I very highly doubt it: They cannot very well have people's hearing aids fail to work if some sort of doom destroys the phone.
It is probably simply that it isn't so absolutely difficult for Apple to start making these. The company is already experienced in making small electronics, earbuds, and things like this.
They know how to make feedback-based sound equalization via their latest generations of airpods. This bit is very important for adapting the devices to the hearing loss profiles of patients.
This is what made them extremely expensive for a good part of their history. Adaptability and auto-adaptability.
Also, they're very small electronics for what they do.
I love hating on Apple as much as the next guy, but I doubt that would happen. They'd probably have some fancy features that could only be controlled from Apple devices, but surely none of the core functionality.
47% taxes above A$180k/yr (US$125k/yr). Very little loopholes like in the US that allow you to reduce your tax paid.
So considerably less monetary incentive to 'make it big'. For entrepreneurs who want to do that, why not move to the USA and come back to Australia when you want to settle down and have a family?
Is the entrepreneurial equity tax picture the same? In the US, it's all about the capital gains rate. Australia appears to have a similar setup where gains from an asset held for more than a year are taxed at half the rate. That would bring it in line with the US rate.
Even for the raw income tax rate you cite, any place paying the really high salaries, historically, has been at a similar rate.
As an immigrant to Australia, the dream is now being able to rent it. Cannot say that I feel that there is tall poppy at work, things can be quite creative and competitive. Schools do give that feeling of subdued expectations. I’d say education is the key factor for subpar performance, with very limited focus on academic achievement and inter generational education segregation partially built into the system. Australia beats significantly below its weight education wise. Weather, language, affluence would have you expect at least a couple globally leading universities. They are good, but nowhere near where they could be, as they focused on the easy money of attracting Chinese students just on the basis of proximity and language. With this source drying up, I see many academics I knew leaving the country (5 out of 5 is anecdotal and explicitly correlated, but hard to not take it seriously).
I'm not sure that's the dream. For me it's a massive cause of anxiety and recurring stress.
I've been renting for my entire adult life in NSW. Despite NSW (and Australia in general) having pretty decent tenant protections - it's getting increasingly difficult to find a landlord/real-estate agent who isn't trying to just outright screw their tenants, because they can get away with it.
- Constantly pushing rental rates, at absolutely every opportunity. Owning rental property is no longer just a solid investment that'll pay itself off, no, they're pushing the whole the-most-the-market-will-bear aspect.
- Forcing use of rental payment platforms that are privacy invasive and charge additional fees (rather than just free direct-deposit)
- Completely ignoring basic tenant requests, unless you force their hand.
- Outright abusive and even unlawful contracts and if you protest - well fuck you, find somewhere else to live.
You're never able to be totally secure, because landlords are able to just toss you out, no reason or cause - or able to construct causes if you're able to protest them.
I was tongue in cheek. I was just issued a notice to vacate with no grounds a week ago, so believe me I am with you. And no, apparently tenant protection is not decent at all. European countries are much better in tenant protection.
Wow. This seems terrible. I never really understood the anglo obsession with owning a house (easier to move with rentals, outperformed by the stock market while not paying dividends, and still crashing with the stock market).
But if renting is that bad in your world, i really understand.
You are so correct, property ownership is now just a dream, however I stand by the cultural inertia of home ownership rather than "making it big" as being an underlying driver in peoples minds. Why else would people take up mortgages at very low interest rates that will be impossible for them to make payments when the interest rates start to rise as they have started to do.
My kids (low 20's) still seem to dream that owning a home (well at least having a mortgage) is something that they can aspire to on a normal wage. The one who has given up on this idea is now tending towards "not playing" as being a logical decision with regards to economic participation, and to be honest who could argue with them.
The T1 runs an iOS variant because Apple understands that if you can re-use security primitives (Secure Encave from IOS), you have less surface area for attacks and you have a more secure product.
There is absolutely no need for a separate SoC for the lock screen, when the Apple SoC already features high-efficiency cores.
Yeah but Apple products are so expensive, outside of the USA, most[1] people still use Android simply because their budget for a phone is maybe ~$300-$400 and they don't want a SE with the body from 5 years ago.
They have a huge second (or third-forth)-hand market though (which is actually maybe the greenest part of Apple’s operation and one I will applaud them for). Most people would probably be much better off buying a 4-5 years old iphone than buying the latest shitty low-end android phone thrown at them by telecom companies that will be slow even as new and will be literally unusable a year later.
(Though the same disgusting practice is used on laptops where a mid-class 5 years old laptop can easily outclass a “modern” low-end one..)
This is directly from Pratchett's "Samuel Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness".
Well-off people can afford the iPhone SE, which will get updates for 5-6 years. Poorer people get the fancy schmancy latest Android device with 42 front cameras that'll stop getting OS updates in a year or two. After 3-4 years it's completely unsupported by anything and bordering on unusable, at this point even the security updates have stopped.
>that'll stop getting OS updates in a year or two.
Buy better phones then? Samsung and Google both offer 5 years of updates now.
>after 3-4 years it's completely unsupported by anything and bordering on unusable
No they aren't, and we all know you don't have a source to support this.
4+ years ago this wasn't the case and I watched people get burned by shitty support multiple times - all the while my iOS devices chugged along. Even flagship phones could get 0-1 official OS level updates.
Oh, and check the fine print on those promised "updates". IIRC the Samsung one guarantees "security updates" for 5 years - basically they'll backport fixes for high enough severity CVEs to older phones. You won't be getting 5 Android OS updates on them.
I'm willing to bet actual money that no more than a half dozen Android models you can buy _today_ with Android 12 on them will get Android 16 as an official update. On the other hand I can pretty much guarantee that the iPhone 13 being sold today will still get iOS 20.
Specs might be better, but in real-world performance Apple provides the smoother experience. Not to mention that software support is sparse and short-lived for Android phones in that budget range. Sadly...
This is actually bad news because a super-hot labour market tends to lead to higher inflation; forcing the Fed to artificially slow down the economy even more and increasing the chances that they land with a recession.
Is it a law of nature that whenever workers do well, the Fed has to curb it? That seems like a deliberate policy choice made not with the average person's interests at heart.
> Is it a law of nature that whenever workers do well, the Fed has to curb it? That seems like a deliberate policy choice made not with the average person's interests at heart.
It is a less-spoken about flaw of the economic system we live in.
In a resource-constrained planet, we just cannot have too many people demanding too many resources. Under the current system, most people cannot consume above average resources except a few successful capitalists and systematic holders of power.
The fed is merely trying to reduce inflation but the society is structured in a way such that only the common man suffers inordinate costs to their lives. The select few people have entrenched their positions in society, thus they will never suffer extreme consequences in a fed induced downturn.
This systematic disproportionate affect is what causes unrest in society. If the wealthy lost money proportionate to their gamble and literally fell on the streets, shoulder to shoulder with the commoner, most people wouldn't have a problem with a fed downturn.
>If the wealthy lost money proportionate to their gamble and literally fell on the streets, shoulder to shoulder with the commoner, most people wouldn't have a problem with a fed downturn.
Isn't that exactly what happens when the stock values go down? That most don't end up on the street isn't a result of any magic tricks, but of diversifying investments. So if Amazon goes to shit during an upcoming recession/depression, I would assume that Bezos has more than enough money parked in real estate or other assets.
Diversifying investments helps the rich for sure. It is the wise choice to make.
But the real problem is bailouts and cheap loans for the rich to cruise through the downturn while the ordinary person will likely lose their job and healthcare.
>But the real problem is bailouts and cheap loans for the rich to cruise through the downturn while the ordinary person will likely lose their job and healthcare.
While I agree with the idea that government shouldn't give bailouts, I don't see how obtaining cheap loans when one has sufficient collateral to wager is a problem. Banks tried subprime lending before and the result was a global recession and a tighter grip on the financial industry.
As a worker there is no way to do well. If there is no rise in wages all of the benefits of automation and efficiency improvements go to other inputs/outputs, if anything starts to raise wages the fed kicks in.
Maybe we have to see where things land between real interest rates, inflation and wages growth by figuring out how to relax all of this cheating over time.
Well that would be bad as the Chinese economy is going to get started meaning gas prices among others are heading way up -- as it will buy more of Russian oil -- which will impact also the U.S. indirectly. In essence the Fed at best is going to achieve move of wealth to China.
The good news is that supply of a lot of products should ramp up. Now how and when these products are going to make it to the markets is another question.
Insightful observation. Arab Spring changed Facebook and social media, across the whole world.
Don't forget the AI moderation-on-post. Just recently, a popular 'influencer' posted a scam. I left a comment saying such, along with a comment that the influencer should be ashamed of himself, and immediately, an AI filter told me that my comment may go against the Community Standards, and that repeated attempts to comment would lead to account deactivation. There is no appeal button.
To those building these technologies, beyond false positives and coverage error, it takes one law or PR incident for you to re-train this model against dissent. And to those building technologies like Apple's CSAM scanning, it takes one DB replacement to make it flag photos of the Hong Kong protests or Tank Man.
1. Forward a message to someone else. Sometimes you're not the best person to answer, but a colleague is. Forwarding should be easy and feature minimal friction.
2. Auto-deleting of messages in a DM after X _messages_ (e.g. only the last 100 messages are retained as scrollback). It forces you to document knowledge in more suitable forms; than having it lost in DM silos. Furthermore, it keeps conversations with your regular contacts more candid and natural; but retains the information and context for infrequent contacts.
> Forward a message to someone else. Sometimes you're not the best person to answer, but a colleague is. Forwarding should be easy and feature minimal friction.
Cardinal does this! You just share with someone else and you can expand or change the discussion as needed.
2 is interesting but I would definitely want a minimum retention of a couple days. It sounds awful to have your messages rolling over into the shredder mid-conversation.
I just do not understand how ridesharing cannot turn a profit. Let's look at unit economics:
~25% take rate on a ride ($15 average): $3.75 take
Payment processing: 2.5% + 30c = $0.68
Servers / datacenters: $0.20 (for a margin-sensitive business, you should be colo'ing your own servers, or using cheap alternatives like OVH/Hertzner)
Customer support: Automate as much as possible (auto refunds up to a certain point; for lost items, connect directly to driver); assume 1 in 50 rides require manual human support with a $3 cost = $0.06 support cost per ride
Fraud/refunds: Assume a 2% fraud rate that cannot be reclaimed; thus $0.30 cost for fraud. Refunds for things like driver purposefully took a longer route can be clawed from the driver.
Gross COGS: $1.24
Gross profit: $2.51
What am I missing?? Marketing? Fuck marketing when you can't turn a profit. Everyone knows about Uber or Lyft already, you need to turn a profit, not waste $30 per CAC.
You're missing roughly 30,000 employees to run a service that, at steady state, probably needs about 30 software developers and a few hundred second or third level customer support folks, with first level being handled by outsourced local-language companies.
And then there's Uber self-driving. Uber AI; Uber electric airplanes. Uber freight, Uber restaurant delivery, Uber grocery delivery, Uber this and Uber that. Oh, and Uber scooters.
Uber eats? Scooter integration? Mass transit support? Scheduled rides? Commuter cards? If you were building the app with 30 developers you'd simply not bother with those features.
I can only see giving up on Uber Eats as being foolhardy, that is a profitable business with a solid business case, yet lacking those other features would not really cause me to prefer traditional taxicabs telephone dispatch over using an app.
There's legitimately a reasonable argument that Uber rides has a worse business case than Uber Eats. If I were in Uber's shoes I would be clinging onto both.
Delivering time sensitive goods from many locations to many other locations is not an easy business model. Especially when you do not control the provider of the sensitive goods or the delivery provider.
Logistics is a tough business so I’m bearish on Uber eats.
eBay looks like a platform that is at least an order of magnitude simpler: No realtime data streams like GPS updates, no matching algorithms, no demand-based pricing or incentives, no ETA calculations. Uber is operating in the real world which means that weather, traffic, protests, construction, events and so on affect the operation.
The eBay business requires no boots on the ground, Uber Eats does because they have to equip riders. And eBay has almost no market-specific laws/regulations which change every couple of months to worry about.
I think eBay doesn't process payments, that is outsourced to PayPal.
It looks like eBay is in about 25 markets, Uber is available in 85 countries.
Serious question: Why does eBay have so many employees? It's just a search engine for a user generated product catalog where users can place bids on the items. My guess is that most Uber employees aren't high-paid developers, it is more likely that they are in support roles.
eBay can get away with relying on third parties for advertising, selling, and transporting goods. They are just an online marketplace.
Uber has to market themselves which needs local expertise, if nothing else to liaise with a local PR firm. Then they need local legal expertise to actually operate in the country (eBay transactions happen online, and the transport agency hired by the seller figures out how to get the package to its destination). Uber then has to have maps for every country it operates in, as well as change their standards to match local expectations.
eBay is arguably a bad example because they sure could do with a proper overhaul of their software that is halfway modenised with a bunch of rough edges accumulated over decades.
I will agree that 'receipts' is part of the core product and should be retained. I didn't mention it because I'm sure we can agree it's within the capabilities of a 30-person team!
I ignored the other stuff because I don't know WTF "pickup special cases" or "on-trip experience business logic" or "growth features" are. So I'm not informed enough to guarantee they aren't part of the core product offering - although you can probably guess my intuition on the matter.
This kind of "how hard could it be" analysis is what causes people espousing it to go surprised-Pikachu-face when their nose is ground into fractal complexity requirements. The closer to the coalface you get, the more "huh, who would have thought?" is murmured. A huge chunk of this comes from only thinking about happy path logic in one setting.
The software that runs the world and gets actual work done day-in, day-out behind the scenes, is riddled with edge case handling. In really mature codebases impacting many stakeholders (not just direct users), the product team can categorize 1% or less of the stakeholder population by a tiny fraction of a commonly-used feature set they use. On that basis, the coding and maintenance effort for the edge cases can sometimes outweigh the sliver of features used by that sub-population of stakeholders.
We aren't talking about a web scraper or run of the mill DevOps here. Anytime you work with lots of business rules in multiple jurisdictions impacting the same processes, the edge case counts go up rapidly, and combinations of processes that you never thought would intersect but are forced to by specific jurisdictions also appear more frequently.
I mean this is still arguing over 3 orders of magnitude difference in employee count though. Uber is incredibly heavy on non-"provides a ride from point A to point B" compensations.
Due to the lack of Operations having a real seat at the social hierarchy table at most companies, it isn't hard to see why you can have such a vast difference when dealing with many jurisdictions.
Here is how it works in most of my clients. Management is at the top of the heap. Business/sales/marketing comes next. Developers/engineering after them. Way down at the bottom of the heap, sits Operations. They're the "grunts".
The default dynamic is developers code up a system and toss it over the wall to Operations. When informed by operations of some edge case that comes up frequently on the sad path, developers roll their metaphorical eyes and tells Operations to "just" develop and follow some "SOP".
Cue "One Decade Later..." in French accent meme...
After enough of those edge cases over enough time, it isn't hard to see why all those manual intervention edge cases result in an operations-oriented staff bloat. These are especially challenging to address, because everyone is looking for a silver bullet and very few people in charge of writing checks will accept the reality that this is every bit as much technical debt as the code that runs on the systems, and working off that debt with interest is a slog of expensive unwinding.
Uber gets hit on multiple fronts with this dynamic. More jurisdictions, in an incumbent industry that has accreted more baroque government interfacing, that has simultaneously famously resisted making any of its relevant data available in any form whatsoever beyond paper and microfiche. Sometimes it will take more people than you can imagine.
Scheduled rides never actually allocates a driver for me; just a time range and it books a normal ride right when that range starts. Then the driver comes late!
Whatsapp used to service 900 million users with literally 50 engineers. Instagram had 13 employees when it was acquired. The old canard is true if you focus on a core product and make smart architectural choices. (in Whatsapp's case they credit a lot of their efficiency to Erlang).
Simplistic messaging apps aren’t really a good model to run off of. Designing WhatsApp and Instagram are common system design questions because they’re trivial in comparison to design Uber/Lyft, etc.
Even Waze isn't complex enough to compare with Uber. Waze has to process real time data but doesn't have to deal with processing payments and complying to regulations worldwide.
There's a bunch of reasons why this model doesn't hold up in the long run, and I'll give one of them: accessibility. Once your business decides that your app must be sufficiently accessible to reach the many people who need accessibility work, your backlog explodes.
Technically it isn't: if you run an American business, you are subject to the Americans With Disabilities act as it is pursuant to electronic services [1].
Uber specifically would definitely fall under a "public transportation" service - accessibility is non-optional if someone decides to sue. [2]
>> So ignore accessibility. It's not a legal requirement and it doesn't pay.
Firstly that is just plain incorrect in a lot of areas (of business) and jurisdictions. Secondly your outlook on accessibility is just ... SMH and walks away from keyboard.
says who? accessibility is not that hard to achieve if you know what you're doing and make efforts from the very beginning to build your product in an accessible fashion
Well, the google results when I initially posted it didn't even bring up the choice I would probably use (again). Which is C++ and either a custom hand rolled platform abstraction layer, or maybe something like QT if the application were UI heavy. Which from what I can see of the uber app isn't.
That is because its very well supported on both platforms, and one of the few language ecosystems that can actually create native looking/acting applications on both.
Yes, the initial development may be a bit slower, but that is common with C++ because what the smart people are doing is usually creating an application specific "language" out of C++. Then once that core bit is done the actual development would probably outpace many of the other choices. I've done this a couple times with native development toolkits, the "customer" in one case was really questioning how much work was actually going on when 1/2 way through the contract it barely had a single "screen" in a data collection/reporting application working. But, then another few weeks went by, and literally in the space of about 2 days the application went from looking like it had just been started, to being basically feature complete. That is because the C++ engine was complete and it took ~12 hours to fill out the few 10s of thousands lines of boilerplate ui descriptions that actually formed the UI (in that case it was a custom textish/declaritive application description language, most of the c++ code was parsing it and doing layout/drawing in response. Super happy customer too, once they understood that their inhouse "IT" people could update/change the app with little more than a text editor against some fairly simple to understand rules).
And many of the functions the GP was asking about are the kinds of things one could contract out. Aka, why not just use google maps API for the routing/etc.
Frankly, given what I saw a couple years ago when I went poking around in the iphone app store, it seems just about every region taxi company had reimplemented large parts of the uber interface in their own apps. Maybe not always as slick, but the core parts were in many of them, and I doubt random regional taxi companies can afford the engineering effort uber apparently is spending on.
>> You're missing roughly 30,000 employees to run a service that, at steady state, probably needs about 30 software developers and a few hundred second or third level customer support folks, with first level being handled by outsourced local-language companies.
This comment is insane for any real app in the real world transacting in real dollars. There are a hundred countries with 100 regulations. Accounting/P&L/bookkeeping for the United States ALONE would take 30 developers for a revenue base this size.
Revenue 6854
Cost of Revenue 4026
Operations and Support 574
Sales and Marketing 1263
Research and Development 587
General and Administrative 632
Depreciation & Amortization 254
Total Costs 7336
I wonder (and am too lazy too try to find out) what portion of sales and marketing is driver-focused. One could maybe argue (as the grandparent did) that they should be spending less on rider marketing, but marketing to get drivers in the door seems pretty important. Dunno what their driver churn rate is, but keeping the pool of drivers large is critical for their service.
From what I’ve come to understand you are right on the money. All these “sharing economy” models rely heavily on churn and burn like many other less than solid business models like MLM.
I would love to see the breakdown of drivers and their immigration status, because from what I can gather, what is happening here is not any different than in the past of America’s history where the whole business model relies on the exploitation of “immigrant” labor that knows no better and is easily exploited, aka their unrealized labor value is converted into profit, or better states, benefits and riches for the executives.
Bingo. Andrew Chen, formerly of Uber, says exactly that in his excellent new book The Cold Start problem. The driver side is the hard side of the market and must be constantly tended.
Interesting because the taxi business had all that figured out already. It was a profitable business and drivers stuck around for decades. Does Uber have too much overhead to ever be profitable?
The taxi industry had it figured out only on a smaller scale. Rideshare reaches more people and rides than taxis did. In most of America, taxis were never a serious option outside of niche use cases like getting a ride from an airport. Even in NYC, where street hailing is possible, that only ever really worked in Manhattan (and not even all of Manhattan); and medallion caps meant driver supply could never fully meet rider demand, unlike for rideshare, so getting drivers wasn't a realistic problem.
Rideshare expanded the reach of taxi-like services to more regions, people, and use cases. It's now viable to travel without renting a car in many US cities - you can see this by how rideshare affected rental car companies. That's what makes the rideshare business hard: the places where they didn't have existing competition, because that's where the matching is harder and the economics not as easy.
It's a similar story for food delivery: GrubHub/Seamless operated in core areas of cities like NYC for many years (since the 90s in NYC, I think). Uber Eats brings that service to far more places, and that's where the challenge comes from in that business.
>Rideshare expanded the reach of taxi-like services to more regions, people, and use cases.
You don't need rideshare for delivering service to large areas.
In my country we have a taxi app which can be used by any taxi driver. If you request a drive, your call can be seen by all drivers which are at a certain distance from you. That distance can be se by each driver.
One or more drivers will reply to your request and you get to pick the driver.
And you can either pay directly to the driver using cash or card or you can be charged through the app.
The fee for the drivers is very small so almost all drivers use it.
And the money are not subject to tax evasion, they stay in the local economy. Taxi drivers have wages, social insurance, health insurance and pension funds. They also have a valid license to transport people and are regularly checked to be able to hold that license.
Depends on the city/locale. In NYC most drivers don’t own their medallions, they drive shifts for someone else’s medallion.
In fact I’ve had a lot of conversations with Uber and taxi drivers who started as taxi drivers, switched to Uber when the bonuses were lucrative, and then some of them switched back because they liked the predictability of a fixed shift and not being ordered around by a machine. Others felt exactly the opposite.
Sales and marketing should be labeled price discrimination. It’s all incentives to match driver earnings and rider costs to respective minima (maxima).
> The term cost of revenue refers to the total cost of manufacturing and delivering a product or service to consumers. [0]
It sounds like "developing the core product" falls entirely under this bucket, so with what others are saying about what falls under other buckets is right, then the one that looks most cuttable to me is actually "Research and Development". That sounds like the "experimental new stuff that may go nowhere" bucket, and if it's eliminated it would also put them just above break-even. Maybe they could focus on improving profits for their core product for a while before bringing that back.
Maybe there is necessary stuff included in it though, which I guess means that wouldn't be an option.
All tech companies put most of their engineering under “research and development”. It lets you capitalize your expenses and smear them out over many years.
Kinda, they can classify the activity of the engineers project work as r&d, and capilise the appropriate amount on the balance sheet (i.e. does not show under r&d expenses). Over time that would then be shown as depreciation, not r&d. You can't captilise an engineers time that is maintenance work.
A quick look at Ubers annual report states they do not capitalise r&d costs and instead expense it as incurred.
If you look at their financials, they show gross bookings, which include both the full billed values for food and delivery, and transportation of people. Revenues only show their share of that total.
In regards to incentives, it looks like a complicated question, I found an interesting outline[2]
Cost of Good Sold is the variable cost most directly associated with bringing in the revenue. So the raw materials for making a physical product, or the salaries paid to service workers who are billed out hourly. Anything that is strictly mandatory to create the product or service.
Cost of Revenue goes a step further, and includes the next layer of costs that are necessary to cause sales to happen for a given product/service line in a reporting period. That includes things like sales and marketing, and distribution. Basically anything that would cause the revenue to stop coming in fairly immediately if it wasn't done.
Neither includes R&D to create the product/service in the first place, or general overhead.
It's a clever way to disguise their unit economics to look better.
Their marketing budget is mostly going to pay drivers.
Put another way - you could be saying - why not pay drivers EVEN less? Well, they're paying them the least they can already. You can be sure of that.
If they did actually paid the drivers more and not disguise it as marketing - then their unit economics wouldn't look good - and when the business as a whole doesn't look good either - that's not a good look.
They can’t, that “S&M” is heavily focused on getting low information drivers into the service by smoke and mirrors about how wonderful it is to drive for them. They have to keep the rate of influx of new drivers at least above the rate of people realizing what a bad deal it is for them, aka churn.
If I remember correctly they spend a lot of money on marketing campaigns against any law that could hurt their business model. So slashing marketing might actually hurt them even more.
They only need some occasional reminders that might be targeted at the few people that haven't used or heard of friends or family using an Uber before.
Coke is somewhat of an impulse purchase. At least it needs to be in your mind to buy it at the grocery store.
Conversely, I'm not going to take an Uber ride tomorrow because they showed me an ad today. When I need to get somewhere I'll look at my options and choose the best. So long as Uber meets the minimum level of me being aware of it then theyre good.
Coke (and Pepsi) marketing is mainly concerned with affirming that drinking soda makes you sexy and keeping restaurants et al from changing their supplier.
Marketing is as much about keeping your customers from going to rival providers as it is about finding new customers. If you don't want people to leave you need to remind them why you're better than the exciting new company that's spending VC money to take your market share.
- insurance -1 (drivers and riders get generous insurance, not in cabs)
now we have $2.5 per ride to pay fixed costs, not including marketing. in reality, they also give out generous marketing coupons to riders which cabs did not do. $1 per ride on avg discount drops us to $1.5 per ride.
it's probably true that 100 engineers could sustain uber in the US without any new features. 100 * 500k payroll cost = $50M/yr = 33M rides per year.
Lyft alone did >300M rides per year. Uber and lyft combined would be a solid company able to sustain and be profitable. This company would provide a way higher quality service (and safer, and more insured) than it replaced, without monopoly profits being captured by rich medallion holding families.
However, uber and lyft are still pouring money into product development. Shared rides as an example, still hold the potential to improve everything in cities massively. Lower cost than taxi, faster than bus, less congesting than private car.
Both also seem to be expanding outside of ride share, which should be viewed like amazon expanding to aws 15 years ago. if it works, there could be hugely positive impact. if it doesn't, then it's a massive waste of shareholder capital.
They have nearly 30,000 employees, mostly SDEs from what I understand. Its been discussed (and rationalized) here, but I still don't understand how that many are necessary. I read somewhere else that their engineering tend to need to rewrite their software every two years to keep up with the scale, so maybe they need them? it still seems insane to me.
This blows my mind. I used to use Uber a bunch, and I built relationships with drivers such that I could just text them and get a ride at a certain time for a discount.
Ultimately, I wonder if Uber is prime to be disrupted if drivers got together and funded a few engineers to build a city-scale service for the hailing and payment aspect.
>Ultimately, I wonder if Uber is prime to be disrupted if drivers got together and funded a few engineers to build a city-scale service for the hailing and payment aspect.
Apparently a whole bunch of folks are trying to do just that.
I was going to provide just one example, but a web search[0] shows a whole bunch of these efforts in a variety of locales. As such, I just provided the web search results here.
Austin had that for a while when they went and banned Uber/Lyft. They were... ok? The issue ends up being that it's hard to be a one-city service that's mostly used by people who don't live in the city. If I arrive in a random city, the last thing I want to do to get to where I need to go is have to search for which app I need to install and give my CC info to in order to get a cab.
NYC used to have Juno, but it went bankrupt in 2019. I feel like if you can't run a single-city rideshare app in NYC, you're gonna have a hard time doing it anywhere else.
>NYC used to have Juno, but it went bankrupt in 2019. I feel like if you can't run a single-city rideshare app in NYC, you're gonna have a hard time doing it anywhere else.
I haven't used it (I always pay cash, as the drivers are charged ~3-5% per fare for "CC processing" when a card is used), but every NYC taxi has a feature where you can pair with the onboard system and pay with your phone.
Not sure what "pairing" requires, perhaps someone else has used this feature and can comment.
>If I arrive in a random city, the last thing I want to do to get to where I need to go is have to search for which app I need to install and give my CC info to in order to get a cab.
Searching and installing a random app introduces a slight amount of friction, but I don't think payment necessarily has to be that much of a hassle. Just use apple/google pay.
That assumes the app supports on-phone payment options like that. Obviously it's gotten more ubiquitous now, but most of the non-Uber/Lyft apps I've used in the past didn't. They often will require me to make a full account as well, give them name, address, email... I think one of them tried to make me upload a picture of my Driver's License, even thought I was very sure I wasn't signing up to be a driver.
Obviously this all could be easy, but it's amazing how many apps fail to make things easy to onboard. When I've just gotten done traveling for hours and just want to get to some place to relax, the last thing I want is to wrangle new account creation in some app where they're trying to be cheap and haven't hired any UX designers to smooth out the process because "you can rebuild Uber with 3 smart devs" as everyone on HN says.
Already happening in NYC w/ Curb, though many (like me) are staying the fuck away from it and sticking w/ Uber/Lyft. It's a matter of trust and operational complexity (that's not easily "solved" from the ground up), imho
The uber/swift rewrite thread from a couple years ago is highly informative of the company "engineering" culture.
The kinds of decisions taken for granted by the hacker news thread/etc are the kinds of decisions that could sink a self funded company, starting with the fact that they are basically writing multiple copies of the application for each platform (ios vs android) and going from there. This is maybe the problem with VC funded companies (like government contracts) the money just keeps flowing independent of all the bad decisions being made. Also, having enough engineers that whole teams can be split off to rewrite the application for no appreciable benefit except to peoples resume's is itself an upper mgmt problem. If the goal was a single unified application I might see how something like that could be justified, but they choose technology stacks that are to native for that to work.
Don’t forget about lawyers, compliance, lobbying, lawsuits, etc., etc. It’s also likely your assumptions are very wrong. Just think about what will happen when people figure out you auto-refund everything below a certain point.
Competition. Part of Uber's biggest expenses is "driver and customer incentives" which is corporate speak for bribing people to stay on the app. We know from economics that competition drives down profits and rid hailing services are a dime a dozen.
For a simplified version of the app with arguably no worse user experience, it's not THAT farfetched.
Uber has an absurd amount of logging & analytics.
If the app was simply drop a pin, get a ride - it wouldn't be that crazy.
Uber has 3.9M drivers world wide. There's probably very rarely more than 1M drivers active at any time. Probably less than 300k people looking for a ride at the vast majority of times.
Assuming you can update the driver's location 1 time per minute - that's
~1.5B requests per day - less than 25k requests per second (including user bookings).
That's like ~2TB of bandwidth per day. That's less than $200 per day. Almost everyone spends more than 5% of their cloud bill on bandwidth. Meaning, the rest of a drastically simplified (but nearly equally useful) Uber could run for ~$4000 per day in server expenses.
That's a $1.4M / year data center. Uber has revenues of >$11B.
They could be making a lot of money. They just aren't because they're spending AT LEAST 50x more on servers and product engineering than they NEED to.
They paid for growth for a long time. They have a monopoly now. There's not a lot of growth left to get. At some point the axe will come down.
It just does not work that way. I was an SRE at a similar company. You need driver locations, passenger locations, cost calculators (including ML models), ads serving, respect user preferences, geofencing, ride sequencing, analytics, compliance, fraud detection (you'd be surprised at the amount of fraud and clever tactics people employ). This is just a very minimal set of services (I'm guessing <10% of what you need) and you need to run this somewhat reliably.
Cost of revenue in just terms of infrastucture was measured in $/ride and minimizing it reliability is difficult, especially if you're a fast growing startup and on cloud providers. Unfortunately, if you're a fast growing startup you also don't usually run bare metal (even though I'm a fan of colo/OVH/Hetzner).
Don't forget that money used to free, with the way interest rates and investors were. It's far more difficult cutting down, than it is to throw money around, obviously.
It’s also a denial strategy. The bleeding edge that also forces your competitors out of the market because they cannot get past the network effect and name recognition hurdle is worth its weight in gold.
Most people will say they’re going to get an Uber, even if they end up having to use Lyft, no? Ubers, as well as others’, expressed strategy has long been not only first mover, but also monopolization of all aspects of their space, expressly anti-competitive. Part of that is not only being the leader, first to mind, but also draining the enemy/competitor’s resources and undermining their efforts to even challenge you. It’s a total market domination strategy that shouldn’t even be allowed, but they’ve also paid off politicians and captured government in other ways too, so don’t expect anything from there either. There used to be other ride sharing services, I don’t even know if they exist anymore, but even before the Great Monopolization, aka COVID, they were barely scraping by on crumbs in a few local markets while the likes of Uber worked in basically every market, especially in the high spending business travel and entertainment segments.
Maybe that was their thinking? Have massive loses while killing all competition including taxi drivers and capture the market and after that just cut features and jack up the prices while paying less money to drivers?
Fortunately it haven't worked. But could it work assuming the VC investors would be able and willing to pour much more money into it?
You're way overoptimistic in your expenses calculation - Maintaining a "real-time" app is 100x more complex than that.
100x, bringing their opex to hundreds of millions on billions of revenue. They should still be able to cut the fat and actually turn a handy profit, but they won't.
What is the set of information that makes you say this? Because I would put money that Uber's data team has run an experiment with lower realtime status updates (realtime is expensive, these companies aren't filled with idiots, they test things). And based on that, I think it's reasonable to assume that critical metrics are negatively impacted by not having realtime updates.
So I'm curious if you have any knowledge, or if what you are saying is "I don't need realtime", or perhaps more charitably, "I can't imagine realtime being valuable to users". I push back on the 2nd, and I strong push back on the idea that someone with can reach the conclusion that Uber is wasting money on things that don't drive user value.
Unless, of course, you work/worked there and worked on these projects, and saw firsthand that Uber decided to waste a bunch of money internally.
In a major metro like Boston 1 minute further down the road could mean a 5 minute longer wait. I think your point stands however with 6x traffic increase to once every 10 seconds.
I'm not sure that's true. Almost every rideshare I've gotten in the last few years outside of an airport pickup has been in motion when they got assigned to me, and usually already on another ride. Even many of my airport rides were being picked up by someone who was dropping off someone else at the airport right before.
You also don't know for-sure what route they're taking. Almost every driver I've had was using Waze or some other mapping app that usually took a different reasonable route than whatever Lyft was showing when I booked it.
Surely you don't think a modern and complex app requires just a single API endpoint that triggers once a minute? And that it's that simple a thing for the driver/ passenger?
I wonder why all backends are now web based even if the frontend apps are not web based?
If someone does a mobile or desktop chat app (think Whatsapp or teams) he will use web technologies on the backend. But IRC is very old and still works like a charm without using web technologies.
Likewise, if email was invented today, it would be just calling some REST api instead of using SMTP.
When I worked as a game developer, the server side of our games was a slow and ineficient PHP crap becouse the founders were friends with a PHP programmer. I had to jump through many hoops to mask huge latencies from web server or even the web server not replying at all.
I think using web for anything can add a massive overhead.
I can see the advantage of the web, though. You don't need to implement a server, you just think in terms of HTTP requests and the framework will transform those for you in data and transform the data back into replies.
But if you need something real-time you have to use web sockets, and at that time the simplicity goes away and you can use OS sockets just as good.
I am arguing that using web frameworks for an app which won't have a web fronted adds almost the same kind of overhead as using Javascript for mobile and desktop apps. It's doable, yes. It's the best usage of resources, no.
Normally I should be the last one to complain since I architect and develop web apps for living.
But I do like efficiency, I think that sometimes many layers of virtulization, abstraction, indirection, protocol encapsulation are hurting both the performance and the speed of the development.
And I also know how to develop a server side app without using an HTTP server and a web framework.
I wonder if the root of the problem is that apart from the the people doing mobile apps, the rest are mainly learning a frontend or backend framework and they can't do or are not willing to do anything besides that. Or, even worse, new developers are just learning dynamic laguages such as Javascript or Python or PHP which catters mostly to the Web.
If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
When I had to design a tool to masquerade the real people data in our microservice based app, everyone from my team was amazed I wrote a console app instead of a Web based application. But since there it wasn't a need for that tool to be called through an API, why should I have made it a web app? Just to use curl instead of command line arguments?
It's a horrible business - why would I even want to enter it? And if I was insane and did, why would anyone use my Uber app?
Uber is a monopoly that already has all the drivers and spent $10B+ to aquire them - plus all the riders - they're already trained to open that app - already have it downloaded. No one can compete with that without spending $1B+ - at which point - you'd need a 50% margin for years just to return the value. Maybe I'm uncreative, but I cannot think of a worse business to enter.
It's equally amusing to me that you seem to assume Uber is efficient just because it's a public company.
A smaller and leaner model could work at small scale by focusing on via drivers focusing on their returns with word of mouth marketing.
If you use Uber a bunch, then it is a great way for good drivers to get repeat business privately. A simple platform which is driver-friendly which focused on the whale customers (like myself when I was spending $500/mo+ for commuting) could squeeze the Uber even more. When I started working with a few drivers via text, I was able to save money whilst the driver made more money
Comments like this, boring and dismissive and with absolutely no effort put into them (often responding to one that does have a lot of effort in it), are not big HN energy and don't belong here. Zero value.
Okay, OVH is not realistic, but at Uber scale, you can certainly roll your own data-centres and get costs lower than, or similar to OVH, even when including the cost of sysadmin and maintenance.
Yes, it means you won't get all the shiny quality of life services offered by cloud providers, but you're in a _margin sensitive business_. Deal with it. Optimize every cost.
Also, you don't need expensive engineers re-inventing the most basic things (I know Uber had a huge not-invented-here syndrome). Use the boring tools for the job. Only reinvent what is necessary. You don't need engineers practicing resume-driven-development.
Marketing. At first people needed to know about Uber. Then they needed to trust Uber. But now they need to carry on using Uber instead of the competitors.
I think if the tech investment bubble bursts (if it is a bubble) then this makes it easier for Uber in terms of competition as ride prices will tend towards the original "Taxi" prices and people will have to get used to that. And then Uber can make their profit (and also the drivers can make a reasonable living).
In my country Uber is more expensive than taxis. Sometimes much more expensive during rush hours or busy days or holidays. A lady I know payd 10x the price for a taxi ride because it was new Years Eve.
Are these numbers made up? Everyone is pointing out the indirect costs but I suspect that’s only a piece of it.
A big chunk of that $15 goes to driver incentive promotions. Not the steady state cost, but the sign bonuses and what not. Given high driver churn, this is always a big line item.
Google first result says just 3% of drivers drive for them for more than a year.
driver cost is a lot more than $3.75. you think really drivers are working for 75% of a $10 ride per active hour? they're publicly measured to make 4x that
Please don't cross into personal attack in comments. Making substantive points without swipes is essential to the kind of forum we're hoping to have here.
Uber doesn’t make money. The bigger their enterprise is the less money they make. They should be firing anyone who says they need more complicated systems to scale when the idea could run on a PC under their desk.
Do you have an MBA or other similar business experience? Because you can’t “fuck marketing.” Without marketing you have no business. How are people going to find out about your product?
How did people find out about Google, YouTube, Facebook, Whatsapp, Waze, Instagram, when they have started?
I think it was because they provided an unique service and word of mouth was enough.
I remember when Gmail was in beta. There was no marketing. I was fortunate to receive an invite and once I get 5 invites, friends were begging me to send them one.
Exactly! As a SWE pursuing MBA, I was surprised to learn how critical marketing is to the existence of a business, and that it's way more logical, quantitative and data driven than people realize.
You can write a hugely popular app with great UX, and super scalable backend but if you don't align your marketing parameters you won't make ends meet.
>Exactly! As a SWE pursuing MBA, I was surprised to learn how critical marketing is to the existence of a business
And you are wondering that people who are in business to teach you something tell you how vital is what they are teaching you? All salesmen sell things that are vital for your success, health, well being if you trust what they are telling.
