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letterthief

> The Uber model has no barrier to entry

If uber has no barrier to entry, neither does facebook.

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Facebook has network effects. I use it because my friends use it.

I don't care if my friends use Uber, if a different Taxi company offers me the same service for cheaper.

So you start a competitor to uber, where are all of your drivers?

Uber has network effects too. Facebook has friends, Uber has drivers. You certainly care how many drivers the Taxi company has because it affects the time you have to wait to be picked up.

This is addressed elsewhere on this thread, but I'll repeat: drivers have no compunction about having multiple apps open at the same time. Nothing ties them to Uber.

Sure, but nothing ties eBay sellers to eBay. For an Uber driver to add another Taxi app it's not just a case of downloading and installing the app. They have to create a user account, enter their bank account details, verify their email address, take a photo of themselves, their car, drivers licence and insurance documents and upload them to the Taxi app server. Then wait a day or two for it all to be processed.

If the Taxi app has a significant number of users you might convince driver's to jump through those hoops. But if the Taxi app has no users it's impossible.

Uber was flat out paying drivers to sign-up.

This is an easy problem to solve.

All the taxi apps are incentivizing signups by subsidizing their pay rates. Everyone is essentially taking losses to grow market share. Drivers will signup for whoever can make them money, so there isn't as much friction as suggested. They earn their livelihoods from driving, so a couple day sign up process is well worth it.

the eBay analogy would be that nothing stops people from posting the exact same product on multiple sites at the same time. If I were looking at something on eBay, and I could do a quick google to find that same product on another site for 15% less, eBay will very quickly find themselves in trouble.

In India at least, Uber is asking drivers to do ~5hrs shifts at a time. Or they cut the amount given to drivers. This is due to fierce competition from Ola, Meru and other cab companies.

Not sure, when they will just have to accept that those drivers are their employees(maybe a lawsuit is needed in India as well).

Uber is inherently a two-sided marketplace. You don't care if your friends are shopping on ebay, but you care if enough people are selling there.

I think that says more about Facebook than it does about Uber. Not to derail the conversation but it's entirely possible that FB will be gone in ten years. They already have a demographic problem: far lower penetration among younger cohorts than in years past. And engagement metrics among new younger users show that they are using FB differently than older cohorts.

Thus, I think one could easily argue that FB could be supplanted very quickly by a new service that offers many of its features but is more attuned to the use cases of the younger generation. In Uber's case, the situation is much different because their only appeal (low fares) is unsustainable.

People have been gabbing about Facebook's demographic problems almost since Facebook debuted public access. Not that you couldn't be right, but people are going to keep making this statement until someday it becomes true, then congratulate themselves that they're great prognosticators.

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