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Comment by frakkingcylons | Hacker News Reader

Their branding and existing install base is a huge advantage.

Uber and Lyft returned to Austin last week after the Texas state legislature passed a law that overturns Austin's regulations. The local competitors have lost huge numbers of customers. Fare is shutting down, Fasten had to lower their rates, and Ride Austin saw their trip volume decrease by 55% in the first week [0]. I'd say it's pretty unlikely they will survive to the end of this year.

[0]: https://austinstartups.com/what-we-learned-from-the-first-we...

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It is an advantage but it is not huge, it is not moat-like. They have more money to spend marketing and subsidizing rides. Again you said:

"Fasten had to lower their rates"

It is a price war, it is not truly about innovation in the space. Their software & services are not so innovative/defensive that it is hard to switch.

The argument for Uber's leadership is that they are special because they are building something that other Entrepreneurs/Leaders could not, that is not accurate if it is so easy to switch to a competitor. Not much hassle, loss of service when switching, same drivers / same cars.

> It is a price war, it is not truly about innovation in the space.

Longer term it certainly is about innovation. The next leap for Uber and its competitors, is going to be removing most the drivers from the business. That's an extremely difficult and expensive path, Uber is among the few that can afford to pursue it early. Their moat may end up being the vast data they have to leverage to compete in autonomous. The winning Uber-type company in the future is going to be the one that best utilizes the most driving/use/traffic data. The company that does that, will have dramatically greater margins (and potentially greater customer satisfaction) than any upstart competitor can manage; that'll mostly be the end of new competition in the Uber space. After the segment settles down, there will still be a rare gimmick-based company (like Cuil), they'll all fail or be acquired however. All tech spaces that produce a giant company, end with very little competition, this will be no different. There are not going to be 47 Uber clones succeeding in the US market, three or four would be pushing it.

Why remove drivers?

...price.

The interesting question is how much of that is due to hard advantages:discounts, lower costs, and better technology, having access to drivers vs branding ? because if the model changes(self-driving, or shuttles) and big competitors attack, the hard advantages will look quite different.

It simply underscores the fact that ridesharing is a commodity. If the price or experience is in any way different users will happily jump ship. I don't fear monopolization of the technology too much as it's relatively easy to bootstrap one of these companies in a short amount of time (options, while most would say are and were inferior, popped up in Austin within a month after Uber and Lyft's departure). As these apps grow, I think there will be an eventual ceiling on the experience part of it (there's only so much you can improve on the app experience of getting from point a to point b before you start to face diminishing returns). Eventually like gasoline the price of the service will be the main deciding factor in the future.

This train of thought does not take into account the game-changing possibility of self-driving cars.

> If the price or experience is in any way different users will happily jump ship

And that's one of the many reasons why users will not jump ship. It'll cost billions of dollars in red ink to compete with Lyft and replicate the price & experience. It costs more to successfully compete with Uber. Which is why there aren't / haven't been tons of successful competitors to Uber in the US market.

No, you can't bootstrap a competitor to Lyft's $2 billion VC blackhole. No, it's not easy to do. No, users won't just bail on Uber to try your start-up. No, ridesharing isn't a commodity, precisely because the experiences are not all the same and never will be.

It'd be like claiming that retailing is a commodity (it's not), so therefore you can bootstrap a competitor to Walmart or Amazon. Except, you know, for the hyper scale that enables them to operate at slimmer margins than you can (your ability to compete with them at what they do declines at an accelerating rate as they increase scale), and the vast data they have on every angle of customer behavior (which you entirely lack, which negatively impacts your business in a thousand ways vs Walmart or Amazon). One of the things that protects a Walmart from being susceptible to commodity-style competition, is among other things their incredible data and national consistency (which small time operators and start-ups can never replicate; if I go to a Walmart in Texas it'll be similar to one in Virginia, I can be relatively confident in the results of my shopping trip there).

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