From Der Spiegel, Mar. 4:
The word on the street is that Travis Kalanick, founder and CEO of
Uber, can be an asshole. He publicly insults the competition, mocks his
own customers on Twitter and believes that politicians are incompetent. A
top company executive even went so far as to suggest that journalists
be spied on and Kalanick himself has said that it is as easy for him to
seduce women as it is for others to call a taxi. In response to unhappy
Uber drivers protesting poor pay, Kalanick predicted that they would
soon be replaced by computers anyway.
Since December, Uber has been valued at $41 billion, not much less than
Germany's largest financial institution, Deutsche Bank. It only took the
company five years to spread from San Francisco to more than 260 cities
in over 50 countries around the world. Every month, the company adds
another couple of countries and a handful of cities to its portfolio.
Uber is a good -- no, a great -- product. Essentially carpooling at
the push of a button, it is an extremely simple service and one whose
implementation is technically brilliant and easy to use. In most parts
of the world, Uber is not only cheaper than any taxi service on offer,
but also better. The company says that 50,000 new drivers join Uber each
month.
The fact that the boss isn't particularly nice shouldn't really
matter that much, but things aren't quite that easy in this case. The
company, after all, is a mirror image of its founder: aggressive,
ruthless and overly ambitious.
After Portland, Oregon, banned the ride-sharing company from
operating in the city late last year, Kalanick launched the service
there anyway. The head of the local bureau of transportation was
furious. "They think they can just come in here and flagrantly violate
the law?" he asked. "This is really amazing. Apparently they believe
they're gods."
There has been similar resistance in many other cities around the
world, including in Germany, where Uber simply ignored court orders. For
Kalanick, though, such skirmishes are small frays in a much larger war
for supremacy. His "vision," as he calls it, sees Uber becoming a kind
of global transportation service that will ultimately allow city
dwellers to eschew owning a car. He sees it transforming into a mobility
giant that doesn't just take people from place to place, but also goods
-- at the click of a button and at the lowest price available. Ideally
with a driverless vehicle.
But Uber isn't the only company with ambitions of taking over the
world. That's how they all think: Google and Facebook, Apple and Airbnb
-- all the digital giants along with the myriad smaller companies in
their wake.
Their goal is never a niche market; it's always the entire world. But
far from being driven by delusional fantasies, their objectives are
often realistic, made possible by a potent cocktail unique in economic
history: globalization combined with digitalization.
The technological advances made in the last decade have been
breathtaking, but it is likely still just the beginning. The growth of
new technologies, after all, has been exponential rather than linear,
with ever larger advances coming at an increasingly rapid rate. It is
like a gigantic avalanche that begins as a tiny snowball at the top of
the mountain.
San Jose, CA, Silicon Valley
The iPhone only made its appearance seven years ago, but most of us
no longer remember what the world was like before. Driverless cars were
considered to be a crazy fantasy not long ago, but today nobody is
particularly amazed by them. All the world's knowledge condensed into a
digital map and easily accessible? Normal. The fact that algorithms in
the US control some 70 percent of all trading on the stock market?
Crazy, to be sure. But normal craziness.
Dozens of companies are trying to figure out how to use drones for
commercial use, be it for deliveries, data collection or other purposes.
Huge armies of engineers are chasing after the holy grail of artificial
intelligence. And the advances keep coming. Machines that can learn,
intelligent robots: We have begun overtaking science fiction.
The phenomenon is still misunderstood, first and foremost by
policymakers. It appears they have not yet decided whether to dive in
and create a usable policy framework for the future or to stand aside as
others create a global revolution. After all, what we are witnessing is
not just the triumph of a particular technology. And it is not just an
economic phenomenon. It isn't about "the Internet" or "the social
networks," nor is it about intelligence services and Edward Snowden or
the question as to what Google is doing with our data. It isn't about
the huge numbers of newspapers that are going broke nor is it about jobs
being replaced by software. It's not about a messaging service being
worth €19 billion ($21.1 billion) or the fact that 20-year-olds are
launching entire new industries.
We are witnessing nothing less than a societal transformation that
ultimately nobody will be able to avoid. It is the kind of sea change
that can only be compared with 19th century industrialization, but it is
happening much faster this time. Just as the change from hand work to
mass production dramatically changed our society over 100 years ago, the
digital revolution isn't just altering specific sectors of the economy,
it is changing the way we think and live.
This time, though, the transformation is different. This time, it is being driven by just a few hundred people.
There is, of course, nothing new about powerful elites. Indeed,
wealthy factory and oil barons dominated the 19th century. Later, it was
bankers and hedge fund managers who felt called upon to grab control of
the world's destiny -- a group that un-ironically called itself
"masters of the universe". But their era is slowly reaching an end.
The new global elite are no longer based on Wall Street. Rather, they
have their headquarters in Silicon Valley, the 80-kilometer (50-mile)
long valley south of San Francisco. It is here that the chip industry
got its start and where the computer age began -- and it is now where
the leaders of the current digital revolution are located. They are
founders and CEOs like Sergey Brin of Google, Tim Cook of Apple and Mark
Zuckerberg of Facebook. They are more recent newcomers like Travis
Kalanick of Uber and Joe Gebbia of Airbnb. They are angel investors who
pump billions into up-and-coming tech companies. And they are all
supported by an innumerable army of programmers, computer experts and
engineers who are constantly seeking to replace an old concept with a
new product....MUCH MORE
HT:
MetaFilter
San Jose, CA, Silicon Valley
