Super Beats Uber
This is how Uber ends.
If creating great software takes very little capital, copying great software takes even less. This means dissent can be resolved in an interesting way that is impossible in the world of atoms. Under appropriately liberal intellectual property regimes, individuals can simply take a copy of the software and continue developing it independently. In software, this is called forking.Efforts can also combine forces, a process known as merging. Unlike the superficially similar process of spin-offs and mergers in business, forking and merging in software can be non-zero sum. —
What is Uber? What does it want? Say, provisionally, that Uber is a conspiracy between a small number of human beings to capture massive amount of monies for their own personal use by owning the virtual marketplace where humans can bid on private transportation. These human beings are called “venture capitalists” and “ceos” and “top management.” Because of social connections and lucky births, these human beings have access to large amounts of social resources, so they can employ the energies of computer programmers, mathematicians, data scientists, and marketers to construct “a platform” which they hope will be the main platform that people use to get rides to places.
Now if you believe that it is fine for marketplaces to be privately owned, then you probably don’t have any problem with this plan. Also if you believe that the trend towards more wealth for those who have wealth already is optimal, then you probably also don’t have any problem with this.
Maybe you don’t have any problem with this because you just believe that the world is headed this way and so that’s the way things are, you know, the way things are is the way things are.
But things could be different, and if you believe that people follow incentives, then there is a good chance they will be different.
Uber drivers pay between twenty and thirty percent of each fare to Uber. So if you said to an Uber driver, hey uber driver, there’s another network with just as many people on it as uber where you can get the same fare and only pay ten percent to the platform, that would be a good incentive for them to join the new platform.
How do you build a new platform that only takes ten percent? Some women, somewhere, interested in making a lot of money for themselves (incentive!) and fucking over google, decides to fund a team of all-women programmers team that builds a ride calling dispatch program. Let’s call this platform Super. Super choses a town, say, Cincinatti, and goes to Cincinatti and conspires with the drivers there to orchestrate a collective departure from Uber. One day all of a sudden there are no rides in Cincinatti on Uber but there are a lot of rides on Super, and Super is also a cooler company because the platform is owned by Women and the drivers get ninty percent of the shares and the company puts all of its profits towards a public transportation R&D lab.
This is a great story, and so it gets international media play, and the international media play does for Super’s market share what international media play did for Donald Trump’s poll numbers, except Super beating Uber is actually a happy ending.
“it’s gonna take us a lot more than coupons to get saved” —
