On Fri, 23 Sep 2016 11:01:31 +0100, "tim..."
wrote:


"Recliner" wrote in message
...
tim... wrote:

"Recliner" wrote in message
...
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.

It's that network focus that makes it vulnerable in each of its local
markets.

only a percentage of your customers in Delhi are going to be
Europeans/Americans taking advantage of already having Uber on their
phone
when they get off the plane. Many of the potential customers are going
to
be locals who can switch to local competition if the incentives are
there.

Also,
the long-term game plan is to have self-driving cars,

which I don't believe they will be able to achieve. To do this they have
to
hoover up all of the finance available for "buying" rental cars and
taxis.
This is an order of magnitude more funding that they currently need.

Are the backers really going to put all their eggs in one basket for this
operation, I think not.

There will be plenty of micro operations of autonomous car pooling that
people will want to invest into spread their risk.

which need things
like highly detailed maps that new competitors won't have:

of course they will

All of the parties interest in producing autonomous cars are working on
(or
have a partner who is) such maps, it isn't just self driving taxis who
have
to find their own way from Waterloo to Kings Cross. All domestically
owned
cars will have to be able to do it as well.

It's a nonsense to suggest that this will be unique to Uber's cars

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/featur...month-is06r7on


I know

but they can afford one city as a trial on the basis of their current
funding

but scaling it up to 10,000 cities just isn't going to be cheap, and I defy
them to find the funding for such.

They won't be rolling driverless cabs worldwide in one go. It'll
happen in stages, and I wouldn't expect large, complex cities to be
among the first to get them. And Uber isn't exactly facing a cash flow
crisis: it has around $4bn in the bank. That will pay for mapping
quite a few cities.

But I'm sure Uber's investors will be keen to seek your expert advice
on Uber's prospects, as you appear to know so much more about the
company than they do.