Ubers other differentiator is the fact that I can go to just about any city in the world and use it. I guess I could research and install fotaxi but as a 21th century consumer, I'm extremely lazy.
I don't think it comes down to just being lazy. Regardless of whether you've had good or bad experiences with Uber, you've had experiences, may have chatted to their support team, etc, and you know what to expect from the service and the company. The local alternative might be better, but it's an unknown.
For me that's Uber (well, Lyft), but a local restaurant - I don't think it's a fair comparison. Getting somewhere in a cheap and timely way is often an instrumental issue, rather than "part of the travel experience". When it isn't, I'll happily walk, take the subway, etc.
This sort of reminds me of Usain Bolt in Beijing, actually. He lived on McDonald's chicken nuggets, not because he's averse to trying new things but because he couldn't risk anything upsetting his stomach during competition. For him, eating was instrumental, so he wanted predictability.
Even if you immersive travel, there are times when it's really useful to know what you'll get.
I read the GP as saying there'll be a unified UI to various local taxis ("interconnected ecosystem"). I could see this emerging from EU regulation, in a similar way they mandate banks to open up their APIs (which is much bigger than taxis).
I don't know how big that really is. While there are a few business people/tourists that travel a lot, a lot of execs are likely to either take a taxi straight from the airport taxi queue, as it's quite a lot of hassle to use uber at a lot of airports.
The small journeys around town aren't as likely to be as valuable, it's usually the longer airport fares which will make up the majority of taxi spending for people away.
That's why these local taxi companies usually have billboards at train stations and airports that inform travellers of their app.
EDIT: Alternatively, convince the taxi companies to open up their API. Then you can have one app that selects the correct API based on your current location.
> That's why these local taxi companies usually have billboards
What year is this? $YEAR_OF_BILLBOARD_INVENTION + 2?
> Alternatively, convince the taxi companies to open up their API.
I still feel like one company will take over. You cannot build a good product by federating APIs across different municipalities, governments, continents, (planets?).
