And it might be not something that an Alphabet company wants to do risk/ reputation-wise. Better to offload bad press (both related to ride sharing in general, and autonomous vehicles) onto an entity which is already "hated".
It'll be interesting if Cruise ends up partnering with/acquiring Lyft. Although Cruise seem to be still betting on their Origin vehicle.
consumer expectations are much higher than 13 years ago and that's not going to cut it.
If Google was to enter a market at a loss in an effort to use its market dominance in Android to drive out a competitor that would potentially be something that would be considered anticompetitive and US regulators would likely be interested in it.
I don't believe that Google can compete with Uber losing money as it is nor that Google has an appetite for purchasing the necessary vehicles and maintaining them outside of a few test cities for a technology demo. Having driverless taxis also means that they would need to do a better job with end user support (compare the urgency of "help, I'm locked out of my email" and their current resolution time to "help, I'm locked in a car and can't get out!").
LOLOLOL
This is nonsense. Google has more than enough legal resources to handle this. So much so that it would be nothing more than a regular 3-6 month project that would be assigned a small team of lawyers inside their org. It's no different than any other regionally-regulated product launch at large companies.
Not only that but Google has enough money that they could just hire away some folks that work at Uber/Lyft to get a huge jumpstart on any such project. Even if they didn't need such expertise they'd probably still recruit and hire those people just to be safe; to get the perspective of people with experience.
Big companies have big legal organizations and they don't actually operate that differently from the IT orgs that so many of us on HN are used to. For example, they would probably divide up the task on state-by-state basis with lawyers certified to practice law in each respective state assigned as SMEs or to-be-SMEs. They would do their research and for bigger states they might even have county-level SME lawyers or at the very least paralegals that focus on that particular region. Big cities would probably be assigned their own teams of SME lawyers as well.
It's like any given complex programming task: Divide and conquer. Rolling out a new highly-regulated product across a large region is a highly parallelizeable procedure.
Of course, it would be easier to put together the necessary legal structure now that Uber and Lyft have already both done so. It’s easier to be a follower than a leader. But it would still be much harder for Google than building a mobile app like Uber, which would be right up Google’s alley.
And it isn't the lawyers.
It's the network of riders.
Waymo promised to 10x their scale this year.
Waymo could saturate the territory with empty vehicles waiting for riders on the Waymo app, or it can tap into a fraction of Uber's volume.
I don't think this is even close to correct. Lawyers were hit especially hard in the January layoffs, way more than 6%, and many teams lost their dedicated lawyers entirely (e.g. my team had one lawyer laid off and the other was reassigned to a basket of products instead of just our own).
At least we got FOSS chromium + FOSS android.
That said, things like Google Play Music -> Youtube Music was poorly handled and has permanently shook me. Have been leaving Google since.
Well, if you are referring to IT organizations in firms in the tech industry where that’s the core business (i.e., a value center) you are wrong, they are run more like IT orgs in non-tech firms (cost centers), vigorously minimized to be a bit smaller than they should be to handle routine day-to-day needs effectively, with new, emergent, and non-routine work outsourced.
Is experience doing this with human drivers all that helpful for building a driverless service? I'd expect the legal and regulatory questions would be very different?
But this will be different for robots though. This is not a moat for Uber.
Hm. This is like --
It's not 1066 any more, there are property rights now.
The original regulatory capture.
Step 1: Ignore the law; establish a fait accompli.
Step 2: Sanctify the new status quo.
Sad for a rule-follower to figure out that this is how things work.
On the other hand, I guess rule-following is low risk. For each William the Conqueror there were thousands of warriors who just got killed on the battlefield. And I'm sure the guy had to work really hard, you know, like nights and weekends.
as someone who has worked at Uber, this is a gross misstatement. It takes a lot to run Uber, far less even to run it at scale globally and with viable unit economics
They could follow Uber's startup model: ignore/break laws and provide false information to regulators.
Nonsense
It would be a huge job. Even for Google
