7 ms·

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 anym

by 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

by bartwr 3y ago

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