[InclinedPlane]

Google and amazon won the market because they made a better product. Before google search was clumsy and slow, it was just bad. But people still went to search sites because where else are you going to go? Most other search sites (yahoo being a prime example of one that existed before google and still survives) decided not to try improving search (which was too hard) but rather to bolt on additional features, to make their web-site a "portal" by providing directories, other services, games, etc. Portal sites were all the rage in the late '90s. But then google came around and knocked it out of the park with a rethink of search. They took cutting edge CS and software engineering in the form of pagerank and map/reduce and married it to an equally cutting edge model for running web apps in the form of sharded multi-host metacomputers and then hosted it on a clean, fast loading page. The result was that google could produce better results faster and at lower ammortized systems cost than the competition, and the clean UI made the site more usable. Instead of taking 5 seconds per page to return a result that might have something worthwhile on like page 3 google returned a page full of high quality results in a fraction of a second. That's why they won. And it's how they made money too because they could provide more targeted and less intrusive ads (based on search terms) and they could make less money per ad while still making more money overall (because their cost per search was so low).

Amazon figured out how to marry a familiar and easy to use web-based store to a state of the art fulfillment pipeline, which is how they took over the market. Fulfillment is a non-trivial problem. Keeping track of what is where and how much is left, figuring out what to charge for shipping and handling, and figuring out where to keep stock and how to produce orders. A typical web-based shop will get to your order in one or two business days and be able to put it in the mail maybe that day or a day later. Amazon figured out how to optimize everything about their systems to be able to get your order in the mail within hours of you placing it. They've consistently been improving that process for years, and almost nobody can keep up with them. They can achieve same day delivery on a lot of common items in many metro areas, for example.

If Uber was as superior to the alternatives as Amazon or google was they wouldn't have any problems keeping marketshare. But they really aren't that much different than Lyft or other ride hailing apps. The core valueadd comes from being able to use a smartphone to set up your ride instead of having to place a call or having a cab be immediately visible to you. There's not enough that Uber brings to the table otherwise which would allow them to keep their business if they couldn't subsidize fares using VC money.