Uber, just a click away
About a month ago, we were discussing Uber, and the headaches it is increasingly causing the taxi industry, a traditional sector made up of small businesses and the self-employed and subject to all kinds of rules and regulations that Uber quite simply doesn’t take into account. So far, the authorities’ response in many European countries to Uber’s growing popularity has been to fine or ban the service, an approach that the eminently sensible Neelie Kroes, the deputy president of the European Commission, has criticized.
There is now a new problem: anybody who has Uber’s app on their smartphone will find that when they open the recently updated version of Google Maps and looks at the route options for their usual journeys will find Uber’s as well, and that anywhere along that route, they can simply click for a driver to pick them up along the way.
There is a certain irony here: if you are planning to go somewhere using the best-known app for route mapping, Google Maps, you will now find that the app allows you to make your journey using Uber, but won’t let you call a taxi. There has been a proliferation of taxi apps: if I open Google Play, I can see more than a hundred, including some very popular ones, such as Cabify, MyTaxi, Hailo, and a plethora of others, to which growing numbers of taxi drivers have signed up. But if you’re using Google Maps, you can’t connect to any of these apps, even if they are installed on your phone: my only option is Uber.
This is an important move. It could be argued that most of the time we still hail taxis in the street, or by calling one up by phone, but that doesn’t mean things will always be like that, as the growing popularity of apps like Uber shows. There is now a new generation of customers who put predictability first, along with easy payment, and freedom of choice over the traditional way of going about things. There is nothing strange about these people, it’s just that times change.
So what lies behind Google’s decision to team up with Uber? The answer is simple: it’s protecting its investment. Google, through Google Ventures, its investment arm, has a stake in Uber: the $258 million it put into the company in August 2013 was the biggest such investment in its short life. Seen in this light, the decision to incorporate Uber into Google Maps makes a lot of sense: you are using a Google product to plan your journey, so here’s another Google product that you might be interested in to help you with that task.
Which is all well and good, but we should also remember that business logic is not always the same as that of somebody who has just experienced a disruption process first hand: after overcoming a series of problems, invested a large amount of money into licenses, equipment, etc, and having accepted a series of requisites to work in a particular industry, you now have to accept that the smartphone that most of your customers carry about with them, via the most popular map app, is now suggesting to your potential customers that they call up another service who is not subject to the same rules and regulations that you are. What’s more, this competitor is taking an ever-larger share of your market.
How to respond to this new competition? If the answer to that question is by staging demonstrations and striking that bring cities to a standstill, I am afraid that the only thing taxi drivers are going to achieve is widespread unpopularity. People want more choices, not less, even if that means breaking the rules that have traditionally governed an industry. Those rules can be shown to be fair or unfair, appropriate, or inappropriate… but people are only interested in the choices they can make and efforts to reduce those choices will not garner much support, even when backed by rules and regulations that in theory are designed to protect consumers. Is it worth protecting somebody who seems to be saying that they do not want their options limited in any way, who is saying to all intents and purposes: “stop protecting me”?
What is really going on here, as with most disruptive processes, is whether a traditional activity is able to compete with another, newer approach to carrying out that activity. The customer will decide, based on the options available, and on the importance given to criteria such as cost, safety, comfort, guarantees, popularity, etc.
And these are precisely the factors that Google intends to influence: Google Maps is effectively saying that from now on, you can get somewhere by walking, on public transport, by bike, or with Uber. For Google, there is no such thing as a traditional taxi service.
(In Spanish, here)
