Here's where I am conflicted. I love the service, even as I find some of their practices deplorable, and as long as Uber continues to operate in my country, I will never use another taxi for as long as I live.
This is why Uber gets away with their deplorable practices.
We can have long arguments about what the problems are with traditional taxis, and I know you live in a different place than I do so the problems are probably different for each, but understand that you just started a conversation with "I know what this unscrupulous, misogynistic company is doing is unethical, often illegal, and broadly destructive to society, but it's convenient so I help keep them in business".
However, the deeper reason is that in a sense, I just admire the way Uber simply muscled its way into a new market and totally disrupted the system with a new product which simply worked way better, while making the incumbents seem like complete idiots in the process. Despite the fallout.
Muscling in is a good choice of words, actually. The reason we have rules and laws is because winning is easy if you only care about one narrow objective and don't take into account how your success affects the larger society.
People like that Uber lets you hire a car by an app. Simple as it was, that is the user facing feature that endeared Uber to the world.
Problem is that they didn't just innovate to win-- they also chose to cheat, bully and deceive their way to success. In my mind, that completely invalidates their contributions.
The taxi industry looks like it does because of years of experience leading to layers of regulation. Uber is going to be re-teaching us all the reasons the taxi industry became what it did. Once Uber is no longer competing against an entrenched taxi industry, do they strike you as the type of company that will continue being as good as they can to their customers, or do they strike you as a company that will do anything to earn an extra buck? Ten years from now, Uber won't look much different than taxis did 10 years ago and we'll realize that what made Uber look shiny was that it was an upstart without history, not that it was fundamentally better.
That in itself doesn't bother me so much. What bothers me is two other things that are going to happen in that time:
- we're causing permanent damage to society by, for example, further normalizing pervasive violations of privacy and by undercutting the wages of yet another part of the service sector.
- we're enriching a man and his investors as a reward for patently bad behavior.
If Uber went away, someone else would fill the void. Probably even in Singapore. And without Uber's shady strong-arm tactics, there might be several services competing for your business. The innovations are already seeded into society, we can safely kill the company off now.