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Uber have struck me before as a bigger potential headache for Google than even Facebook were/are, and I suspect this is all an effort to acquire them and drive

Uber have struck me before as a bigger potential headache for Google than even Facebook were/are, and I suspect this is all an effort to acquire them and drive the price down. There is something about the automated dispatch at giant scale business which overlaps with the search as interface idea. "Get me to [wherever]" is a natural extension of what you might do after searching. Furthermore, the act of finding a driver is itself a search. Feed the driver information back into search and it gets entertaining, with queries like "What are the restaurants right now with 80% rating, tables available and will cost me less than $20 to get to?" That's a query you can only answer with the driver and price data. As such Uber have the hard bit and can grow the rest, Google face a move into a physical world full of people, which is pretty much their Achilles heel.

boomzilla 12y ago
This is very spot on. Savvy advertisers are already rubbing their hands, waiting for the day when they can get access to Uber data. Imagine if one can send a message/notification to the people heading towards certain restaurants in Uber cars, asking "How about visiting my place instead, first drink and dessert is on the house :)"
- SyneRyder 12y ago
  Uber is already doing/testing this in a better way. They had free Uber week in Perth not long ago, with discounts & freebies offered at a number of restaurants if you made them your final Uber destination. I don't usually go out on a whim to a restaurant when the taxi is $40 each way, but when the travel cost is dramatically subsidized by the venue or zero...
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billsimpson 12y ago
Facebook was viewed as a threat to Google for two primary reasons: - Facebook had access to tremendous amounts of personal information, and it was assumed they could leverage this data to improve ads and search and beat Google at their own game. - Everyone sat at their desktop computer staring at Facebook for hours on end, making it valuable ad real estate. Again, this cut into Google's core business. So is Uber a comparable headache for Google? I don't see Uber as being a threat to their core business (their business is ads, not search; search just happens to be their best channel for ad delivery). Arguably it provides valuable information to improve their ad targeting, but it seems like a huge investment for relatively little payout in that regard. My guess is that it's a natural extension of their work on self-driving cars. People have identified how Uber would be natural fit for self-driving cars. But I doubt Google wants to be reliant on a third-party company with reputation problems to introduce these cars to the world. That would introduce too many variables. So they're cutting out the middle man and doing it themselves, at least at first. So how does this impact advertising? A nation-wide or global fleet of automated, networked cars would obviously produce a glut of valuable information (arguably their Uber-clone would too, but an automated solution could be taken to another scale). But really, I think the self-driving car is a disruptive enough technology that it could be completely orthogonal to their core business and still worth pursuing. On a side note, can we agree yet that Facebook is quickly fading into irrelevance? It seems to have two important properties left (neither of which they developed): WhatsApp and Instagram. WhatsApp gives Facebook as much value as AIM gave AOL in its later years (which is to say, not enough to justify the company's size and market capitalization). Instagram took Facebook's best use case (looking at your friends' photos) and stripped away everything that made the experience suck: ads and Farmville (in other words, Facebook's business model). I like what they're doing with React though.
- thirtyseven 12y ago
  Passengers in cars are potentially a huge captive advertising audience.
  - untog 12y ago
    Potentially. But ask anyone who advertises on the NYC subway, for example - they're all looking at their phones anyway.

boomzilla 12y ago

This is very spot on. Savvy advertisers are already rubbing their hands, waiting for the day when they can get access to Uber data. Imagine if one can send a message/notification to the people heading towards certain restaurants in Uber cars, asking "How about visiting my place instead, first drink and dessert is on the house :)"

SyneRyder 12y ago
Uber is already doing/testing this in a better way. They had free Uber week in Perth not long ago, with discounts & freebies offered at a number of restaurants if you made them your final Uber destination. I don't usually go out on a whim to a restaurant when the taxi is $40 each way, but when the travel cost is dramatically subsidized by the venue or zero...

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billsimpson 12y ago

Facebook was viewed as a threat to Google for two primary reasons: - Facebook had access to tremendous amounts of personal information, and it was assumed they could leverage this data to improve ads and search and beat Google at their own game. - Everyone sat at their desktop computer staring at Facebook for hours on end, making it valuable ad real estate. Again, this cut into Google's core business. So is Uber a comparable headache for Google? I don't see Uber as being a threat to their core business (their business is ads, not search; search just happens to be their best channel for ad delivery). Arguably it provides valuable information to improve their ad targeting, but it seems like a huge investment for relatively little payout in that regard. My guess is that it's a natural extension of their work on self-driving cars. People have identified how Uber would be natural fit for self-driving cars. But I doubt Google wants to be reliant on a third-party company with reputation problems to introduce these cars to the world. That would introduce too many variables. So they're cutting out the middle man and doing it themselves, at least at first. So how does this impact advertising? A nation-wide or global fleet of automated, networked cars would obviously produce a glut of valuable information (arguably their Uber-clone would too, but an automated solution could be taken to another scale). But really, I think the self-driving car is a disruptive enough technology that it could be completely orthogonal to their core business and still worth pursuing. On a side note, can we agree yet that Facebook is quickly fading into irrelevance? It seems to have two important properties left (neither of which they developed): WhatsApp and Instagram. WhatsApp gives Facebook as much value as AIM gave AOL in its later years (which is to say, not enough to justify the company's size and market capitalization). Instagram took Facebook's best use case (looking at your friends' photos) and stripped away everything that made the experience suck: ads and Farmville (in other words, Facebook's business model). I like what they're doing with React though.

thirtyseven 12y ago
Passengers in cars are potentially a huge captive advertising audience.
- untog 12y ago
  Potentially. But ask anyone who advertises on the NYC subway, for example - they're all looking at their phones anyway.