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After Uber's success, nearly every pitch made by starry-eyed technologists “in Silicon Valley seemed to morph overnight into an ‘Uber for X’ startup" with various companies described now as “Uber for massages,” “Uber for alcohol,” and “Uber for laundry and dry cleaning,” among many, many other things. The conventional narrative is this: enabled by smartphones, enterprising young businesses are using technology to connect a vast market willing to pay for convenience with small businesses or people seeking flexible work. Now Leo Marini writes that the Uber narrative ignores another vital ingredient, without which this new economy would fall apart: inequality.
"There are only two requirements for an on-demand service economy to work, and neither is an iPhone," says Marini. "First, the market being addressed needs to be big enough to scale—food, laundry, taxi rides. Without that, it’s just a concierge service for the rich rather than a disruptive paradigm shift, as a venture capitalist might say. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there needs to be a large enough labor class willing to work at wages that customers consider affordable and that the middlemen consider worthwhile for their profit margins." There is no denying the seductive nature of convenience—or the cold logic of businesses that create new jobs, whatever quality they may be concludes Marini. "All that modern technology has done is make it easier, through omnipresent smartphones, to amass a fleet of increasingly desperate jobseekers eager to take whatever work they can get."
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday December 20 2014, @09:05AM
Most taxi companies still use a human (aided by a computer for larger fleets) to handle dispatching, which means someone has to answer the phone and make decisions. This doesn't scale to a huge number of taxis, so you need multiple dispatchers and you need to pay them even when they're not really doing anything. Uber has a fully automated dispatcher, which can handle an enormous fleet. The cost of running their service is a few programmers and a couple of servers, but per taxi it's trivial.
They also benefit from payments. Handling cash in large quantities is expensive. Uber doesn't take cash, and they have a sufficiently large volume of credit card transactions that they will get a better rate than smaller taxi companies.
Finally, they benefit from convenience for the user. If you use Uber, then you've got a single app that lets you book a taxi wherever you are. No more having to hunt the number of a local taxi company when you travel, just step off the plane and you can have a cab waiting.
sudo mod me up