Generous of the article to refer to Gett as a "rival" and not a clone.
Because Uber is so crazily innovative that no-one else would ever think about doing it? Come on. It's a car service with a smartphone app. There's a reason there are at least a dozen companies doing it.
Non-taxi on-call cars have existed for many, many decades before Uber. Especially in NYC where this article is relevant, car services are a dime a dozen and have been a regular part of city life for decades.
The difference is between picking up your phone to get one vs. using your smartphone. Uber was first to market, but it's silly to pretend that without them it wouldn't have happened. That's like calling the Pizza Hut app a clone of the Domino's app, because they both order pizzas and Domino's came out first. Ultimately Uber is a newfangled (and more convenient) front-end to a service that has pre-dates itself by a wide, wide margin.
The extension from "call the car company to get a car" to "use an app to get a car" is a pretty obvious innovation, particularly in NYC.
So what? You can say that about any large tech companies.
Google wasn't the first search engine. Apple didn't make the first music player. Facebook wasn't the first social network.
Being unique doesn't matter a single bit. Only thing that matters is that people are using them. And that's the case with Uber. Judge however you will their shady tactics, but it's ridiculous to downplay their success based on that.
I'd wager that people in ancient Athens would send a messenger to the local chariot service when they needed to get around on short notice. The idea that Uber is somehow doing something new is ludicrous.
Was Uber really the 'first'? Lyft a similar service came out of zimride.com which was doing ride sharing as early as 2007 though perhaps not through a smart phone in real time.
Zimride did indeed launch in 2007 as a Facebook based carpooling app. It wasn't real-time at that time. Don't know if/when Zimride built an iPhone app but I built a real-time ridesharing iPhone app in 2008: http://ridecell.com/gt/
Uber started in 2009.
Disclaimer: The company I started, InstantCab, competes directly with Uber.
A few requests/cancellations to get the cell # would be scrappiness. 100+ is sleazy and if I were Travis or Ryan I would be removing the NYC GM if this story is accurate.
I'm curious, do you think all of those "X but on the internet" patents are good inventions worthy of 17 years of government protection? Because this is basically the same thing. Uber provides a service that has been around for centuries, it's just "on smartphones". Is that really sufficiently unique to call other people who do it "a clone"?
To be fair, integrating the Ebay-style rating of sellers/drivers does stand out as an important distinction - making that a core part of their app is a bit disruptive. Not a huge deal and not all their competitors do it, but that's something you don't usually expect in that kind of car service.
I agree, and I don't want to make it sound like Uber isn't doing anything interesting or innovative. I just don't think that what they're doing is interesting or innovative enough that we should consider it all an original idea that others could "clone".
Taking smartphones and eBay-style ratings and integrating it into a smartphone app is great! But imitators, if they are "cloning" anything, are cloning eBay and car services, not Uber. The combination is extremely useful but ultimately nothing special.
Because Uber is so crazily innovative that no-one else would ever think about doing it? Come on. It's a car service with a smartphone app. There's a reason there are at least a dozen companies doing it.