I remember when Uber was clearly dominant. That was over a year go. For the past two conferences I've been to, including the one I'm at now(Ember Conf), EVERYONE has been using Lyft.
It really is possible for a company to piss off enough people.
Anecdotally I haven't found this HN-wide negative sentiment of Uber (and narrative of its decline) to be shared anywhere else in the US.
My extended family in the southeast and northeast US is familiar with Uber (without using it), but they haven't heard of Lyft. When I lived in Chicago, most of my peers had Lyft, but Uber was the always the first choice.
Does anyone else see the same trend? The bay area certainly seems to be Lyft-dominant, but I haven't seen that anywhere else.
True. Here in Europe in general, Lyft is uknown, but, at least here in Greece, everyone sings the praises of Uber, in comparison to the terrible service normal taxis provide.
HN is not only a regional but also an ideological bubble, and it seems to hate companies that are doing well for themselves (except Apple and Musk-affiliated gigs).
> at least here in Greece, everyone sings the praises of Uber, in comparison to the terrible service normal taxis provide
There. It's not only in Greece, it's pretty much all over the world except a few places.
I know, the taxi drivers work hard, but the standards before Uber were really abysmal. Why? Because monopoly.
For the young ones and those with poor memory, the overcharging, taking 5 times the normal length "shortcuts", geographically challenged, downright scammy taxi drivers were a norm. In the States, they also expect a tip of 20% for deigning to do their job; one thing I never understood in Boston is how it is physically possible to accumulate so many fumes in a modern car. In places where the taxis are in demand, they wouldn't bother picking you up.
Today the horrible ones still exist, of course, but their number is dwindling.
Also source required where the number of sexual harassment cases at Uber > the number at a comparatively sized company. Otherwise you are just going off of who gets the most publicity in the media.
You’re asking for something impossible, I.e. proof of something that cannot be proven. After all, any sort of statistic I could find would be tainted by your “media bias” catch-all.
Why do you think HN hates companies that are doing well for themselves?
Doing this is way more exhausting than cheering them on (see SpaceX, people have fun in those posts). "Oh this company is doing well and I'm jealous"? Seriously don't know how that's enough.
There's a slightly less nefarious interpretation which is that people have different values, and disagreement happens.
So many people are extremely happy to see other people's success here, for example Lyft here. But what you might think is unimportant virtue signalling is something other people actually care about, sometimes deeply
Are you sure about your first assertion? It is well known that HN is gratuitously negative about everything. SpaceX is the exception, rather than the rule - and you'd be hard pressed to find another company with quite such a positive reputation on HN.
Personally, I think the causality here is flipped.
People by default will be excited about stuff that's "good news". But the community is pretty big, so there will usually be a set of people that see an issue, and comment on it.
So in the end many things coming through will be negative or cynical. The fact that people tend not to just comment "neat" but will write the paragraphs of research saying how X is wrong doesn't help in the impressions. But for things like research papers, most people tend to just comment on the contents.
I think the reason so few companies on HN have this reputation is because many of these companies are problematic. Google is the symbol of ad networks. Facebook does a bunch of privacy-busting stuff. Amazon exploits many workers on the lower end and it's not certain that their monopoly will be benificial in the future.
If anything I think it's an indictment on the kind of company that succeeds in SV (and, well, capitalism). I think we all remember old "do no evil" Google financing a bunch of awesome stuff. And when they turned out to be like every other company.... well that sucks.
Inversely loads of smaller businesses tend to get a lot of good press on this website, because people can see the passion and the "not about quarterly revenue" attitude.
It's deeper than that. People here like Tesla because it's forcing other car makers to build decent electric cars. That's something that needs to happen if we're going to move away from fossil fuel dependence.
SpaceX is cool because there's a really good chance they'll be more successful at missions to the moon and Mars than NASA has been recently. They're both forward-thinking companies.
Agreed. Whether you think it's worth changing your habits for, with the numerous examples of shitty behavior (that their new CEO has even copped to) from Uber it's not hard to see why people wouldn't want to support them.
In my European bubble people are generally aware that Uber is a morally questionable company (without necessary knowing about the details, just a reputation) and some have heard of Lyft, even though it's not available.
This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Uber is banned in Greece, Italy, Finland and a host of other countries. It's also legally banned in London afaik and heavily regulated in a lot of other places.
Actually in Greece 4 drivers have been criminally charged for violating the law by driving for Uber and falsifying documents (as per company instructions).
In the countries of South Europe (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal) in which I have personal experience, although there are some Uber drivers operating illegally or in gray zones, penetration is minimal. You can only get rides in capitals and major cities, and they're not much cheaper.
The main reasons are 2: people hate Uber because they know they're exploiting workers, and taxi drivers have strong unions. Uber IMHO is the only entity that managed to become more hated than taxi drivers.
The reason Uber is banned everywhere can be summed up by the European Court of Justice: Uber needs to stop pretending to be just an app. It's a transport company, and it's using the app as an excuse to operate illegally, bypassing regulations, responsibility and avoiding tax.
I can second this. Uber did have a positive effect on local taxis, forcing them to upgrade. We now have taxi companies that are reinventing themselves - apps are good, you can pay with CC in the app and the drivers need to adhere to some standard of professional ethics.
Imagine that - they are able to do that without the "Uber" model of ignoring regulation and doing the fuck they want regardless.
Atleast where I live, southern germany, Apps for Taxi have been a thing for a while, to my knowledge predating Uber and the standards for them have been extremely high for decades at this point.
I noticed the same thing about my family in Phoenix who has nothing to do with the tech industry. They think they're very savvy for having the Uber app and knowing how to use it. In fact my uncle was bragging about some uber benefit he gets via his amex platinum card.
They've never heard of Lyft and don't know anything about any Uber controversy other than the fact that 'taxi drivers hate it!"
Great! Now let's get out there and educate, because Uber is truly a disgusting organization at the top. I am sure once they have died, their engineers can find spots at Lyft as something will need to pick up the void, so no need to worry there Uber devs reading this.
> They think they're very savvy for having the Uber app and knowing how to use it. In fact my uncle was bragging about some uber benefit he gets via his amex platinum card.
Yeah, and I keep seeing ads for Maven around. But public consciousness is very high for Uber. The average user that I see doesn't know or care about its internal problems.
If ride availability has anything to say about it, there are plenty of Lyft drivers in San Antonio. I say "take a Lyft" or "Lyft there" when I talk rideshare. I don't preach it or say "Uber sucks" but when I am asked, I mention that Uber had a crummy internal HR program, has committed multiple shady business practices, none of which I can remember, but I can remember disliking.
This is anecdotal, but I'm also in San Antonio and have generally had better experiences with rides from Lyft, even without considering the issues you mentioned. Even wait times have been pretty similar for both. I know someone who drove for both Lyft and Uber, and that person only received any sort of in-person training with Lyft.
I do see the appeal with using Uber internationally that others mentioned in this thread, though.
This seems to be survivorship bias. Since you like lyft, you are more likely to be friends with people who also like lyft. OR to phrase it better, you and people who like lyft have more in common.
I'm visiting the area, and know little to no people here. I downloaded both uber and lyft, and so far have had far more success getting a lyft than an uber.
Anecdotally, in DC the typical wait time for my Lyft rides has about doubled over the past year. Since I can't imagine why fewer people would be driving for them, I interpret that as evidence of increased demand for Lyft.
Not really. They head Uber was about to launch it and pre-emoted by a few days. Still to this day haven’t been able to suss out who was really first with the idea.
Interestingly, I used to work for a company that worked with the London Black cab manufacture to developer ride-hailing from a mobile phone. This was back in the early 00's. I always wondered if there was any patent portfolio that is relevant to Lyft/Uber. It was called Zingo, sadly the only reference I could dig out from a cursory Google was a story about it going bust: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2004/nov/25/transportin...
That's totally true, sad you're being down-voted. Second market mover advantage is equally as strong as market makers. As a second market mover, you just better be prepared to wake build.
Sometimes being first to market yields an unshakable dominance in that market for a long time to come... Mostly not though :)
What you're pointing out is often called 'second movers advantage'. Apples iPhone is a pretty decent example: by not being the first phone provider Apple got to enter a maturing market with a mature offering, use their own core competencies, and dominate. That's hard to do if you're bogged down with backwards compatibility and fighting to make the tech possible.
I'll give you the other ones, but I'll challenge the Amazon example. Sure, there may have been other small sites selling stuff online, but Amazon definitely was a first mover in selling lots of stuff at volume. With all your other examples I can name the companies the later movers overtook (e.g. Google -> Yahoo/Alta Vista, Apple -> Blackberry, Facebook -> Myspace), but I think the first time I bought something online it was a book from Amazon.
When Amazon started they were far from dominant. For a long time they only sold books. Then they only sold classical music CDs. Bit by bit they added other things, like other music, DVDs, and eventually basically all retail goods.
But for years they were basically just one among many sites, and not even terribly notable in the overall retail space. There were lots of other companies selling lots of other stuff at the time. Buy.com, for example, and ebay of course. Of all the ways to buy things online amazon was pretty far down the list until the mid 2000s.
What Amazon brought to the table was a unique combination of good web dev / services skills and top notch fulfillment logistics. And highly competitive pricing. Buying things on amazon was just a better overall experience compared to other sites. For example, when you put something in your shopping cart on amazon it stays there, it doesn't magically disappear for some artificial reason. And the overall experience of search/browse, read reviews, add to cart, then checkout, which today is commonplace throughout online retail was really particularly well honed by amazon. They didn't invent the form but they shaved off all the hard edges. This meant that amazon had much better customer retention than other sites and as amazon added new product lines existing amazon customers often decided to just use amazon for those things too. It took years and years for that momentum to snowball into the online retail juggernaut that Amazon is today.
A lot of other companies at the time had more revenue and invested more money into their stores than Amazon did, but they didn't win because ultimately they didn't execute as well. Amazon was helped by being online early, it gave them the experience necessary to build into what they became, but it's a stretch to claim they had first mover advantage.
> Of all the ways to buy things online amazon was pretty far down the list until the mid 2000s.
That's just not true. Yes, they focused largely on books and music originally, but they were still a first mover in ecommerce and a huge presence. Heck, their 1 click patent was published in 99.
Uber has been ridiculously overvalued. They're core offering an app for hailing taxis. There's a dozen copycats that do it exactly as well as Uber. They are #1 by being first to market and establishing a strong brand. Their product is extremely vulnerable.
They also have no moat on either the consumer or driver side. Apps are trivial to install. Drivers can easily run multiple. It really is a race to see who can get another related business off the ground first.
The competition in ride-hailing industry is pretty intense right now actually. You have several big players:
- Ola (India)
- Didi (China + Brazil & perhaps Japan soon)
- Grab (Southeast Asia)
- Go-Jek (Indonesia, a very populous country with 250 million by the way)
- Uber (global but has retreated from certain markets already, see Uber/Didi deal in China)
- Lyft (US/Canada)
- bunch of startups in Europe but not sure if any of them are big enough to mention
You just listed why Uber is so valuable: none of the others have anywhere near the global range Uber has. Even if Uber banned in a couple European countries they're still widespread enough worldwide to be a better alternative than <no similarly-sized competition to insert here> because of a simple fact: I already have the app setup and running on my phone, which isn't true for any other ones you listed, which either don't operate in the continent at all or are regional to the point of near-uselessness.
In other words: when I travel somewhere, be that a different city or country, I'll by default have Uber already running on my phone; I don't have whatever regional equivalent there is there. This also works the other way around: because I have Uber setup for whenever I travel, I end up using it over any local apps because it's already there and another taxi app offers me nothing that Uber doesn't. I'd love for Lyft or anything similar to get off their asses and expand internationally but I suspect I'll be an old man by the time that happens in any serious capacity.
edit: for example you said you work for Grab. Ok, granted that people from other countries are likely just a tiny market not worth chasing so you don't particularly care whether I use Uber whenever I visit SG, that's fine. But users in SG surely care about only needing one application whenever they travel abroad, which drives adoption towards Uber in Grab's detriment; that's a big reason why Uber is so valuable. From reading the Grab website it looks like that's exactly what Grab is chasing too: expansion into other markets (and props for already supporting multiple countries, along with the app being totally fine with my unsupported country phone number).
> I don't have whatever regional equivalent there is there
I imagine you would install it if Uber is not very common in that market; waiting for an Uber to come might take much longer than for you to install that regional equivalent.
Problem is only Lyft is somewhat big. When you say "There's a dozen copycats that do it exactly as well as Uber", that includes operating in several markets too, no?
If you look at markets outside of America. There’s a few. Most people don’t use Uber in singapore. They use grab. Then in Indonesia there’s grab and a local brand. And Thailand is grab and a local brand. Too lazy to double check the names.
My extended family in the southeast and northeast US is familiar with Uber (without using it), but they haven't heard of Lyft. When I lived in Chicago, most of my peers had Lyft, but Uber was the always the first choice.
Does anyone else see the same trend? The bay area certainly seems to be Lyft-dominant, but I haven't seen that anywhere else.