At least in Europe there were apps to call a taxi and sites to book vacation homes before either Uber or AirBnB came over. But sure ruthlessly minimising personnel responsibilities and costs can be another "value".
>At least in Europe there were apps to call a taxi
Where?
In France the taxis never accepted debit cards (= tax evasion), and generally provided piss-poor service. They've stepped their game up massively since Uber arrived.
In the UK I never saw a taxi app that wasn't an utter heap of garbage.
Sweeping generalizations about EU countries are almost always wrong or meaningless.
Really? On par with Uber? Because that's the goalpost that's been set, here.
Hailo was often fully booked when I tried using it, and I had several previous-day reservations evaporate into thin air. It wasn't (as) reliable.
London taxis have always been slightly better than the FR/ES/BG/IT taxis I've taken, but not that much better. And the apps have either gone bust, not worked, or both.
As someone currently living in a German area with almost no Uber service, mytaxi (the equivalent Uber-like taxi app) is inferior to and much less reliable and functional than Uber and Lyft.
I tried mytaxi during a vacation in Italy. Went through the whole onboarding, including checking the trips expected fare and entering CC details only to get told after pressing the 'call taxi now' button by a popup that the service is not available in this area. WTF? Also the whole app looked very cheap and felt fragile.
In my hometown I'm just calling taxis off the street or via plain old phone.
I took a MyTaxi in Germany and it was terrible. I absolutely missed Uber when I was in Berlin, MyTaxi was a joke, same with most other taxi apps (i.e. Flywheel here in the Bay Area)
..in the case my my experience living in the south of France, taxis wouldn’t show up at all. That happened to me more frequently than they actually showed up.
Can you please edit personal provocations like that out of your posts to HN? They add no information and are often wrong. The comment would be fine with just the second sentence.
