tim... wrote:

"Recliner" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 21 Sep 2016 15:03:48 +0100, David Cantrell
wrote:

On Mon, Sep 19, 2016 at 03:10:42PM +0100, tim... wrote:

spending billions on trying to win a market of millions is just silly

Becoming the default choice for taxi services throughout the developed
world (which is what they seem to be going for) is not worth mere
millions.

What they're doing is very similar to what Amazon did early on. They
consistently lost money for the first few years, and only occasionally
made a profit since. It's only very recently that they started to make
vaguely reliable looking profits. Amazon spent those profitless years
buying the market.

Exactly. People who only look at the deliberate short-term losses are
ignoring the bigger picture.

It's possible for Amazon to kill the competition and for it not to come back
again, leaving you in an unassailable position to reap the rewards of
previous work

Once Uber has established in a city, competition can continually spring up
again meaning that you are continually fighting it. There is no path to
killing it off completely (other than making your price so low you don't
make a profit). There are always new drivers prepared to compete with you.

It's an international business, which benefits from network effects. Also,
the long-term game plan is to have self-driving cars, which need things
like highly detailed maps that new competitors won't have:
https://newsroom.uber.com/uk/mapping-ubers-future/