Or, Google could do nothing and let Uber fail. Lyft would probably pick out the good employees. All of the drivers would just stop using the Uber app since many use both or could easily switch. The C suite would be gone by this point.
At this point once self driving tech is perfected Lyft would just buy it from Google.
comparing https://www.lyft.com/cities to https://www.uber.com/cities/ it seems like there is a huge discrepancy between the cities that have lyft and those that have uber. Uber has a significant international availability.
I'm wondering, what prevents Lyft from just starting to operate in all the cities Uber already operates in? Does Uber reach individual deals with the cities to get permits?
1) I'd imagine there are significant costs to entering a new city. Uber is a two-sided marketplace so in any new city Uber needs to invest resources and time into acquiring supply/drivers and to a lesser extent users. Combine this with the operational support to maintain that marketplace and the overhead becomes non-negligible.
2) First mover advantage is a real thing so any ride-sharing network that enters a city with an established player is going to have a harder time acquiring the aforementioned supply/demand.
3) When more than one ride-sharing company is in a city it eventually turns into a subsidy war for demand. From what I have read this is what happened to Uber competing with Didi in China and resulted in massive losses for both companies.
TL;DR entering new markets is in fact pretty expensive, and far more so when there is existing competition.
It's only a two-sided marketplace if you need drivers. If Google uses Waymo tech to remove drivers from the equation, there's only one side to the market that they have to consider, which makes it a much easier proposition to enter those markets. The legal/compliance issues are probably the bigger hurdle since they can't hide behind "independent contractors" the way Uber has.
They need to spin up marketing in each locality, which is both costly and requires nuance with local colloquialisms and existing market forces (e.g., knowing what ITP and OTP mean in Atlanta, or the huge taxi market in NYC). It's probably the hardest part to scale.
They also need local support infrastructure. Lyft actually does an in-person interview with every driver, which requires a human being there. They have at least re-used resources by promoting certain drivers to a higher level that enables them to run these interviews. But bootstrapping that infrastructure requires some effort.
Between the costs, the marketing efforts, and the support infra, it's not as easy as just flipping a switch.
