

kibwen 3y ago
> The power of Uber doesn't lie in it's app I'm not sure what else Uber could possibly have. Name recognition? More people know Google than Uber. Install base? More people have Android phones than have the Uber app. Drivers? Uber is trying to eliminate its drivers, as this deal shows. Uber is defenseless against Google.
- andruby 3y ago
  Name recognition and installed user base in a 2-sided marketplace. That's huuuge. Google owns the action "to google something". Uber owns the action to "get an Uber". Also, don't underestimate the value of a working business. Google has only ever been successful with a search engine and an ad platform. They've never been success in a consumer product/service. I don't think their corporate structure and business culture makes them likely to succeed in B2C. Uber has it's flaws, but they've been very reliable as a consumer. And have responsive and helpful support. Imagine having to rely on Google to provide support to a stranded user or resolve a dispute.
  - lukeschlather 3y ago
    The idea is to make it a 1-sided marketplace. Uber's entire business model is focused around squeezing vendors - now they think they can squeeze Google if Google becomes their vendor instead of a bunch of independent contractors who are legally inhibited from collective bargaining? Uber has no idea how to be successful when the seller side of their marketplace is organized and plays hardball at the negotiating table.

015a 3y ago

> I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. Like how they can "just spin up" a messaging app? Building companies and customer bases is really, really hard. Microsoft tried like three times to build a Github competitor. They still have at least one of those attempts (Azure DevOps). They still bought Github. An interesting product technically, sure, but: its where the people are at. It was worth it.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
Spinning up a messaging app without a compelling differentiation is hard. It's much easier with a compelling differentiation. Waymo could just set prices at half of Uber and boom instant market share.
- paulcole 3y ago
  Instant market share if they're willing to lose 2x the money that Uber is losing. It's not like drivers are going to be falling over themselves to sign up if it's a 50% paycut.
  - darkwater 3y ago
    Waymo is about driverless cars aka robotaxis
- shagie 3y ago
  Using Google's dominance to expand into other sectors (at a loss) is a perfect example of anticompetitive practices that regulators would likely take a keen interest in investigating.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    Using robots to cut costs and thus prices is not anticompetitive.
    - 3y ago

grumple 3y ago

You're pretty wrong. No organization can just spin up large international companies. I don't know where you'd get such an idea from. Even the technical parts of Uber alone would take years to replicate. The app frontend? Sure, with manpower you can get that out in a few months. The backend, supporting infra, legal systems, customer support, relationships with users, restaurants, etc? Years to decades. Google could never do it, they are too big to move fast. Think, when is the last time Google successfully launched a project of even a fraction of the scale of Uber?

bryanlarsen 3y ago
Trivial compared with getting regulatory approval for self-driving, with which it has a lot of overlap.

fizwhiz 3y ago

Obligatory: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

nashashmi 3y ago

The customer network is the hardest thing to replicate

kibwen 3y ago
There's no network effect from having the Uber app. All Google would need to do is push a notification to every Android phone that has Google Maps (so, all of them) that says "book your next trip through Google maps and the first ten rides are free!" and they're in business.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ghaff 3y ago
  I mean, I use mostly Lyft in the US. And if there were another app or two that had a reputation for being cheaper or better service even if they didn't service everywhere, I'd be installing that in a minute. Brand has some value and I don't want to be installing one or more apps for every city I visit. But it mostly works when someone is as good or better for most purposes.
- nashashmi 3y ago
  That would be an anti trust problem.

londons_explore 3y ago

> I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app in a few months/maybe a year. The app, sure. But Uber also has the aggression necessary to expand across the world and bulldoze/ignore/skirt/rewrite local taxi laws fairly successfully. There is no way waymo/alphabet would manage that. They'd nicely ask permission, and in most cities permission would be denied by incumbent taxi operators and uber drivers who don't want their jobs taken.

EddieEngineers 3y ago

Uber had to fight tooth and nail to get permission in numerous countries - Alphabet will not want that battle. Add to that battle they suddenly want to be autonomous too and they will really struggle rolling out. Also, would you trust an Alphabet Uber? It'd be torn down within a year like usual, based on precedent - looks at Stadia controller annoyed.

deleted 3y ago

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sidcool 3y ago

Uber is not just the app and the APIs. It's a more complex operation than that. It's like saying Google is a web scraper.

nunez 3y ago

They tried this in Israel with RideWith, renamed Waze Rider; shut down in 2022.

temporalparts 3y ago

That's what they thought about Google Video, but then Google decided to buy Youtube. Technical advantage (which Google has in strides) does not always translate to business advantage (which Uber has done remarkably well for itself).

afavour 3y ago
I think you’re right here. You can recreate the technical aspects of YouTube relatively easily. You can’t recreate the brand. Just because it’s big doesn’t mean Google will inevitably succeed. Look at Google+, Allo, Duo etc etc. to my mind there’s no guarantee a Google rideshare app would capture mindshare.
bruceb 3y ago
YT was relatively cheap and much stronger network effects. Uber does not. Google is so much more integrated in to people's lives than 15+ years ago. Google Maps + Waymo or "Google Taxi" would have millions of customers immediately. What Google did to Yelp is what might happen to Uber. I think the main point thing stopping is what others have pointed out. Is it worth the reputation? Instead of running their own service just take a nice cut from Uber and let them deal with bad headlines. Especially when the headlines will read Uber "fires" poor single parent uber drivers in favor of robot cars.

wmf 3y ago

Y'all are talking as if the Waymo app doesn't already exist. https://waymo.com/waymo-one/ https://waymo.com/waymo-one/

fairity 3y ago

> I am pretty confident google could spin up an org to replicate the uber app Google has already done this. Waymo One is the name of Google's app, and it's live and serving customers already in Phoenix, AZ. Completely driverless - nobody but the passenger in the car.