On March 3rd, USA Today published a Jessica Guynn piece
titled “Uber’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.” It related how the company, already based as
I have written on unsustainable success, in seven days or less, (1) was the
subject of an “explosive blog post alleging sexual harassment and
discrimination,” (2) was publicly accused, also by employees, of having a
“toxic culture,” (3) was sued by a major competitor, Waymo, for technology
theft, (4) ditched its senior vice president of engineering for being
investigated for a previous case of sexual harassment, (5) had its CEO featured
in America’s Funniest Home Videos (well, actually only on what a car dashcam
picked up) haranguing one of their drivers, (6) became known to the world for
using software, Grayball, to identify and avoid legal authorities in places
where their service had been banned, and (7) in the wake of all that, lost its
vice president of product and growth.
But Uber’s flaming descent didn’t stop there.
The Greyball story was described in a 6-page New York Times
article (How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide”) released that same day,
in which author Mike Isaac documented the electronic effort to which Uber went
to unmask the enforcement agents, which included such Big Brother techniques as
combing social media profiles for those calling themselves police officers and
checking personal credit cards for connections with police credit unions, and
wrote that using such software might even be a federal crime. Five days later a company representative said
they had made a change, “expressly prohibiting (Grayball’s) use to target
action by local regulators,” but added that it would “take some time.”
After that, the hits just kept on coming. (8) Uber’s competitor Lyft announced the week
after the bad-week story that it would move into 100 new markets later this
year. (9) Another New York Times piece,
this one on March 18th (“As Uber Woos More Drivers, Taxis Hit Back,” Winnie Hu)
showed how Uber drivers are making more money per hour driving Yellow Cabs
instead. (10) Eight days after a
progress report on Uber’s self-driving cars was leaked, showing that their test
fleet of 43 put in over 20,000 miles in a mid-March week but required manual
driver intervention more often on average than every mile, the program was
suspended for two days when one driverless vehicle was in an Arizona accident –
not their car’s fault, but which resulted in the vehicle flipping on its side.
The carnage seemed to stop in April, but earlier this month,
(11) Uber’s primary competitors Lyft and Waymo officially joined forces, per
Isaac in the New York Times again on May 14th, “to work together to bring
autonomous vehicle technology into the mainstream through pilot projects and product
development efforts.”
In combination with the ten previous disasters, that joint
venture, if it works, could finish Uber off.
In the May 7th Wall Street Journal, Christopher Mims (“How Self-Driving
Cars Could End Uber”) showed how such technology could not only fail to help
that firm but could eliminate it entirely, if it is not on the right side of
“transportation-as-a-service” offerings likely to come from Ford Motor Company
within the next five years, and which would remove Uber’s advantage of not
needing to own vehicles themselves.
One set of people, though, still profit reasonably from
Uber. That is the customers. They will not be able to keep doing business
with that company, though, if it is forced out through its original and continuing
problems – or if it has many more streaks like this March. Although driverless technology speeds on,
Uber’s business model will not. Without
cleaned up management along with a major consortium partner, the question is
only how many feet of water in which the company will drown.