[mintone]

(on the assumption that your first sentence was sarcastic) Everyone does love getting middle-manned, it's why uber is successful. We had taxi services before uber, but they were unreliable and sometimes meant calling around 3 or 4 to get a cab at busy times. No accountability of where the cab was if it was late / no showed. Uber changed that and people flocked to them in their droves. Same for airbnb and basically any other major marketplace app / site.

They may now be looking like an autonomous driving play, but that is not why the company started.

[frgtpsswrdlame]

People use uber because it is cheap and easy. If taxis and other ride services roll out apps (which they are) then uber has lost its advantage in ease of use. If uber starts to feel expensive as well then they have lost everything that made them popular. Uber has to start squeezing someone for $700m a quarter. That squeeze isn't going to feel good.

[mintone]

That's happened though. I live in London, where black cabs are the de facto standard. They should be one of the examples of the most organised taxi 'companies' in the world - brilliant brand, effective organisation and a technically closed market and yet they have 3 major apps (gett, mytaxi(hailo), taxiapp) meaning they can't offer the same experience as uber. Black cabs also cost 4x what an uber costs for the same journey, which certainly doesn't help.

People want 1 app which does taxis - uber fits that bill pretty nicely, and to be honest, I don't think users would really notice if they bumped prices by 10%, certainly not in London.