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That's a lot of "eventually." Uber is a software company that runs cabs, basically. Their competitors - the old school, that is - are cab companies who are now
by sedev 13y ago
That's a lot of "eventually." Uber is a software company that runs cabs, basically. Their competitors - the old school, that is - are cab companies who are now faced with the challenge of writing good software. The track record in general of industries where long-established players find that they have to become software companies and put out a polished product there, in addition to whatever they were already doing, suggests to me that the timeline for old-school cab companies putting out an app that doesn't look like total garbage next to Uber's, is likely to extend so far out that it might as well be never. They may turn around and subcontract the work of creating and maintaining the app, but that has its own problems that we're all familiar with.
- ForHackernews 13y agoWhy couldn't some software company license out their app to cab companies? The Uber app is slick, but it's not exactly groundbreaking tech--somebody could clone it.
- ianburrell 13y agoThat is what Taxi Magic and bunch of other companies are doing.
- ericd 13y agoThis seems like a good business idea, but it would likely be fairly messy and hard to provide a uniformly good user experience. But I'm guessing that a lot of cab companies would pay for this software dispatch service, if you just sent them customers (perhaps according to bids they set?)
- ebonfortress 13y agoIn Russia, a leading internet search provider rolled out an aggregator app, it's pretty good. There're multiple others as far as I remember.
- mistermann 13y agoI'd suggest that perhaps the entrenched culture of traditional taxi companies is negative in so many ways that even with the best software they'd be at a disadvantage. Pure speculation of course, but from reading the article it doesn't seem that farfetched.