[trhway]

>Would incumbent transportation companies have had more time to catch up, leading to a more competitive market?

i'm not sure that in general incumbents catching up leads to increased competition, i think it leads instead to the incumbents protecting their position and using it to stop the innovation and the resulting threat of disruption.

In case of Uber it wasn't about incumbents per.se., it was about regulators. The blitzkrieg allowed to crush regulators and thus increase competition by adding "ridesharing" into the mix.

Similar thing of using your huge weight to crush a chokehold on the industry happened when Jobs took control over phone apps away from the telecom companies.