Not to say I’m a fan of Uber - 🔗🔎 I have been railing against them for over a decade.
I finished 🔗📚 Pattern Breakers by Mike Maples Jr a while back - and I keep quoting him - but you really should read the book. He uses Lyft and Uber as case studies.
Dear London peeps: remember Zingo? Not Uber or Lyft, but functionally identical. Six to ten years ahead of them. And it failed. Mike’s book partly explains why - without even mentioning them. Too early. But there’s more to it:
- Technology wasn’t ready. Location-based services in 2003 were still promises, not reality.
- Black cab drivers resisted disruption. No incentive to adopt.
- THE Chicken-and-egg problem. Without critical mass of drivers, the app was useless. Without users, drivers wouldn’t join.
All adding up to too early, wrong incentives and by the time Uber/Lyft arrived, smartphones were common, GPS was accurate, driver economics had shifted.
But what ‘common wisdom’ tends to gorget is that Zingo was also fighting the government. Not UK medallion fights. This was about using apps to track people in the physical world. Back then, the government was actively arguing against that play. (My - how times have changed.)
Zingo had the idea. But timing, infrastructure, and aligned incentives matter more than being first. So does getting the government out of the way.
In a parallel universe - we would be Zingoing all over the world - and the taxi business would be very very different.