Setting aside the snark over Uber, much of the criticism has been (willingly, I suspect) self-inflicted. The rhetoric of the company as typified by CEO Travis Kalanick who said, “We didn’t realize it, but we’re in this political campaign, and the candidate is Uber, and the opponent is an a–hole named taxi,” or the imposition of sure-to-surprise policies like surge pricing are merely exaggerated elements of the approach most start-ups take when seeking to disrupt an industry. Get public attention and leverage legacy inefficiencies.
The apparent strategic decision to push the envelope is the difference in this case, but not for the reasons cited by most who point to Uber as arrogant; like Jake and Elwood Blues, “We’re on a mission from God.” Or at least the God View.
Too bad, too, because the potential coalition of support dormant in search of a leader to transform the taxi industry could easily have propelled Uber to at least the $40 billion valuation it earned by alienating most of those potential allies. The result is a much higher cost of being able to do business.
All Uber needed was a little history. All it needed was to remind the public, the media and elected officials that a system devised in the 1930s no longer met the needs of now. No matter how entrenched the taxi industry had become in 75 years, each part of the business — the drivers, the cab owners, passengers and city officials — were well aware of the need for improvement. The long hours affecting drivers’ performance that added a glaze to the too-often-lost look on their faces, a time & miles cost equation devised before the dawn of rush hour traffic, the exponential rise in the cost of a medallion driven up by artificial scarcity and the municipal rules that created too-high a set of hurdles for new entrants, particularly among the immigrant classes who vote, were all ripe for change.
The in-your-face approach has made the point for Uber, but it has also energized the opposition, assholes or not. And in a battle where the fields of play are various state capitals, it is often popular opinion that can hold sway because, well, people vote. But Uber has not sought to be popular. The story is being told now in Sacramento.
If publicly the folks at Uber think they are channeling Muhammad Ali, I suspect that in their quiet moments they offer a nod to Federal Express and the way it made a monkey out of the U.S. Postal Service. But if you close one eye, squint the other and tilt your head to the left you might see Webvan, the failed parent of a now growing industry. It was a great idea, but performance and approach left the market to those who came later.
