| > McDonalds didn’t have the first burger franchise, So saying "the innovation is in the franchise" wouldn't make sense, right? > That doesn’t really do you any good when the use case for a taxi is generally that you need a car in a place that is not your home, and so you are unfamiliar with the area. The use case for a taxi is surely dominated by when you need a car but can't or don't want to drive? I've definitely taken more taxis near my home than away from it, purely because I'm here more often. > Uber not only gave you a reliable dispatcher, they show you with GPS that the taxi on the way, which greatly improves consumer confidence that yes, the ride really is on its way. If that existed pre-Uber for some areas, it hardly matters if you never visit the area and so don’t know about it’s existence. This seems like an odd description of innovation to me. "I didn't know about it so it's innovative"? Remember, innovation is not the same as value. I'm not saying it doesn't add value to have these services elsewhere, but that the app is not innovative simply because it was not new. |
I say this as someone who was downright flabbergasted that the iPhone was described as “innovative.” After all, I had been using a handheld PC with full Windows installed for years when the original iPhone came out, and it could make VoIP calls just fine! It took me awhile to accept that the incremental “new” people are talking about when they talk about innovation is distinctly NOT novelty. It’s a shuffling of the already existing puzzle-pieces in a way that, in the cases it is successful, we call innovative, and when it fails, it was simply “ahead of its time.”