Uber Drive Quotes

A 2018 study at MIT found that fully three-quarters of Uber drivers earned less than the minimum hourly wage in the states where they were driving. Almost a third of them lost money in the deal. In effect, they were paying Uber to drive. It was a pretty good deal for Uber. The company’s thirty-nine-year-old founder had a personal net worth of $5 billion.

We are caught in a growth trap. This is the problem with no name or face, the frustration so many feel. It is the logic driving the jobless recovery, the low-wage gig economy, the ruthlessness of Uber, and the privacy invasions of Facebook.

The folks contributing their automobiles and driving labor to Uber, or their property and hosting to Airbnb, make less than minimum-wage employees and don’t own a piece of the company even though they constitute the infrastructure. Only money talks.

You should learn how to play the flute. Then you could ride in the passenger seat of my car and play instrumental versions of classic 80s pop songs while I drive around on the clock for Uber.

The same thing, notes Brynjolfsson, happened 120 years ago, in the Second Industrial Revolution, when electrification—the supernova of its day—was introduced. Old factories did not just have to be electrified to achieve the productivity boosts; they had to be redesigned, along with all business processes. It took thirty years for one generation of managers and workers to retire and for a new generation to emerge to get the full productivity benefits of that new power source. A December 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute on American industry found a “considerable gap between the most digitized sectors and the rest of the economy over time and [found] that despite a massive rush of adoption, most sectors have barely closed that gap over the past decade … Because the less digitized sectors are some of the largest in terms of GDP contribution and employment, we [found] that the US economy as a whole is only reaching 18 percent of its digital potential … The United States will need to adapt its institutions and training pathways to help workers acquire relevant skills and navigate this period of transition and churn.” The supernova is a new power source, and it will take some time for society to reconfigure itself to absorb its full potential. As that happens, I believe that Brynjolfsson will be proved right and we will start to see the benefits—a broad range of new discoveries around health, learning, urban planning, transportation, innovation, and commerce—that will drive growth. That debate is for economists, though, and beyond the scope of this book, but I will be eager to see how it plays out. What is absolutely clear right now is that while the supernova may not have made our economies measurably more productive yet, it is clearly making all forms of technology, and therefore individuals, companies, ideas, machines, and groups, more powerful—more able to shape the world around them in unprecedented ways with less effort than ever before. If you want to be a maker, a starter-upper, an inventor, or an innovator, this is your time. By leveraging the supernova you can do so much more now with so little. As Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

But unlike naïve Marxians, we do not believe that economic interests alone drive change. Change is often affected by the evolution of ideas, and particularly of overarching beliefs.54 Once the Enlightenment notion that “all men are created equal” was accepted (however that idea came to be accepted, whatever the drivers), it was no surprise that it evolved in directions that brought within its ambit women and slaves. Given these beliefs, it would be hard to preserve the slavery system, in spite of the economic interests in preserving slavery—and even though motivated interests may have played a role in the creation and spread of the racial “construct” in the first place.55 The uber-ideology of the Enlightenment—the questioning of authority and the belief in meritocracy, the notion that change is possible and desirable, the respect extended to science and technology—have created preconditions that are favorable to the creation of a learning society and to learning institutions (firms)

Bailey,” I say, my voice carrying easily across the marble floor. “Wait.” She turns back and rolls her eyes, clearly annoyed to see me coming her way. She quickly wipes at her cheeks then holds up her hand to wave me off. “I’m off the clock. I don’t want to talk to you right now. If you want to chew me out for what happened back there, you’ll have to do it on Monday. I’m going home.” “How?” Her pretty brown eyes, full of tears, narrow up at me in confusion. “How what?” “How are you getting home? Did you park on the street or something?” Her brows relax as she realizes I’m not about to scold her. “Oh.” She turns to the window. “I’m going to catch the bus.” The bus? “The stop is just down the street a little bit.” “Don’t you have a car?” She steels her spine. “No. I don’t.” I’ll have to look into what we’re paying her—surely she should have no problem affording a car to get her to and from work. “Okay, well then what about an Uber or something?” Her tone doesn’t lighten as she replies, “I usually take the bus. It’s fine.” I look for an umbrella and frown when I see her hands are empty. “You’re going to get drenched and it’s freezing out there.” She laughs and starts to step back. “It’s not your concern. Don’t worry about me.” Yes, well unfortunately, I do worry about her. For the last three weeks, all I’ve done is worry about her. Cooper is to blame. He fuels my annoyance on a daily basis, updating me about their texts and bragging to me about how their relationship is developing. Relationship—I find that laughable. They haven’t gone on a date. They haven’t even spoken on the phone. If the metric for a “relationship” lies solely in the number of text messages exchanged then as of this week, I’m in a relationship with my tailor, my UberEats delivery guy, and my housekeeper. I’ve got my hands fucking full. “Well I’m not going to let you wait out at the bus stop in this weather. C’mon, I’ll drive you.” Her soft feminine laugh echoes around the lobby. “Thank you, but I’d rather walk.” What she really means is, Thank you, but I’d rather die. “It’s really not a request. You’re no good to me if you have to call in sick on Monday because you caught pneumonia.” Her gaze sheens with a new layer of hatred. “You of all people know you don’t catch pneumonia just from being cold and wet.” She tries to step around me, but I catch her backpack and tug it off her shoulder. I can’t put it on because she has the shoulder straps set to fit a toddler, so I hold it in my hand and start walking. She can either follow me or not. I tell myself I don’t care either way. “Dr. Russell—” she says behind me, her feet lightly tap-tap-tapping on the marble as she hurries to keep up. “You’re clocked out, aren’t you? Call me Matt.” “Doctor,” she says pointedly. “Please give me my backpack before I call security.” I laugh because really, she’s hilarious. No one has ever threatened to call security on me before. “It’s Matt, and if you’re going to call security, make sure you ask for Tommy. He’s younger and stands a decent chance of catching me before I hightail it out of here with your pink JanSport backpack. What do you have in here anyway?” It weighs nothing. “My lunchbox. A water bottle. Some empty Tupperware.” Tupperware. I glance behind me to check on her. She’s fast-walking as she trails behind me. Am I really that much taller than her? “Did you bring more banana bread?” She nods and nearly breaks out in a jog. “Patricia didn’t get any last time and I felt bad.” “I didn’t get any last time either,” I point out. She snorts. “Yeah well, I don’t feel bad about that.” I face forward again so she can’t see my smile.

But the world is changing at warp speed, and cities have to evolve to stay ahead of the curve. Which brings us to the third generation of cities, Cities 3.0, where the city is a hub of innovation, entrepreneurship and technology. Cities 3.0 is paperless, wireless and cashless. In Cities 3.0, we have more cell phones than telephone landlines, more tablets than desktop computers, more smart devices than toothbrushes. We know that in order to keep up in the modern era, we have to be innovative. If cities are going to drive the nation's economic revitalization, then we need to become laboratories and incubators of change. Yet the pending state legislation, which seeks to require the same insurance for ride-sharing companies as for old-style taxi companies, would discourage innovation and force out-of-date thinking on Next Economy companies such as Uber and Lyft.

This applies not just to people’s time, but also to their assets: to drive for Lyft or Uber, you do need a car. The on-demand economy is in many ways a continuation of what has been called the “sharing economy” exemplified by Airbnb, a company which turns apartments into guesthouses and their owners into hoteliers. For people with few assets, though, on-demand labour markets matter more.

innovation—perhaps from the translation world’s equivalent of Uber, a taxi app. Software is unlikely to replace the translators, but it could co-ordinate their work with clients more efficiently. Smartling, an American company which seeks to cut out middlemen in this way, has clients including Tesla, an electric carmaker, and Spotify, a music-streaming service. Jochen Hummel, a pioneer in translation memory, says that a real breakthrough would come from combining software, memory and content management in a single database. But making money may still be tricky. The American tech titan has not tried to commercialise Google Translate. A former executive says the firm experimented with content-management software but “decided to focus on easier stuff, like self-driving cars.

Uber has taken what could be seen as a massive business hurdle—litigation—and turned it into an asset that drives growth.

Bizarre and Surprising Insights—Consumer Behavior Insight Organization Suggested Explanation7 Guys literally drool over sports cars. Male college student subjects produce measurably more saliva when presented with images of sports cars or money. Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management Consumer impulses are physiological cousins of hunger. If you buy diapers, you are more likely to also buy beer. A pharmacy chain found this across 90 days of evening shopping across dozens of outlets (urban myth to some, but based on reported results). Osco Drug Daddy needs a beer. Dolls and candy bars. Sixty percent of customers who buy a Barbie doll buy one of three types of candy bars. Walmart Kids come along for errands. Pop-Tarts before a hurricane. Prehurricane, Strawberry Pop-Tart sales increased about sevenfold. Walmart In preparation before an act of nature, people stock up on comfort or nonperishable foods. Staplers reveal hires. The purchase of a stapler often accompanies the purchase of paper, waste baskets, scissors, paper clips, folders, and so on. A large retailer Stapler purchases are often a part of a complete office kit for a new employee. Higher crime, more Uber rides. In San Francisco, the areas with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary are most positively correlated with Uber trips. Uber “We hypothesized that crime should be a proxy for nonresidential population.…Uber riders are not causing more crime. Right, guys?” Mac users book more expensive hotels. Orbitz users on an Apple Mac spend up to 30 percent more than Windows users when booking a hotel reservation. Orbitz applies this insight, altering displayed options according to your operating system. Orbitz Macs are often more expensive than Windows computers, so Mac users may on average have greater financial resources. Your inclination to buy varies by time of day. For retail websites, the peak is 8:00 PM; for dating, late at night; for finance, around 1:00 PM; for travel, just after 10:00 AM. This is not the amount of website traffic, but the propensity to buy of those who are already on the website. Survey of websites The impetus to complete certain kinds of transactions is higher during certain times of day. Your e-mail address reveals your level of commitment. Customers who register for a free account with an Earthlink.com e-mail address are almost five times more likely to convert to a paid, premium-level membership than those with a Hotmail.com e-mail address. An online dating website Disclosing permanent or primary e-mail accounts reveals a longer-term intention. Banner ads affect you more than you think. Although you may feel you've learned to ignore them, people who see a merchant's banner ad are 61 percent more likely to subsequently perform a related search, and this drives a 249 percent increase in clicks on the merchant's paid textual ads in the search results. Yahoo! Advertising exerts a subconscious effect. Companies win by not prompting customers to think. Contacting actively engaged customers can backfire—direct mailing financial service customers who have already opened several accounts decreases the chances they will open more accounts (more details in Chapter 7).

Do you have any fun plans today?” “I’m going to buy a car.” I couldn’t keep the glee out of my voice, and it made him smile. “I’ve never bought a car before. I’m really looking forward to it.” “That does sound . . . well, I don’t know if fun’s the word I would use. Having the car is fun. Buying it usually not so much.” “I’ve been adequately warned. And my friend Shay is supposed to be here in a few minutes. I’m hoping to get to the lot before it opens so I can get the car I want.” This was the dealer’s busiest day of the week and I was afraid the car would get sold. My phone buzzed with a text from Shay. “Speak of the devil.” “Oh no,” I said. “Everything okay?” “Not really. Shay had to cancel. I’m going to try one of my other friends.” I called Delia and she didn’t pick up. Which was unlike her. I tried texting her and waited. “No answer?” Tyler asked. “She didn’t reply,” I confirmed, a sinking feeling settling in my stomach. “Which means I’m going to have to take an Uber to get to this dealership.” It wouldn’t be cheap. “I can drive you.” “What?” Had I heard him correctly? “I can drive you,” he said, repeating his offer. “I don’t have much going on until later on this evening, so if you want, I can go with you.” He’s not interested in you. He has a girlfriend who looks like a Russian Barbie come to life. He is just being your friend. Stop being so excited. My pounding heart didn’t listen. Something in my expression made him laugh. “Is that a yes?” Um, obviously the answer was yes. Because I might have been a lot of things, but stupid was not one of them. It was, in fact, an overly enthusiastic “Yes!” It made him laugh again. So even if I was embarrassing myself, it was worth it to hear his reaction. “From what I’ve read online, you’ll be even better backup than Shay,” I told him. “Because you’re a man. And you’re tall.” And hot. Thankfully, my lips refrained from uttering that last part. “You don’t know any other tall men?” he asked. “We did discuss this as a friend group, and no, we didn’t have anybody else to ask that we thought might do it. Delia did offer to send along her giant cardboard cutout of Edward from Twilight, but I passed.” “Good choice,” he said with a grin. “Are you ready to go?” “Let me grab my purse.

Shervin Pishevar’s other star investment, Uber, was embroiled in its own case about whether it was as humble and powerless as it claimed. A group of drivers had sued Uber, as well as its rival Lyft, in federal court, seeking to be treated as employees under California’s labor laws. Their case was weakened by the fact that they had signed agreements to be contractors not subject to those laws. They had accepted the terms and conditions that cast each driver as an entrepreneur—a free agent choosing her hours, needing none of the regulatory infrastructure that others depended on. They had bought into one of the reigning fantasies of MarketWorld: that people were their own miniature corporations. Then some of the drivers realized that in fact they were simply working people who wanted the same protections that so many others did from power, exploitation, and the vicissitudes of circumstance. Because the drivers had signed that agreement, they had blocked the easy path to being employees. But under the law, if they could prove that a company had pervasive, ongoing power over them as they did their work, they could still qualify as employees. To be a contractor is to give up certain protections and benefits in exchange for independence, and thus that independence must be genuine. The case inspired the judges in the two cases, Edward Chen and Vince Chhabria, to grapple thoughtfully with the question of where power lurks in a new networked age. It was no surprise that Uber and Lyft took the rebel position. Like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft claimed not to be powerful. Uber argued that it was just a technology firm facilitating links between passengers and drivers, not a car service. The drivers who had signed contracts were robust agents of their own destiny. Judge Chen derided this argument. “Uber is no more a ‘technology company,’ ” he wrote, “than Yellow Cab is a ‘technology company’ because it uses CB radios to dispatch taxi cabs, John Deere is a ‘technology company’ because it uses computers and robots to manufacture lawn mowers, or Domino Sugar is a ‘technology company’ because it uses modern irrigation techniques to grow its sugar cane.” Judge Chhabria similarly cited and tore down Lyft’s claim to be “an uninterested bystander of sorts, merely furnishing a platform that allows drivers and riders to connect.” He wrote: Lyft concerns itself with far more than simply connecting random users of its platform. It markets itself to customers as an on-demand ride service, and it actively seeks out those customers. It gives drivers detailed instructions about how to conduct themselves. Notably, Lyft’s own drivers’ guide and FAQs state that drivers are “driving for Lyft.” Therefore, the argument that Lyft is merely a platform, and that drivers perform no service for Lyft, is not a serious one.

all of its paths to reduce its losses—charging higher prices, paying its workers less—would destroy the advantages that it has built. So it sits there, widely regarded as one of the defining success stories of the Internet era, a unicorn unlike any other, with billions in losses and a plan to become profitable that involves vague promises to somehow monetize all its user data and a specific promise that its investment in a different new technology—the self-driving car, much ballyhooed but as yet not exactly real—will square the circle and make the math add up. That’s the story of Uber—so far. It isn’t a pure Instagram fantasy like the Fyre Festival or a naked fraud like Theranos; it managed to go public and maintain its outsize valuation, unlike its fellow money-losing unicorn WeWork, whose recent attempt at an IPO hurled it into crisis. But like them, it is, for now, an example of a major twenty-first-century company invented entirely out of surplus, less economically efficient so far than the rivals it is supposed to leapfrog, sustained by investors who believe its promises in defiance of the existing evidence, floated by the hope that with enough money and market share, you can will a profitable company into existence, and goldwashed by an “Internet company” identity that obscures the weakness of its real-world fundamentals. Maybe it won’t crash like the others; maybe the tens of billions in investor capital won’t be wasted; maybe we won’t be watching a documentary on its hubris five or ten years hence. But Uber’s trajectory to this point, the strange unreality of its extraordinary success, makes it a good place to begin a discussion of economic

The way that Berardi describes labor will sound as familiar to anyone concerned with their personal brand as it will to any Uber driver, content moderator, hard-up freelancer, aspiring YouTube star, or adjunct professor who drives to three campuses in one week: In the global digital network, labor is transformed into small parcels of nervous energy picked up by the recombining machine…The workers are deprived of every individual consistency. Strictly speaking, the workers no longer exist. Their time exists, their time is there, permanently available to connect, to produce in exchange for a temporary salary.15 (emphasis mine)

There are additional social and cultural factors that come into play which have nothing to do with computer parts, highway infrastructure, and laws. For example, the failure or success of driving-related public health initiatives, such as those regarding texting while driving, will influence our attitudes about driverless cars. If the youngest Millennials and Generation Alphas increasingly rely on the present-day Uber car service to get around, they may not value driver’s licenses in the future, which could increase social pressure for driverless cars.

Metromile, which offers per-mile insurance. The company gives drivers a device that plugs into their cars to track how far they drive. The more they drive, the more they pay. Even better, Metromile can track the driving and match up trips with Uber rides, so the insurance company can see which of miles are personal miles and which are commercial. Metromile charges users only for the personal miles, since Uber covers the car when drivers are with or en route to passengers. “The existing model for insurance hasn’t been able to adapt [to Uber],” Metromile CEO Dan Preston said.3 “We have a technology that drives the insurance product.” More mainstream insurance companies, such as Geico and Progressive, have followed Metromile’s lead by offering ride-share insurance that caters to Uber and Lyft drivers.

About ten years later, in March 2018, Waymo purchased that fleet, buying twenty thousand sporty, self-driving Jaguars for its forthcoming ride-hailing service. With this many cars, Waymo intends to deliver a million trips per day in 2020 (this might be ambitious but Uber currently delivers 15 million rides a day).

They gave everything of themselves to their mate. Which sounded great. Until you considered just what it meant to be a wolverine’s anchor. They didn’t like being apart from their mate at all. They literally became their damn shadow—an unreasonably protective and uber-possessive shadow who’d adore every hair on their mate’s head while driving them insane.

Uber Driving In Los Angeles Is Random And Very Unpredictable. Expect The Unexpected.

Here’s a little thought experiment: Let’s take three radically disruptive technologies and mash them together. Bitcoin. Uber. Self-driving cars. What happens when you mash the three together? The self-owning car. A car that pays for its Toyota lease, its insurance, and its gas, by giving people rides. A car that is not owned by a corporation. A car that is a corporation. A car that is a shareholder and owner of its own corporation. A car that exists as an autonomous financial entity with no human ownership. This has never happened before, and that’s just the beginning. Audience member gasps: "Oh shit!" I can guarantee you that one of the first distributed autonomous corporations is going to be a fully autonomous, artificial-intelligence-based ransomware virus that will go out and rob people online of their bitcoin, and use that money to evolve itself to pay for better programming, to buy hosting, and to spread. That’s one vision of the future. Another vision of the future is a digital autonomous charity. Imagine a system that takes donations from people, and using those donations it monitors social media like Twitter and Facebook. When a certain threshold is reached and it sees 100,000 people talking about a natural disaster, like a typhoon in the Philippines, it can marshal the donations and automatically fund aid in that area, without a board of directors, without shareholders. One hundred percent of donations goes directly to charitable causes. Anyone can see the rules by which that autonomous altruistic charity works. We are beginning to approach things we have never seen before. This is not just a currency. Now, let’s look at how the bitcoin community is addressing this incredible potential with their design choices and metaphors. Oh boy, it’s a mess.

If we think about the world techno-utopians are envisioning, it may be hard for the average citizen to have the freedom and autonomy to enjoy meaningful work. Would a life where your daily existence relied on driving four hours a day for Uber, serving as a concierge for your Airbnb guests in the spare room, and spending your evenings doing crowdwork on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk meet Epicurus’s test? And would you have any time to live an “examined” life? Is the goal of tech success freedom, or addiction?

commerce store’s business model revolves around driving the highest volume of potential shoppers to its site, and so search ads and SEO are obviously vital channels, while marketplace businesses like Uber and eBay must divide efforts between channels for bringing in suppliers and those aimed at shoppers (or riders).

Curious about what separated the successful companies from those that failed, we examined dozens of cases and found that the failures mostly relied on price or brand effects. By contrast, the successes hit on an idea that really worked—driving traffic from one user group in order to drive profits from another user group. We described our findings in a paper that analyzed the mathematics of two-sided network effects.10 Today, such successful platform businesses as eBay, Uber, Airbnb, Upwork, PayPal, and Google exhibit this model extensively.11

One assumption that is already being shattered is the idea that only routine, semi-skilled jobs like taxi driving, food delivery, or household chores are susceptible. Even traditional professions like medicine and law are proving to be susceptible to platform models. We’ve already mentioned Medicast, which applies an Uber-like model to finding a doctor. Several platform companies are providing online venues where legal services are available with comparable ease, speed, and convenience. Axiom Law has built a $200 million platform business by using a combination of data-mining software and freelance law talent to provide legal guidance and services to business clients; InCloudCounsel claims it can process basic legal documents such as licensing forms and nondisclosure agreements at a savings of up to 80 percent compared with a traditional law firm.11 In the decades to come, it seems likely that the platform model will be applied—or at least tested—in virtually every market for labor and professional services. How will this trend impact the service industries—not to mention the working lives of hundreds of millions of people? One likely result will be an even greater stratification of wealth, power, and prestige among service providers. Routine and standardized tasks will move to online platforms, where an army of relatively low-paid, self-employed professionals will be available to handle them. Meanwhile, the world’s great law firms, medical centers, consulting partnerships, and accounting practices will not vanish, but their relative size and importance will shrink as much of the work they used to do migrates to platforms that can provide comparable services at a fraction of the cost and with far greater convenience. A surviving handful of world-class experts will increasingly focus on a tiny subset of the most highly specialized and challenging assignments, which they can tackle from anywhere in the world using online tools. Thus, at the very highest level of professional expertise, winner-take-all markets are likely to emerge, with (say) two dozen internationally renowned attorneys competing for the splashiest and most lucrative cases anywhere on the globe.

A well-organized revolt by the major members of its hard side can kill a product entirely. Twitter once bought an app called Vine for a reported $30 million. It let users create and view six-second looping video clips—it was ahead of its time, and not dissimilar from the insights behind TikTok. Like many social apps, the most popular content creators became very successful, and they were important to attract an audience. Unfortunately, a few years in, more than a dozen of the top content creators organized a revolt: Led by creators Marcus Johns and Piques, the group pitched an idea: If Vine paid each star $1.2 million and changed certain features of the app, each creator would post 12 Vines per month. Otherwise, all 18 would leave the platform. “We were driving billions of views—billions—before we left,” DeStorm Power explained of the monetary request.69 Vine turned down the plan, and a few years later, the service was shuttered. The hard side is worth the effort to cultivate. The most successful and prolific members of this side of the network also provide the highest level of service, are willing to make the investments to scale their impact, and ultimately become the defensible backbone of the network—assuming they can be retained. In Uber’s case, the power drivers represented the top 15 percent of drivers but constituted over 40 percent of our trips. They were also among the safest and most highly rated drivers—after all, it was their primary source of income.

A successful network effect requires both a product and its network, and that was true in the age of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, and true today. For Uber, the “product” is the app that people run on their phones, and the “network” refers to all the active users at any given time who are connecting with Uber to drive or ride.

Up-front investment to try to professionalize the supply side early on in a network’s development inevitably comes with risk. In a well-publicized misstep for Uber, the company sought to expand its supply side by financing vehicles to provide cars to potential drivers who didn’t own vehicles, a program called XChange Leasing. The hypothesis was that this should push these drivers into power-driver territory quickly. Payments could be automatically deducted from their Uber earnings, and their driver ratings and trip data could be used to underwrite the loans. XChange Leasing unfortunately lost $525 million and failed to professionalize the driver side of the market. The problem was, it attracted drivers highly motivated by money—usually a positive—but who didn’t have high credit scores for good reason. They often failed to make payments, using their Uber-provided car to drive for competitors and avoid the automatic deductions. They would steal the cars and sell them for, say, half price. They would drive for Lyft instead of Uber, as a way to avoid the automatic payment deductions—they would try to have their cake and eat it, too. Uber needed to organize a massive repossession effort to get the cars back, but it was too late—many had been sold illegally, some finding themselves as far away as Iraq and Afghanistan, GPS devices still attached and running. This is a colorful example of how scaling the supply side, when a lot of capital is involved, can be tricky.

Bundling eventually stopped working for Microsoft. After the antitrust investigation, the company maintained its dominance on the PC operating systems market, but it lost control of many other markets. Eventually the industry jumped from PC to mobile. Microsoft tried to exactly replicate the network effects it had before—an ecosystem of hardware manufacturers who paid a licensing fee to run Windows Mobile, and app developers and consumers to match—but this time it didn’t work. Instead, Google gave away its Android mobile OS for free, driving adoption for phone makers. The massive reach of Android attracted app developers, and a new network effect was built, derived from a business model where the OS was free but the ecosystem was monetized using search and advertising revenue. Microsoft has also lost the browser market to Google Chrome, and is being challenged in its Office Suite by a litany of startup competitors large and small. It continued to use bundling as a strategy, adding workplace chat via Teams to its suite—but it hasn’t achieved a clear victory against Slack. If bundling hasn’t been a sure thing for Microsoft, it’s an even weaker strategy for others. The outcome seems even less assured when examining how Google bundled Google+ into many corners of its product, including Maps and Gmail, achieving hundreds of millions of active users without real retention. Uber bundled Uber Eats across many touchpoints within its rideshare app, but still fell behind in food delivery versus DoorDash. Bundling hasn’t been a silver bullet, as much as the giants in the industry hope it is.

pushed

Let’s go for a drive

And around the same time Levandowski left, his partner, Lior Ron, had searched Google for some incriminating phrases, including “how to secretly delete files mac” and “how to permanently delete google drive files from my computer.

Jobs that used to come with some guarantees, even union membership, have been transformed into gigs. Temp workers are not just found driving Ubers; they are in hospitals and universities and insurance companies. The manufacturing sector—still widely mistaken as the fount of good, sturdy, hard-hat jobs—now employs more than a million temp workers. Long-term employment has declined steadily in the private sector, particularly for men, and temp jobs are expected to grow faster than all others over the next several years. Income volatility, the extent to which paychecks grow or shrink over short periods of time, has doubled since 1970. For scores of American workers, wages are now wobbly, fluctuating wildly not only year to year but month to month, even week to week.

Our drivers, I thought, are almost all immigrants and minorities looking to make more money than they could driving a cab or working another job. Our customers numbered plenty of millennials, but also a lot of working people who lived in the boroughs and used UberX because it was cheaper and more convenient than taking a taxi, and for black and Latino customers (much of de Blasio’s base), the experience of being passed over by an empty taxi once the driver saw the color of their skin had created decades of deep-seated resentment. No one knows the color of your finger when you summon an Uber, so to many New Yorkers, taxis were the bad guys and Uber represented real, positive change. By the time my flight reached cruising altitude, it hit me that the fight to kill de Blasio’s proposal of capping Uber’s growth at 1 percent a year would work a lot better if we ran the campaign from his left. He’d never faced that before. (No one had ever thought they could question his progressive bona fides.)

The logistics of getting them around were just completely insurmountable,” said Hanson-Press. “I was really stressed every single day about getting them around.” Cue HopSkipDrive, a Los Angeles start-up that has been described as ride-hailing for children. Founded by three Angelenos who are also moms, the service chauffeurs only children ages 7 to 17. In many ways, it's similar to transport network companies such as Uber, Lyft and SideCar (Uber requires customers to be over 18). Drivers are contractors who use their own vehicles to transport passengers. All drivers undergo third-party background checks and vehicle inspections. Parents can book rides for their kids through a mobile app and pay through a cashless transaction. But there are also significant differences. Unlike Uber, whose drivers simply need to have experience behind the wheel, HopSkipDrive drivers are required to have at least five years of experience caring for children (this can mean people who are themselves parents, nannies, teachers, camp counselors, etc.). And like Shuddle, a similar service that operates in the San Francisco Bay Area, all drivers are vetted in person. HopSkipDrive checks drivers' references and will even go for a ride with each driver it signs up. All rides are covered by insurance specific to transporting minors.

For example, Twist is “call-ahead” software that sees where you are and knows where you are heading, as well as knowing the driving conditions en route. It sends a text message to your next appointment while you keep your hands and your mind on the road. Glympse, as we mentioned, is similar and lets you share your location with others—who just might rat you out when you speed. GasBuddy.com lets you find the cheapest gas near your location. Nooly Micro Weather reports uber-localized weather, within .4 miles of where you are and just 15 minutes into the future, preparing you for the fog bank around the next curve on a mountain road. As we write this, it is available as a phone app and the developer is working with Ford and Toyota for the app to be included in cars as they ship. The integrated, automotive Nooly will signal the car to turn on fog lights or the defroster a moment before the weather changes. Waze is a mobile app that lets drivers share updates on road conditions in near realtime. With a community of nearly 50 million members as of May 2013, it is perhaps the most robust source of user-generated road data in the world. Google acquired Waze in the summer of 2013 for just under $1 billion.

Smartphone technology gave rise to Uber, but before the world figures out how to regulate ride-sharing, self-driving cars will have made those regulations obsolete.

the years ahead, Tesla would also expand its vehicle fleet, adding a compact SUV, a pickup truck, a heavy-duty truck, and a small bus into the mix. The buses would be autonomous, to be summoned by smartphone app, or via buttons at existing stops. The advent of full self-driving capability, which Musk said would ultimately be safer than human-driven vehicles by an order of magnitude, would also enable a business built around car-sharing. Owners could add their cars to Tesla’s shared fleet to generate income when they weren’t using them. In cities where there weren’t enough customer-owned cars to meet the demand for such shared-use cases, Tesla would operate its own fleet—a move that would put it in direct competition with Lyft and Uber.

Many major automakers have established research centers in Silicon Valley to work on autonomy, including Nissan, Toyota, Mercedes, Ford, and GM. The newcomers—Apple, Lucid Motors, Faraday Future, Byton, and Nio—have made autonomy central to their business models and established software development teams in California. Che He Jia and Singulato Motors are working on the technology in Beijing and Shanghai. In the meantime, other tech companies and start-ups, such as Uber, Lyft, Comma.ai, Nauto, Luminar, Aurora, Caracal, Starsky Robotics, and Zoox, are all chasing variations of the self-driving prize, be it for cars, buses, or trucks.

These are all hopeful developments, but there is still a very long road ahead, literally and figuratively, for Saudi women. Saudi Arabia’s government is now the largest investor in the transportation company Uber, having provided $ 3.5 billion in funding from the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund. The director of the fund, a member of the royal family, was given a seat on Uber’s board. But, while Uber helps Saudi women get from place to place, it is not a way for women to drive themselves. Saudi Arabia is using a modern smartphone app as a means to enforce the long-standing ban. In fact, about eighty percent of Saudi Uber’s users are Saudi women.

Uber is already one of the most valuable startups in the world, even while giving around 75 percent of the money earned from each ride to the driver. To that end, how valuable would Uber become if in the span of a couple of years, the company was able to replace every single human driver with an AI-powered self-driving car? Or