When UberEats – the delivery arm of the ridehailing giant – was launched in 2014; the market was already crowded with online food ordering\u00a0and delivery platforms. In most urban centers, one could get delivery from restaurants via different apps already. So how should we examine Uber’s launch into this space ? Is food delivery the real endgame, or are we merely witnessing the proverbial “sustaining innovation” curve leading to UberEverything.<\/p>\n
Uber’s competitive advantage: What’s next:\u00a0<\/strong> Uber will not become UberEverything until a best-practice profit-making model is identified. But how long would it take to get the model standardized and optimized? Perhaps the irony of platforms stickiness is that users get addicted to cheap or subsidized services, leaving the company that chose this strategy with the onus to “make do”.<\/p>\n [1] https:\/\/www.mckinsey.com\/industries\/high-tech\/our-insights\/the-changing-market-for-food-delivery The first move towards UberEverything, the mother of all platforms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2693,"featured_media":7002,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[],"class_list":["post-6999","hck-submission","type-hck-submission","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","hck-taxonomy-organization-uber","hck-taxonomy-industry-food-and-beverage","hck-taxonomy-country-united-states"],"connected_submission_link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/assignment\/growing-businesses-in-the-age-of-platforms-2018\/","yoast_head":"\n
\n<\/b>While customers associate Uber with ridehailing, its main value proposition lies in logistics. Then the question becomes : if anyone could get a car under a few minutes to get from point A to point B, what else could be transported ?\u00a0The UberEats app is hence a first attempt at testing the previous question putting the driver, the food and the customer at the right spot at the right time, in a way that has seldom been done before.\u00a0Uber appears to hit all of the critical factors for food delivery regardless of location:<\/p>\n\n
\nAfter the company announced the creation of its “UberEverything” division\u00a0[2]<\/span>, UberEats seemed to be but a first variation of the core human transportation service. There is little doubt that\u00a0Uber will venture into an array of other sectors where it will continue to leverage its main competitive advantages.\u00a0What’s more, the emergence of autonomous vehicles could offer Uber almost endless new possibilities. Perhaps even too many…
\nAs the company keeps pursuing this frenetic growth, and locking-in hundreds of millions of customers worldwide, it is still to this day struggling to turn a profit, and it is therefore not out of the woods yet.<\/p>\n
\n<\/span>[2]\u00a0<\/span>https:\/\/medium.com\/uber-design\/a-beginners-guide-to-uber-everything-f981392a43df<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"