Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Judgmentality 2453 days ago
You effectively summarized all my points towards "Uber is fine," "Boston Dynamics is fine," and "self-driving cars are fine."

Uber is hemorrhaging money and are still competing against Lyft. What is their path towards profitability other than raising prices and losing customers? How do they become anything other than a glorified taxi company? Even if you disagree with me, you can't deny that the stock is trending downwards right now and is expected to continue to fall until after the lockup period for employees is up - that's when I think we'll see a glimpse of what Uber is really worth.

Boston Dynamics has been passed around constantly because nobody wants to keep them once they realize they can't make money. Spot is a cool robot, but they don't release a price. How many people want to spend the better part of $100k (or a leasing option) on something with incredibly limited utility? The market is tiny since the military keeps rejecting their machines.

If you believe in self-driving being the future, fine. Then that's a logical bet. I adamantly believe self-driving is like nuclear fusion - it's decades and tens of billions of dollars away from being commercially viable, if ever.

> Being pretty negative on those companies.

That's because I know how easy it is to make demoware and how hard it is to make a real product.

1 comments

> How do they become anything other than a glorified taxi company?

Just curious, what's wrong with that? A global taxi dispatching service that's always available, always (debatably) efficiently routing drivers to passengers sounds like a game-winning plan. Regular taxi dispatching services weren't doing these things well, on top of just sucking since they had no real competition for so long.

> Just curious, what's wrong with that?

It just means Uber is a failed investment for SoftBank.