Would guess schlep blindness caused a lot of people to dismiss the idea, a whole lot of groundwork and legal headaches besides just making an app to request a car.
http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
The interesting part about Uber is the legal side and not the actual transportation. I.e. how can you legally provide a public transportation without paying for permit.
Or how can you call a driver a non employee while specifically giving him orders to drive.
Uber is a marketing company and the customers are the drivers. The criticism of Uber “ordering” drivers ignores the fact that exactly how the taxi business has worked. Taxi companies don’t have drivers as employees, they are almost always contractors that lease or buy cars from the taxi company. Spend some time as an actual Yellow Cab driver and then contrast that to how good Uber drivers have it by comparison. You can, for example, just not drive and Uber doesn’t charge you a fee. A taxi driver has to pay Yellow Cab daily or weekly for their car/fees no matter if they are rolling or not. A Yellow Can driver can’t also work in the same car for another taxi company, while Uber drivers can drive simultaneously for Lift, do deliveries for various companies, etc. Uber markets rides for the drivers, drivers are customers of Uber, not employees. The taxi business has always sucked for drivers, Uber didn’t create that, they actually made it better because a driver isn’t forced to lease Yellow Cab metal. Uber also broke the taxi medallion racket that kept taxis in many large cities under the control of the mafia or other connected people who could artificially distort the supply and demand using political pressure and payoffs. Destroying the value of taxi medallions was the real, great innovation of Uber. And, the public isn’t any less safe with Uber than they were with taxi monopolies. Passenger safety is practically the same, especially when accounting for the dramatically higher volume of ride share trips compared to the volume of taxi trips.