[lotsofpulp]

I would guess they did not have the timing right with the advent of 3G internet with minimum viable bandwidth to be able to operate things like maps and GPS and payment processing in real time, combined with the advent of usable mobile phones with sufficient qualities of battery life, touch screen sizes, and computing power.

The 2007 to 2012 period was a perfect storm of bringing together connectivity with never before utility from newly developed devices, and if you were in the right place at the right time to stake a claim, then you had significant first mover advantages.

It was discovering new land that had not been settled yet, similar to when computing and society advanced to allow for computers in every home, and then internet connectivity, and then finally, 24/7 computing plus internet computing in your pocket.

Of course, having deep, deep pockets to hire the people at the forefronts of this land rush is also a huge advantage.

[DaiPlusPlus]

> advent of 3G internet with minimum viable bandwidth to be able to operate things like maps and GPS and payment processing in real time

I just realized that GPS was probably the reason: I remember my first time using Uber and it was the fact you could see the location of the car and yourself on the map in real-time, and so you could easily get to the car without the usual hassle of trying to locate and identify each other. That's just not possible with SMS (even if a phone did support GPS, I've never seen anything like "send coordinates by SMS" on a feature-phone, and even if the server could render a map it wouldn't be downloaded in real-time to be useful.

...though if it was a Java mobile app for each platform, that might have worked (even over GPRS), but considering how expensive mobile-data was at the time, hmm, yeah.