| > The final question is: what's the moat? I mean, it's a 2-sided market. That's inherently a moat. There's a reason why it took Amazon to displace Ebay, and Facebook to displace Craigslist. It's a very expensive and difficult market to get into. > It seems an industry designed to reach, at its height, tiny profit margins. There are plenty of industries like that. Grocery, for example. That doesn't mean that the business is a bad one by itself. > I suspect regulation is heading in the direction of making it easier for people to move their data between apps too -- if that happens, the "social-data" moats of these bizes will disappear. IMO, that wouldn't change anything. If I could export all of my Facebook data (maybe I can, I haven't checked), it wouldn't cause me to abandon the platform - I'm there because of the other people on the platform. Riders use Uber because it has the drivers. And the drivers use Uber because it has the riders. The ability to export ride history or reputation isn't going to change that fact. |
> And the drivers use Uber because it has the riders.
You make it sound exclusive, but I've seen many drivers use a few different apps at the same time, often with different phones. You just need some temporary incentives and you've bootstrapped your network, because as explained above, the problem is only the initial bootstrapping.
Concrete example: two months ago I hadn't heard of "Free Now". I've now used it twice in two different European countries, last time because Uber was exactly four times as expensive (maybe that explains their new profits? They just raised their prices, hoping users won't notice?). I'm not often in a taxi so this is just anecdotal, but there's very little friction when switching to another service.