And
that’s not the only way that Facebook has created a near monopoly in
social networking. In the past decade, it has ramped up spending on new
data centers, hired a lot more engineers, and turned its news feed into a
powerful algorithm. The more we use it, the more data we give the
company, and the more it is able to control where we turn our attention.
The company has more than a billion users around the world, and it has
figured out how to become a dominant source of our mobile addiction.
Facebook, thanks to this loop of algorithms, infrastructure, money, and
data, is a winner-takes-all company. Twitter is a distant second in the social web, about a fourth of the size of its rival down Highway 101.
And now Uber is building this tight loop of algorithms, infrastructure, and data, too. In June, 2014, in a column for Fast Company magazine, I pointed out that
Google and Uber aren’t very different. Broadband was Google’s sun god;
the smartphone is Uber’s. If serving up instant search results was
Google’s goal, then Uber’s is to reduce the time to curb, or how long it
takes for you to open an app, order a car, and have it arrive. The
faster the car gets there, the less likely you are to think about Lyft
or Flywheel or anyone else. So far, it’s become pretty fast, which is
why you probably never thought about Sidecar.
Uber has also learned from Facebook: raise a lot of money and use it as a competitive advantage. Because Uber has raised about twelve billion dollars
from investors, it has been able to flood markets around the world with
Ubers. The more Ubers on the road, the more people are likely to use
them. The faster they arrive to pick us up, the more we will forget
about other modes of transportation. And the more we use them, the more
data we give to Uber, which can then tweak their algorithms to optimize
fleet usage and traffic routes. You start to see why food delivery and
courier services are now part of Uber’s recent experiments. What was, at
one time, an idea for an app to hail limousines for party-goers is now a
company that is reimagining all kinds of transportation.
Meanwhile,
Amazon has run away with online retail, leaving everyone else to fight
over scraps. Microsoft, even today, controls the office-productivity
business. Eight years into the smartphone boom, Google’s Android and
Apple’s iOS are the two dominant players, and even in chips it is still
Intel and some others. There are two companies that dominate the public
cloud—Amazon, followed by Microsoft’s Azure. Google’s G.C.E. is a
distant third. There are some competitive markets, such as mobile
payments, where Square, PayPal, Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay, and
Walmart Pay are some of the bigger players. But, if I were a betting
person, I’d wager that this, too, will become a battle between two or
three companies.
Perhaps that is why
it isn’t a surprise that Sidecar is part of the growing shakeout in the
ride-sharing industry. We have seen companies such as RidePal and Leap
Transit go under already. And we will see more failures on this road to
transportation reinvention—after all, this is part of the technology
cycle. Google, Facebook, and, perhaps, Uber are indicators of something
bigger: in our connected age, data, infrastructure, and algorithms give
companies a distinct advantage. With all due respect to Branson, it is a
winner-takes-all world.
Correction: A previous version of this post misstated the name of the app Flywheel.
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