[jval]

What are the "hard" problems of driver and consumer mobile app and infrastructure/coverage?

All the software in this business is commodity.

The only real defensibility at work here are the network effects, which are totally asymmetrical due to the city-focussed nature of ride-sharing.

The legislation is generally not company-specific, which makes the problem much better for followers rather than leaders. Uber enters a new city and gets hit with the upfront cost of having to fight to have legislation changed. No such problem for the followers who can wait until the battle is over and then claim the same status under the new legislation.

Uber and Lyft could do the same thing Sidecar is doing, but then they wouldn't be Uber and Lyft. They would be Sidecar. You have to choose one thesis and go for it. Sidecar is going for the variable price model and Uber & Lyft are going for the fixed price model.

Nobody is going to run the table over the other guy, investors know that and are betting that the different model will attract a subset of customers perhaps not as large as Uber/Lyft but large enough to be a big business in a huge market, maybe even IPO. Seems pretty logical to me.