[thisismyusernam]

Same is true for me.

In my mid-to-late-twenties, I remember thinking "Damn, why are hotels so expensive? I'll just stay in this Airbnb, which is so much bigger anyway. This is the new way and it's disrupting hotels."

Now at the outset of my thirties and a more settled phase of life, I will gladly pay a premium to stay in a hotel.

In the same way, it's becoming more likely for me to flag a London black cab than book an Uber via the app.

There's a reason why some business models and establishment types 'just work' throughout history and it's not entirely because of well-funded lobbying and conservative lawmaking, as we were maybe led to believe in the early Airbnb/Uber days when anything disruptive was shiny.

[rchaud]

I wouldn't say they 'just work', but rather that what we see is the steady state they've arrived at, warts and all. The startup industry has this obsessive focus on looking at the steady state and thinking they can fix all the warts, without really looking into why they formed in the first place.

[smacktoward]

SV has a Chesterton's Fence problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

[rchaud]

Good to know there's already been some prior thought on this topic.

[JadeNB]

What is SV?

[smacktoward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley

[ryanmercer]

>it's becoming more likely for me to flag a London black cab than book an Uber via the app.

Those guys know what they are doing and that's an incredibly hard job to get, the points of interest for example, if you spend that much time just trying to get licensed you're probably going to be more professional than random soccer mom trying to make money while the kids are at school. That's not the case with taxis in the US or many other countries though.

[brightsize]

>Those guys know what they are doing and that's an incredibly hard job to get

Indeed, the dedication required to acquire The Knowledge [1] is incredible, at least to me considering how the job of taxi driver is considered a fairly low-end, unskilled one here in the States.

"The London taxicab driver is required to be able to decide routes immediately in response to a passenger's request or traffic conditions, rather than stopping to look at a map, relying on satellite navigation or asking a controller by radio. Consequently, the "Knowledge of London" is the in-depth study of a number of pre-set London street routes and all places of interest that taxicab drivers in that city must complete to obtain a licence to operate a black cab. It was initiated in 1865, and has changed little since.

It is the world's most demanding training course for taxicab drivers, and applicants will usually need to pass at least twelve "appearances" (periodical one-on-one oral examinations undertaken throughout the qualification process), with the whole process usually averaging 34 months, to pass."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom...