[hyperbovine]

Another difference: I'm not sure that Amazon ever lost money on the margin. Their losses were always attributed to reinvesting whatever profits they made back into the business (and then same). Uber by contrast appears to be losing money on every ride. People will say that they can just jack up the price once they have annihilated Lyft or whatever, but I'm not so sure that is going to work. A big appeal of Uber for a lot of people is that it's currently only slightly more than public transit. Raise the price and your back to being a taxi service, and we've seen how that goes.

[aetherson]

People tend to think of this in black-and-white terms. The actual deal is that if Uber jacks up its prices significantly, on the margin people will ride with Uber less.

Will their number of rides go to 0? No, of course not. But even if there is no other ride service available, there's still taking public transit, driving yourself, or, you know, not going out to whatever you're going to.

Remember also that even if Uber fully defeats Lyft and Lyft's service shuts down, there are plenty of companies out there better capitalized than Uber itself is. Those companies have so far decided to stay out of a "lose $2b per year" business, but if Uber can demonstrate that this is a "gain $2b per year" business, then Google, Amazon, one of the car companies, maaaaybe Apple, and probably a bunch of other companies can at that point launch their own service.

[microtherion]

But even if there is no other ride service available, there's still taking public transit […]

No worries, Uber is working on that:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-15/uber-and-l...

[Applejinx]

Indeed. If Apple decides 'getting and offering rides is part of Apple Pay and iOS' and does to ride-sharing what they did to the music industry, Uber is not ever going to become a 'gain $2b a year' business because there will be no such business.

The idea of ridesharing being a profitable activity is an assumption.

[imron]

> Uber by contrast appears to be losing money on every ride.

Don't worry, they'll make it up in volume!

[FT_intern]

Amazon wasn't losing money on margin even with $25 free shipping back then?

[tedunangst]

Maybe, but I doubt they were losing $25 on each order. For at least some promotions/cities, Uber's losses seem to exceed revenue.

[agumonkey]

I don't know how they manage to lose money on their ride considering how crazy multipliers are at night. First and last uber ride had a 4x. Even without this, some articles said Uber was more expensive than Taxi rides .. weird.