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über vs. Uber
- Dewie 12y ago> It conveys, she told me recently, both a European sensibility What?
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- jasonisalive 12y agoNow that the Germans have been firmly put in their place as the footstools of the Anglo-Saxons, it's safe and trendy to orientalise aspects of their culture and language.
- radicalbyte 12y agoLyft should sponsor her voicemail.
- dustinupdyke 12y agoMuch like domains that live off of mis-spellings, is there a model for grabbing these customers and offering them another service? What if these ladies started pushing customers elsewhere?
- doctorpangloss 12y agoYes my friend, a multi-hundred-million dollar model. If you would like to learn more about rotator domains, direct navigation and Suggested Results, please visit learnaboutrotatordomainsdiscount.com
- Untit1ed 12y ago> What if these ladies started pushing customers elsewhere? I imagine no-umlaut-Uber would retaliate in some kind of distasteful, barely-within-the-bounds-of-the-law way and HN would have its anti-Uber story for next week.
- jlas 12y agoInteresting tidbit: it looks like the über folks acquired the http://www.uber.nyc http://www.uber.nyc domain recently. The .nyc domain actually started registering this year and the auction for uber.nyc (which I was a part of) ended at $3,200. I was surprised that Uber (the taxi company) didn't try to get it.
- greenyoda 12y agoIt makes sense to me that a Manhattan-based company (über) would want a .nyc domain and a global company like Uber would not. Wouldn't it be confusing for Uber to have different domains in different cities?
- IkmoIkmo 12y agoSort of. Uber's profits are extremely lopsided, almost all revenues are generated from just 5 cities with NY heading the list with twice as much revenue as the next city. Given that it makes some sense to try to brand a particular presence in NY. A bit like how a fashion store might want to have a strong presence in Paris. And given NYC alone has a runrate of more than $300m alone, it's not strange to approach this as its own market, just like a company might have a US, UK, JP, DE etc domain for those country markets. Only Uber is more city-segmented than country-segmented right now, each city has its own taxi ecosystem and legislation. In any case, it'd be an easy redirect and for a company worth tens of billions, outspending a $3k bid to get a branded domain for your company's largest market makes sense. Even if you don't use it, grabbing it and redirecting may be useful. Who knows if its worth much in the future. So I wouldn't say that grabbing a uber.nyc domain name is the best move ever but it's not strange given the context. I'd have done it.
- makomk 12y agoExcept that Uber's current funding and valuation depends on them taking over the taxi market globally, not just in NYC. Branding themselves as an NYC taxi firm wouldn't give the right message to investors and the media at all.
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- chasing 12y agoIf everything German reminds you of the Nazis, you're going to have to get used to being reminded of the Nazis an awful lot. And that's on you, not people who use German words.
- dgreensp 12y agoI didn't have the same reaction, but I get the reference. Quoting Wikipedia: >The term Übermensch was used frequently by Hitler and the Nazi regime to describe their idea of a biologically superior Aryan or Germanic master race;[13] a form of Nietzsche's Übermensch became a philosophical foundation for the National Socialist ideas. Their conception of the Übermensch, however, was racial in nature.[14][15] The Nazi notion of the master race also spawned the idea of "inferior humans" (Untermenschen) which could be dominated and enslaved; this term does not originate with Nietzsche.
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- Htsthbjig 12y agoYou think so? I speak German and travel around the world quite a bit, German is probably the language I use the least, by far. I use Spanish and English a lot, in Africa with English and French you can get by. In Asia you find written Chinese a lot(common to China, Japan, and Korea), English in India(so many languages there).
- tolmasky 12y agoIt seems to me that this article is conflating two issues that aren't necessarily related in a kind of strange way: First, the understandable misfortune of the naming conflict, which appears to go beyond just the calling issue (for example the listed suing of the wrong party). Second, it uses this as a strange segue way to criticize Uber for not having phone support. Now if you believe that Uber should have phone support that's fine -- but its kind of unrelated to this person's troubles. By that I mean, had she happened to not name her company uber, then this wouldn't all of a sudden make their lack of phone support OK right? So if what you want to do is say Uber should have phone support, then this seems like a really strange primary point. As an aside -- their email support has always been stellar to me, and I actually have the opposite complaint of other companies: I'd PAY to be able to get a prompt < 1 hour email reply from comcast vs. the "intimate interaction" of wanting to break my table when I'm on the phone with a real life person from their team.
- geofft 12y agoIf she hadn't named her company über, then we wouldn't have the convenient source of data about people who want to call. Since that data exists, it seems reasonable to write an article about it, and briefly explain at the top how it came to be that we have so many people trying to reach Uber instead reaching the same phone.
- tolmasky 12y agoBut this data is actually useless without context. I actually have no clue if 500 calls since August is a lot -- to be honest my first reaction was that it sounded low compared to my (completely possibly incorrect) notion of how many uber rides must be taking place in New York (Uber's biggest market?). It would have been nice for him to have done some analysis with this supposedly indicative number, for example saying how that represents x% of all rides or something. Instead he focuses on really strange parts of this story. I suppose its an op ed so excusable, but I think there was an insightful possibility here that instead just comes off as some guy who's kind of angry and snarky.
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- dkarapetyan 12y agoI am not exactly sure what the lesson is here. It's just another negative piece about the impersonal and cutthroat business practices of Uber. Yet in spite of all the negative press the company is valued at $40 billion and continues to grow. In the presence of alternatives like Lyft and even just regular cabs which are almost always cheaper than Uber why do people continue to use Uber?
- geofft 12y agoBecause the market is so inefficient and taxis are so terrible that a company somewhat more efficient and somewhat less terrible can make lots of money and have only one real competitor. If a market is ripe for disruption, we shouldn't believe that the first company that comes along is efficient and running well. Quite the opposite, since it has so much room not to be and still be successful.
- omonra 12y agoI think that we have a case of 'silent majority' at work (of which I'm a part of). Chattering classes may yap all day about how Uber is bad - while millions of customers are extremely happy with the service they receive. However our level of motivation is starkly different. I am happy using the service - and don't really care enough to write letters / articles defending them. Journalists / taxi lobbyists are vastly more motivated to push a different narrative.
- blisterpeanuts 12y agoI find the taxi business to be impersonal and cutthroat. They under pay their drivers, they offer the least service for the most money, and they will often rip you off if you let them. My mother-in-law got taken for a ride because she's a gullible old woman who didn't know that two miles was two miles, between her pick-up and our house, and this cabbie took her in circles and charged her way higher than he should have. If it were Uber, he'd get one star and a complaint and probably would never get any more riders. But since it's Yellow Cab, he just pockets the money and laughs all the way to the bank. Yeah, there's plenty of need for competition in this overly regulated racket of a business. I wish airplanes were as cheap as cars, and then maybe we could have an Air Uber as well, to give the airline racket a run for their money!
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- morgante 12y agoI don't understand why this is an opinion piece. What exactly is the point? That companies somehow have a moral obligation to provide phone support (you'll find many people who disagree)? If the author personally wants to phone support, he can stick to companies which provide it. Let the market decide (hint: phone support won't win).
- Someone 12y ago"I don't understand why this is an opinion piece." "you'll find many people who disagree" It almost is an opinion piece because you will find many people who disagree. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/opinion-piece http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/opinion...: "Opinion piece: An article in which the writer expresses their personal opinion, typically one which is controversial or provocative, about a particular issue or item of news"
- JadeNB 12y agoIt's funny that the article mentions that the Amazon phone number "isn't hard to find"; I remember that they used to be the poster child (poster company?) for obscurantism in that respect. See, for example, http://amazoncustomerservice.blogspot.com/2007/12/8.html http://amazoncustomerservice.blogspot.com/2007/12/8.html. (Actually, although I agree that it's not hard to Google, a few idle clicks on the Amazon page—including to Help > Contact Us—didn't immediately turn it up there.)
- cowsandmilk 12y agoWhen I click "contact us", it gives me a page that says: "How would you like to contact us?" and gives me 3 options: 1) E-mail 2) Phone 3) Chat If you choose phone, you can have them call you, or you can call their number. It may seem convoluted, but since you are able to choose your order and issue you would like to discuss, the amazon representative calling you doesn't have to go through all the verification nonsense and looking up orders and such silly steps.
- JadeNB 12y ago> It may seem convoluted, but since you are able to choose your order and issue you would like to discuss, the amazon representative calling you doesn't have to go through all the verification nonsense and looking up orders and such silly steps. You are right that these are advantages, and I'm OK with it; but notice that you have to be logged in (or enter your password) to see these options. It seems to me that requiring you to be logged in to find the phone number is still at least a bit ridiculous.
- imaginenore 12y agoThe solution is simple - make a deal with Lyft and redirect the customers to them for a fee.
- Malician 12y agoThe essay writer really doesn't seem to comprehend the decision Uber is making, or the reasons behind it. It's the model Google used to build Adwords, scalability by refusing to implement anything that requires massive call centers, not the Comcast model of trying to minimize the cost of having hundreds of thousands of employees. Uber should work with this woman to take action to avoid an externality of their business model: the harm of her getting spammed by Uber customers. But that has nothing to do with implementing phone support. (Maybe a number for Uber support that leads to an automated prompt, "We don't have phone support, please email us?")
- ianlevesque 12y agoFor uber the car company, press 1?
- lostcolony 12y ago1 "We're sorry, Uber the car company does not take calls. Please email us or give up in frustration."
- sgustard 12y agoIf she got calls like "I'll pay someone $1000 for a ride to the airport right now", that might justify Uber hiring people to answer phones. But she doesn't, she gets calls from angry harassed customers and people who don't know they can't schedule future rides. Guess what, Uber doesn't want or need to hear from these people. They've optimized to reach people who make them profit, not who are a time and money sink. Adding a phone number is only down-side for them and they clearly know it.
- stanleydrew 12y agoI'm guessing you don't spend much time talking to customers in your organization. This is a very shortsighted view. Today's angry or confused customer is potentially tomorrow's evangelist.
- jasonisalive 12y agoI work in customer service (telco) and let me say, you could sort the wheat from the chaff, but there is a lot of chaff.
- drdeadringer 12y agoI've had similar via a Google Voice phone number and people thinking they were calling some ride service; I wasn't able to figure out if it was an airport share-shuttle, a towncar service, or what. Every so often it'd ring: "Hi, you're supposed to pick me up from the airport?" or similar. I ended up not needing that particular Google Voice number as I had thought, so... to whoever has that phone number now, I've been there.
- spyder 12y agoAn Uber competitor should make a deal with the owner of the phone number.
- aaron695 12y ago> Here’s a suggestion: Hire some people who will answer the phone. Lucky a $40 billion company has some hack at the NYT to give them advice. Pet hate: When a company specifically doesn't want people X as customers, X thinks it's because said company is dumb. A great example of 'unconscious incompetence'.
- ghshephard 12y agoLyft should register a phone number for über in every city they compete with Uber in, and offer their services. It's the sort of sharp elbows competition that Uber would certainly do.