[LINK] Uber?

[Kim Holburn]

On 2014/May/13, at 12:16 PM, Glen Turner wrote:

> 
> It's the standard Silicon Valley "disruption" model. Choose a industry 
> with high margins, break the law to enter it,

I'm not sure that is right at all.

It's more like: a technology makes an old model irrelevant.  It does things that were not possible before or that were prohibitively expensive or required complicated equipment.  The incumbents fight back.  The fight goes on for some time with a balance being reached or not.  

There was the archetypal law in some place that required a car driver to have someone walking in front of their car  with a red flag and to stop the car if any passing horse got spooked.  It wasn't that cars were initially illegal.  Just like it wasn't that manufacturing your own copy of say a book was illegal (except if the book was banned in which case it was illegal to own one in the first place).  Heck, making a copy of someone singing a song wasn't even possible and singing it yourself was quite legal.

Taxis require considerable equipment like meters that are certified by authorities in order to be trusted.  They used to require drivers who knew their way around.  Mobile phones can do all that stuff and much more.  They can even monitor the riders' safety to some extent and better than the current taxi system.

The pressure to modernise is not going away.  There's no reason why we can't have various "taxi-like" or "bus-like" or somewhere in between-like methods of getting around.  In the UK they have cabs and mini-cabs.  

> then chose up the loophole 
> you entered through to keep future disruption out. Apple with music and 
> handsets. YouTube with video. Google is trying it with books.
> 
> Particularly nice with Uber is the way it portrays the service as "ride 
> sharing". I am a little more cynical, thinking that such as description is 
> a neat way of side-stepping questions around minimum wages and if it is 
> good public policy to make of all drivers (not just taxi owners) 
> independent contractors.
> 
> For government it's a basic question of the rule of law.
> 
> For industry it's a warning that featherbedding leaves you open to a 
> disruptive 'play' funded by billions of US venture capital finance looking 
> for outlets which aren't in electronics (where margins are low).
> 
> -glen
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Kim Holburn
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