I never quite know how to think about them. On the one hand, they’d changed an entire industry in a way that people wanted but was getting serious resistance from the entrenched players. They had to break a lot of rules and go around a lot of people with a whole lot of connections to get where they are and in the process made a lot of enemies.
I expect blowback. I expect negative news. They essentially pulled it off by looking at every day as combat where fighting dirty was rewarded.
Yea, probably a good idea. I only even need them when I travel but all the cars I saw at the last airport had Uber and Lyft stickers anyway.
The biggest part of the comment was seeing the taxi driver protest in Seattle when I was there on business. My hotel room window had a view of city hall and I watched a bunch of cabs with a news crew pull up for about 45 seconds and start honking their horns. Then they all left and went back to taking fares.
When I watched the local news that night, the broadcast made it look as if they'd blockaded city hall for the day in protest.
It's the things like that that give me pause when I see bad press around a company that has upset entrenched interests.
AirBnb had to fight a very similar path and the only bad press I can remember about them was that tone deaf/ offensive political marketing campaign they had.
AirBnb have their own issues, and plenty of bad press about cities popular with tourists crumbling under the load AirBnB are causing on their communities.
There's been several articles about them shafting apartment owners, offering very little from their "insurance" for trashed apartments. In most cases the renters are sane people, but if you get the drug-fueled orgy, you can probably safe in betting that AirBnB will not compensate you for the cleanup.
Plenty of companies have disrupted plenty of industries by now, but without this kind of behavior. I don't see how the way they dealt with the data breach was required to disrupt the local ground transportation industry, nor was the way they've treated employees (including drivers) and customers.
I expect blowback. I expect negative news. They essentially pulled it off by looking at every day as combat where fighting dirty was rewarded.