I think the value of a brand is under-estimated by HN in general. Brands make people do irrational things and brands do form moats. So while the hardware might be owned by someone else, is it hard to imagine that Uber might be the first association that 1bn people make with "needing a ride"? My answer is no, it's not hard to get there given what I know.

No doubt that car manufacturers will partner with a non-Uber software company. And Uber will partner with someone for hardware. I feel like we could look at how industries consolidate and have an educated guess about how it will play out: some car manufacturers combine to gain more leverage, some create their own proprietary software, some try opening up their cars to multiple software options, one manufacturer exclusively partners with Uber, etc. Phones and computers come to mind as probably sharing _some_ parallels.

So I think the question in our simple discussion is whether the value of the brand and internal knowledge of the software side (data, et al) outweighs the value of having the hardware figured out. And maybe given that this is complicated, it's less about who is in a stronger position and more about who executes better while pursuing that strategy.