[smt88]

I disagree with your premises as well as your argument.

WhatsApp, Instagram, and SnapChat are valuable because they have users. There are a million ways to monetize users once you have them, but it's hard to get them. Google, Facebook, and others are large, humming machines that squeeze money out of users, but WhatsApp, Instagram, and SnapChat are not. The latter three companies are valuable because they can be fed into the larger machines that already figured out how to monetize.

Unrelated: Uber certainly is a threat to a lot of companies (USPS, Zifty, DHL), but I can't see the Google connection. In fact, Uber and Google recently became partners.

If anything, Google is a massive, existential threat to Uber because it's working to perfect self-driving cars.

[zyx321]

How in the world would Uber threaten the United States Postal Service or Deutsche Post?

Even if that's a typo and you meant United Parcel Service (UPS), even if we examine DHL independent of its parent company, they are heavily invested in international freight and supply chain management. I see no great benefits there from the ability to summon a cargo plane on a whim with your phone, nor from handing it off to someone with no formal training/license/qualifications.

[acconrad]

Because Uber could eventually become a cheaper, easier, crowd-sourced version of "the last mile"[1]. This is a huge threat to the thousands of DHL and UPS delivery folk who make a living shipping parcels in the Last Mile, and to the businesses they belong, which make most of their delivery fees via the Last Mile. Unless Uber (or companies like Shyp) partner with them, it could bring these old business models down.

[1] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transport)

[JeremyNT]

I have difficulty imagining any way Uber can compete with an entrenched last mile provider on cost. What possible economic advantage would individuals have in parcel delivery versus an entrenched provider? UPS has massive benefits from economies of scale in terms of route density / fleet maintenance / fuel costs / etc etc, which no individual vehicle operator will ever be able to compete with.

Sure, an Uber driver could charge less for labor, but given that the cost of operating their vehicle will inevitably be more expensive per delivery I expect there is probably no price point at which they can realistically compete.

Perhaps Uber drivers have a path forward in niche delivery services: food, very time sensitive deliveries, rerouted deliveries, etc. But in those areas they will need to compete on quality, and the market for more expensive, higher quality deliveries (while possibly extant) cannot be large enough to represent an existential threat to a company the size as UPS.

Beyond this, I'm curious as to whether it's even in UPS's best interest to continue to service the last mile.

Both UPS[0] and FedEx[1] already have services wherein they partner with the USPS specifically to avoid servicing the last mile. Outsourcing to better/cheaper/more efficient last mile service providers might eliminate a lot of UPS employees and revenue, but the last mile is incredibly expensive to operate. Is the last mile service really a major source of profits when compared to their highly efficient long distance operations?

[0] http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/track/sp_definiti...

[1] http://www.fedex.com/us/smart-post/index.html

[makomk]

There's already a cheaper crowd-sourced version of "the last mile" here in the UK. They're called Yodel (formerly the Home Delivery Network), most of their packages are delivered by non-employees using their own cars, lots of big companies like Amazon use them, and they have a really terrible reputation.

[smt88]

We have LaserShip in the US, and they're also terrible (but not crowdsourced).

[bhouston]

All self-driving cars are a threat to Uber, but it will be a really long time for fully self-driving cars to reach significant penetration, as much as I love them. I think for the next 10 years we will be in the era of smart assisted driving.

[smt88]

1) I actually think self-driving cars are moving faster than expected. Ten years is still a pretty reasonable guess, considering the pace of governments and the auto industry, but we're closer than I thought we'd be by now.

2) Uber will use self-driving cars, probably exclusively as soon as it's legal.

Uber wants to be the internet of the physical world. With the internet, information could travel anywhere with the tap of a finger. Uber wants the same reduction of friction for objects and people.

The problem for Uber is it's already easy to poach drivers from Uber. Drivers don't care if they drive for Lyft or Uber because the payouts are pretty similar. I've met drivers who switched between both.

When cars drive themselves, Uber will have to become even more competitive to stay on top. The cost of building an Uber-like fleet will be no more than buying the hardware.

Remember how hosting companies proliferated in the 90s and early 00s? Until AWS and similar PaaS options, the hosting space was incredibly fragmented, and the margins were awful. That's what Uber has on the horizon.

[marcus_holmes]

Cool thought, that the Last Mile will soon be commodity-priced and driverless cars will be making deliveries when they're not otherwise occupied. Software eating yet another business.

Providing capital to build a replica of an existing proven business model is easy, you already provided the example: gajillions of hosting companies providing physical hardware for peanuts because a few people had proved the business model worked. The cost of the hardware is amortised over its expected lifetime and any bank will provide the loan.

If this is Uber's future then Travis must be looking to exit before that...