As an aside: Every day for at least the past month an Uber story talking about their failings has dominated Hacker News. I strongly believe that Uber's problems are extremely importantant, and deserve to be on the front page. But, its really tiring to talk about a company that is stumbling every single day when we could have posts about other things.
replace the mob with happy users if you wish.
disclaimer: i'm a part of the mob, it's a very interesting topic for me.
No it's anyone who reads the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or watches Bloomberg too. I'm pretty sure that includes much more than techies. Uber has been featured on the front page of both of those newspapers and not just recently.
>"All of my friends who aren't in tech don't know anything about Uber's problems and use it regularly"
That's purely anecdotal.
http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2017-06/travis-kalanick-uber-r...
Uber CEO being fired or Waymo law suit is a bigger story and a lot more people know about it. But i don't think people will stop using uber because of those two stories. Compare that to sexual harassment being rampant in Uber which could cause a lot more people to not use Uber out of ethics.
>That's purely anecdotal.
I didn't say otherwise.
Kalanick's resignation was literally the top story on the NYTimes homepage for a large chunk of the day yesterday, and it's still on the frontpage today (via a separate piece on the topic).
It's not at all just the people in tech who knew about Uber's issues, even before this week. At least since February, it definitely crossed the line into mainstream news. People who read mainstream news might still use Uber for various reasons (lack of other option in their city, price, inertia, apathy, etc.), but this story moved beyond tech news circles months ago.
Not all Uber clients are from the States and so do not read the NYTimes daily (and the newspapers around the other parts of the world usually have other more important things to talk about, we also have our own corrupt and nasty business-people).
Case in point, one of my best friends who works as a tech contractor for a big European defense company in the Arabian peninsula (were newspapers like the NYTimes to discuss about these kind of contracts we'd live in a much better world) and who has just praised to me about how wonderful Uber is because anytime when he comes back home (we live in Eastern Europe) it's a thousand times better to pick an Uber car from the airport than to try and put your faith in a taxi.
Thankfully karma finally intervened!