In fairness, this reminds me a little bit of some legendary tech battles, like when Microsoft (allegedly) sabotaged Netscape by putting certain code in Internet Explorer that would mess it up (this was pre-Google, and Netscape was arguably the leading search engine).
All is fair, they say, in love and war. And Uber and Lyft, two smartphone-based car services, are most certainly at war.
This week, Lyft, a San Francisco-based ride-sharing start-up, said that many Uber employees had tried to sabotage drivers working for Lyft, according to data Lyft shared with CNN. Approximately 177 Uber employees have requested and quickly canceled more than 5,000 rides from Lyft drivers over the past 10 months, Lyft said, in an effort to frustrate Lyft’s customers and drivers.
But this is pretty nasty if it’s true. I won’t use Uber if they pull stuff like this.
Oh, and there are other accusations. Nice kids! as Jon Stewart might say.
joeltpatterson says
Their business plan is to shift to computer-driven cars (which should really be called “autos”).
So, what will their coders try to do then?
I think I’ll stick with traditional cabs.
kbusch says
Uber’s bad reputation would crush them. So not to worry, boys and girls, about lack of regulation.
sabutai says
In libertarian utopia, all it would take would be a couple fatal accidents before people realized that X service was bad. No regulation necessary. Albeit, that is kinda lousy for those who died and those who loved them, but hey, free market.
stomv says
10 months = 5/6 * 365 = 304 days
5000 rides / 304 days = 16 rides per day
If requesting and canceling one ride per hour is bringing Lyft down, perhaps they need to start lifting some weights to bulk up — like this guy.
I’m not excusing uber, and I don’t even use uber (or Lyft). I’m just pointing out that Lyft seems to be admitting their own frailty on this one.
JimC says
Lyft’s business model should have included “Fraud committed by one of our chief competitors.”
stomv says
But if a business goes under because employees leave each day with a handful of paper clips, or an employee with one piece of a Cadillac, your business has other problems.
The issue is the magnitude of what you call fraud — that level should be too small to notice.
JimC says
I get your point, but you’re downplaying it too much. A (legit) customer calls Lyft, but their car is on the way to get a (phony) Uber call, which is then canceled. So they call another company, possibly Uber.
Lyft should be able to brush some of this off, but 5,000 incidents is quite a few against a single competitor. Maybe the other car companies should review their cancellations.
Campaigns rip signs done (some not all), but I’ve never heard anyone here argue that the other campaigns should plan for that.
JimC says
“Signs down”
stomv says
It’s fewer than one an hour. My claim is that, in fact, it’s not “quite a few,” but rater that it should be but a blip to Lyft’s operations.
And if 5,000 signs are ripped down, is it going to have a material impact on the race? For a state rep, sure. For a United States presidential candidate, nope.
JimC says
How many Lyft cars can possibly be operational at any given hour? Let’s say it’s 50 (which I doubt). One per hour is messed with. So 2% of the fleet is unavailable for half that hour. (If the printers in my office were unavailable 2% of the time, that would get noticed pretty quickly.)
If it happens once, I’ll agree with you that it’s a minor disruption.
It happened 5,000 times.
stomv says
Lyft is based in San Francisco, but as of April 2014, Lyft operates in 60 US cities.
Using your math and 30 cities instead of 60 (it happened in the past), we’re down to under 0.1% of the time. Your printers may well be down that often.
JimC says
But if it was one of our competitors making them go down, we’d have something to say about it.