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IT Departments Try To Avoid Getting "Ubered"
StewBeans writes: Fortune 500 companies and longstanding corporate giants are losing to startups that are born digital because they can't keep up or they refuse to acknowledge the ways that technology is changing both business and consumer preferences. Getting "Ubered" is now one of the biggest threats to traditional IT departments as the growing number of unicorns like Airbnb, Spotify, Square, and others take over the economy and win the hearts and minds of increasingly mobile, always-on consumers. In this article, nine tech leaders from large companies talk about how they have had to change their approach in order to keep pace and avoid getting disrupted by the next big thing around the corner.
Your company name gets verbed ONLY when it's both appropriate and a new word is necessary. You get verbed by popular consent. I'm not saying a massive advertising campaign won't do it, but it's damn hard to force a meme. Xerox. Jeep. Scotch tape. They were verbed because they offered something new. Google. Skype. They were verbed because so many people used their products. But even a massive advertising agency couldn't do it for, say, Bing. So what has Uber done to justify verbing? Sure it's shorter than, say, "out-innovated". But "Ubered"? It just sticks in my craw. No thanks. And take your viral marketing with you.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Baring all the corporate jargon, the next big thing more often than not is quite simply a scam managed by venture capitalists and hedge fund managers to create the illusion of the 'next big internet company', pump it up to the biggest bubble possible and then sell it to gullible investors and pension funds (investment managers paid commissions to buy) and 'KABOOM', time for the 'next big thing' (they are not fucking around at all, those bubbles are at minimum hundreds of millions of dollars in size and quite a few end up in the billions range - all bullshit public relations and marketing). Seriously how many more of the dot bombs have to fail before people and investigatory agencies wake up and realise it is all mostly just a well orchestrated scam.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Then try not sucking at your job? Seriously, the reason that Uber has been successful vs traditional taxis is because taxi services suck. Their service tends to be sub optimal and they don't make use of modern technology to allow people to hail and pay for their ride. Uber does better in that regard, and so is popular. Cost really is secondary.
Well, same shit with IT work. If you are "Mordoc the Preventer" then ya, you could well be subject to getting replaced with a service (or person) that better meets their needs. However if you stay on top of what your customers need (customers in this case being the people that call you for service) and try to improve things as you can, then you are more likely to be fine.
I haven't been doing IT all that long, about 15 years now, but in that time I've seen what users need and expect change a lot as technology has changed. They still need and want IT, but what they want from them is different. The IT departments they bitch about are the ones who still think it is 1990 and refuse to update the way they do things.
"worker is typically mandated by draconian management: they don't have a choice in what to use, and are typically chained to a desk for the duration."
Sounds exactly like the 2-3 year old startup I work at.
I think it depends a lot on where you are.
My personal experiences with Uber when I was in Salt Lake for a convention were terrible. There was so much demand that they were sucking in drivers from other parts of Utah who didn't know the city well. My hotel was on a weird frontage road thing that nav didn't get and every time an uber drive appeared they'd end up circling the hotel and coming in from the other side. Similarly downtown salt lake has two Marriotts (the Downtown Marriott and the City Center Marriott) - I've never had a cab driver mix those up, but I've had an uber driver stubbornly insist that I was at the hotel I wanted despite the nav showing he was a few blocks away.
I did have a couple of excellent uber drivers who'd grown up in the city and had no trouble navigating, but uber does a terrible job of separating those from the crap ones. Their weird arms-length sub-contractor situation really hinders their ability to train drivers and make sure they are up to the right standards. If they are actually required to employ everyone then I think it'll be a hell of a lot better. Frankly I went back to taking regular cabs for every situation but 2am coming back from a bar, it was just easier and more predictable.
Similarly I imagine uber will struggle in places like London where cab services are excellent. The real solution to cities who want rid of uber is to make their own cab services be excellent.
They have those millions because people hate cab companies, and Uber offers a better alternative. So it must not be a piece of crap, if people are voting that heavily for it with their $$$.
Hint: It's not the *people* of the municipalities that don't want Uber, it's the *cab companies* and the *politicians owned by the cab companies* who don't want them.
While this is true to a large degree, there are other factors involved.
/. months ago.
I agree that taxi companies and municipalities have long been in each others' drawers, to the detriment of the general populace. But there is also some justification for some of the laws.
For example: making sure a driver had commercial-grade liability insurance. (I don't want to go into the general concept of insurance here; I'm not a big fan. But that is the current system, no matter how much it needs to be changed.)
One of the big problems with Uber is that it has wanted to operate on the cheap, while at the same time charging a rather steep rate for its service. And not only that... it was recently ruled (was it California) that Uber drivers are employees, not contractors, because of the way Uber tells them what to do. And I saw that coming a mile away. I mentioned it here on
Uber tells its drivers what to do WAY too much, if it wants to call them "independent contractors". It tells them they must not get commercial insurance, for example... that is grounds for cancellation. It tells drivers they can't have guns... something you might tell an employee but have no authority to tell a contractor. I am frankly surprised this ruling was made so soon.
It isn't just municipalities. The IRS has guidelines for determining who is a contractor vs who is an employee. And Uber was very obviously way over that line.
I can see that in a tech company, but in most companies AWS tends to be handled by the IT departments, too, because most of the company is non-technical. And in that case, it's pretty anecdotal, but I haven't seen AWS result in any kind of a hit to IT staffing. It does shuffle it around, but it also creates a big pile of new stuff that has to be done. You have fewer people managing physical infrastructure, and instead have a veritable army of DevOps people shepherding all your instances around, building and updating Docker containers, writing and maintaining Ansible scripts, rewriting all your systems so they can handle AZ outages and failover properly, etc., etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
They ignored employment laws. They ignored safety laws. They just ignored laws in general. Ie, the rule that taxi drivers must have commercial insurance is not just some scam to keep out other taxi companies, it is there because such a public service must have better coverage than the generic driver. Uber was basically lying the whole time, claiming it was just "ride sharing" when it was patently obvious to everyone that it was just another taxi service pretending not to be one in order to avoid regulation.
Maybe the regulations are bad, maybe not. It is irrelevant because that was the law! Just because this is the second wave of dot-com insanity does not mean we get to ignore the law.
Well you explained it right there. "Best and brightest CIO" really isn't all that smart. When you're at the C level you are not supposed to have any idea whatsoever what the departments under you do, it's not your job anymore. At the C level you just cheer on your other C level colleagues and collect stock options and hope they pan out some day. The only thing you need to know as a CIO is how to suck up to the CEO and recommend anything Microsoft tells you to.
Taxi laws came about for more than just insurance. The unregulated taxi industry was literately gang warfare. If you called the wrong taxi company and they came into another taxi company's turf to pick you up, they would get shot at. Sure that wasn't happening everywhere, but it was happening in enough areas that city governments had to step in and those laws eventually spread around the country.
Uber has already shown us the type of cut throat taxi industry they want to create. Very early in their life they, by policy, were scamming other 'taxi' companies with false calls. Instead of spending their money in changing local laws to make their business format legal, they've been spending their money to twist and turn themselves into every shape possible to avoid the issues. I don't care if they offer a better service or not, the company itself is slime and completely morally corrupt. I can't wait until they're crushed. Anyone who trusts them not to turn extra super evil once the standard taxi industry is killed is a fool. Their own history says they will.