Comment by RoyTyrell
10 days ago
Those companies are also likely still in the red. They're banking on the hope that one day they will be profitable. I'm sure one of them will be.
10 days ago
Those companies are also likely still in the red. They're banking on the hope that one day they will be profitable. I'm sure one of them will be.
HN said the same thing about Uber forever.
Uber didn't invent anything, they drove taxis out of business then jacked up the prices, squeezed the workers, and now everybody is riding around in regular people's crappy cars for more than a cab cost. And now I need a phone and to maintain my relationship with these two crappy companies rather than to wave at the street (which is what I used to do to get a ride.)
That was literally what everybody said would happen.
I think Uber invented (or at least made widely available) taxi-by-app. Having scores of cab companies, accessed by telephone call, was supremely user-hostile.
If the cab companies had gotten together on an app, they might have shortcut Uber and all of its many dubious practices. They finally are starting to but it's much too late.
4 replies →
> Uber didn't invent anything
They didn't. They innovated, practically implemented ideas that resulted in the introduction of new goods and services [1]. This is a meaningful difference.
Uber didn't invent anything. But they did pull ridesharing out of a hat.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation
I think you're definitely in the minority. For most of the world, Uber/Grab/Bolt have made transportation cheaper, safer, more convenient, and more comfortable.
It completely changed an industry. Just because you don't like the current version doesn't mean it wasn't a major innovation. Uber was just the main player in scaling and marketing a new model across the entire globe, which was a huge and costly endeavor.
LLMs have already changed how software can be written and a thousands of other business/consumer usecases, these companies are just battling it out and finding the most profitable niches. It will be a major business for a long time and the technology will mature and plateau pretty quickly. If R&D doesn't scale economically, it will just slow down and existing models will be heavily optimized to be cheaper to run.
The dot com boom resulted in very few real industries and comparing the two is not very useful.
Uber definitely screwed the workers and probably existing taxi companies, but for the users it was a huge W, at least in many parts of the world. Taxi companies are notoriously scammy and it seems to be a very universal experience.
> rather than to wave at the street (which is what I used to do to get a ride.)
Ummm taxis aren't everywhere like NYC or something. Broadly speaking Uber will pick you up in an arbitrary place and take you anywhere.
Uber is way cheaper and better than any cab ever was.
4 replies →
For almost 20 year, Amazon has been the poster child of "A company can be unprofitable for years and still turn out a winner", but of course - not all companies can pivot from being a regular e-commerce company to cloud infrastructure/hosting, and become a money machine.
So the question, at least to me, is how these AI companies will find a product or service that makes them profitable. Other than becoming actual monopolies in their current domains.
Uber sold something like $50 billion in equity and debt before it went public, and although they're profitable now, to me it doesn't seem like they have answer to Waymo coming up fast in the rear-view mirror. I think Uber is still a scam, just one where the earlier investors fleeced the later ones who are never going to see the returns they paid for.
Uber is still >$10bn net negative over its lifetime. Claude estimates about –$19bn.
It's still quite possible that Uber doesn't make that up in the near future.