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by torginus 624 days ago
Uber is not really a tech company though - its moat is not technology but market domination. If it, along with all of its competitors were to disappear tomorrow, the power vacuum would be filled in very short order, as the core technology is not very hard to master.

It's a fundamentally different beast from AI companies.
1 comments
VirusNewbie 624 days ago
How is it not a tech company? They're literally trying to approximate TSP in the way that makes them money. In addition, they're constantly optimizing for surge pricing to maximize ROI. What kind of problems do you think those are?
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Apocryphon 624 days ago
A good meditation on that: https://www.readmargins.com/p/-the-zombie-apocalypse-scale

> I call this scale the Zombie Apocalypse Scale. It is a measure of how many days a company could run for it all its employees were turned to zombies overnight. The more days you can operate without any humans the more of a tech company you are.

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torginus 623 days ago
If someone would be able to solve TSP and surge pricing better than Uber, do you think they'd be able to dethrone them?

The reason surge pricing exists and works the way it is isn't some capitalist efficiency mechanism - in fact it's quite the opposite - it's algorithmic price fixing enabled by Uber's quasi-monopoly, and it is the very thing that enables Uber to exist in the first place as a very profitable company.

A scenario in which competition exists would drive the margins of drive sharing apps to the ground, making it a highly unprofitable exercise. I suspect investors knew this and secretly colluded to promote Uber to become a monopoly. It has very little to do with technology.

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VirusNewbie 623 days ago
> it's algorithmic price fixing enabled by Uber's quasi-monopoly, and it is the very thing that enables Uber to exist in the first place as a very profitable company.

If this was true, they'd have the surge pricing set for always.

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