Prime Sarah Lacy hatorade
Wasn't this the whole point of "ride sharing" to begin with? Connecting people with similar start and end points to reduce the number of vehicles. When the "sharing economy" term first started going around it was in reference to something more akin to this. What we got instead was totally-not-taxis-but-actually-taxis like Uber and Lyft, and car sharing services like Car2Go and ZipCar. Both types of companies are very much NOT ride sharing. Apparently there were several others competing in that space as well. Uber had better hurry the fuck up with driverless cars, and put them on the road the same way they did their drivered cars. That is, ignoring any laws to the contrary and brute forcing their way through legal pushback.
I think Paul Carr, way back when before NSFWCorp was even playing patronage games, pointed out that Uber had a business plan for exactly as long as it took for Google to decide to take it from them. The parallel is Groupon: "Oh, you make money by making coupons for businesses? Great! We can roll that into AdWords without even having to hire anyone have fun with that IPO TTYL!" That's why they worked.so.hard to come up with a social network that isn't Facebook - they have no penetration into Facebook's market. They have no way to compete for Facebook's eyeballs. So while Facebook will never compete on Google's turf, Google will never compete on Facebook's, either.
Very smart of Google to concentrate only on the efficiency of ride-pairing while avoiding the whole employee/contractor thing. As veen has argued before, Google can extract real value from the information, far more than it costs them to provide the service. It won't be long before Google is telling you how you are going to get home as you walk out of your workplace.
I did an NDA executives-only conference for one of the big media companies. They had a former VP of video from Google who had recently bumped over to Netflix. He made the point that most people think Google's business model is to find a place where they can do things more efficiently, when in fact Google's business model is to find places where they can eliminate all profit for everyone else and assume a monopoly whereby they're eking out such a small profit, percentage-wise, that nobody ever bothers to challenge them again. They have every chance of doing to Uber what they did to Mapquest.
Can you elaborate on the business model part? How can a business model include something like "eliminate profits for everyone else?" I get how that could be an end goal, but I don't see how that could ever be guaranteed without stealing most of the customers.
Enter an established market with a product that is "good enough" and free. (Gmail) Every product in every market only has a couple of passionate users. Everyone else is kinda ok with whatever, ya know? So the majority of users switch to the free product. The people who charge for their version of the product are left with nobody onboard except the die-hards, who can't/won't pay enough to sustain the company. And Poof! The company is either acquired by some misguided twit who thinks they can consolidate all the remaining users from all the dying products, and somehow manage a heroic last stand... and then they die too. (Or fall into obscurity.) Google, in the mean time, has been iterating and building ever-better versions of their app, and now has oodles of really tasty Big Data on the back-end, which people pay them for. They then release a slightly improved version of the app and charge a nominal fee for it. (Google Apps for Business) Now Google is making $.50 per user on 600m users, when the products that used to be in the market got $5 from each of their 25,000 users. Google wins.