The entire ride-sharing/delivery/logistics space was moving ridiculously fast during that time.
Remember those photos of thousands of multicolored bicycles abandoned in fields? Or the scooters being yeeted into the ocean, global riots from taxi drivers, the collapse of the taxi medallion market, regulatory debates in every city/state/country, billions of VC money raised in weeks (or days), the Darwinian M&A scene as companies were devoured in the jungle as quickly as they were founded...
...and, of course, the fact that you could finally push a button and make a bag of groceries appear. (Though the 3,600,000 millisecond latency still isn't great on that one.)
Even though this in the long run may have burned more money than it yielded, I think this also represented a pretty landmark shift in how people saw computers (including smartphones). They were no longer just devices for surfing the web or messaging. Between this, and the rise of Amazon/online shopping, computers were now ways to actuate the world
IIRC, a lot of that was enabled (at least in the US) by the wider-scale rollout of 3g and smartphones. Before that, not only did few people have smartphones (uber initially had both a website and phone number you could contact to get a ride for at least a few years), but even metropolitan service areas were too spotty for near-realtime apps to work effectively.
Remember those photos of thousands of multicolored bicycles abandoned in fields? Or the scooters being yeeted into the ocean, global riots from taxi drivers, the collapse of the taxi medallion market, regulatory debates in every city/state/country, billions of VC money raised in weeks (or days), the Darwinian M&A scene as companies were devoured in the jungle as quickly as they were founded...
...and, of course, the fact that you could finally push a button and make a bag of groceries appear. (Though the 3,600,000 millisecond latency still isn't great on that one.)