Uber is an example of a company that wants to be a tech company, but (1) really shouldn't (2) kinda lacks the technical leadership to really be one.
It feels like the right call, around 2017, was to either:
(A) double down and build a platform for every kind of physical multisided marketplace (matching as a service, maps+routing+locations+geofences as a service, physical product ops as a service, etc) Where Amazon went from books->everything->AWS, Uber could have gone rides->platform-for-all-the-multi-sided-marketplaces.
OR (B) fire every engineer except the 15 or so it takes to maintain the rider and driver apps and a few services, with no new features, port everything over to common cloud companies instead of their DC (shoutout to DCA, the ugly stepbrother of SJC), and just pivot to value extraction and just maintaining it as the simple taxi app it should be.
Instead, they did neither, muddling around building random tech as if they had ads/search/social media margins while losing sight of the customers needs. There's a reason DD crushed them in food.
Edit: Since the primary response seems to be "You don't understand!" I was there 5 year, saw how the sausage was way over-made.
It feels like the right call, around 2017, was to either:
(A) double down and build a platform for every kind of physical multisided marketplace (matching as a service, maps+routing+locations+geofences as a service, physical product ops as a service, etc) Where Amazon went from books->everything->AWS, Uber could have gone rides->platform-for-all-the-multi-sided-marketplaces.
OR (B) fire every engineer except the 15 or so it takes to maintain the rider and driver apps and a few services, with no new features, port everything over to common cloud companies instead of their DC (shoutout to DCA, the ugly stepbrother of SJC), and just pivot to value extraction and just maintaining it as the simple taxi app it should be.
Instead, they did neither, muddling around building random tech as if they had ads/search/social media margins while losing sight of the customers needs. There's a reason DD crushed them in food.
Edit: Since the primary response seems to be "You don't understand!" I was there 5 year, saw how the sausage was way over-made.