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The high cost of Uber's small profit
- happytiger 3y agoIf you don’t want a business built on financial extraction, change the rules by which they can legally operate. Otherwise, expect financial extraction. I love that Uber is taking the blame for being the most efficient extractor of resources from labor by capital. It’s literally like a case study in what to fix. Walk down the things they do: leverage contract labor to avoid the overhead, leverage real-time closed garden markets to create the illusion of greater value, extract tolls when the network is busy even if they have the capacity to serve the demand, use massive data advantages to attack incumbents in every market using the superior advantage of scale, leverage “free money” to operate below profitable market levels and crush competitors, etc. It’s a brilliant business, but it’s built on incentives. It’s honestly amazing how many people get mad at the creations of the system they create and support like the “race to the bottom” isn’t directly the result of the choices we make as a society and the inventive system we give our companies. Maybe I’m wrong — I often am — but it’s certainly interesting.
- ggm 3y agoUber succeeded in my Jurisdiction (Queensland Australia) by being an eggregious scofflaw, and offering to indemnify drivers if they broke the law: It basically said it would PAY PEOPLE to break the law. I still don't understand why their offices weren't raided by a light tank and shut down. That, and by expropriating profit offshore from Australia, by complex financial licencing models and charging for US hosted ICT. I use it, but it sucks. It sucks balls, and it's only because the Taxi model was incompetently allowed to run down into a last chance hotel of bad, that Uber succeeded: it demanded the taxi model break first.