Transportation consultant Huber Horan wrote my favorite article about Uber:
An examination of Uber’s economics suggests that it has no hope of ever earning sustainable urban car service profits in competitive markets. Its costs are simply much higher than the market is willing to pay, as its nine years of massive losses indicate. Uber not only lacks powerful competitive advantages, but it is actually less efficient than the competitors it has been driving out of business.
Horan then compares Uber’s business model to that of the taxi industry and concludes that “Uber has not increased taxi productivity or solved long-standing industry problems” but instead subsidizes fares so that it can offer prices consumers are willing to pay.
Go read the whole article. It’s fascinating.
Horan has a PDF version (and more articles about Uber) on his website.
On his great 3-2-1 newsletter James Clear quotes architect Christopher Alexander (A Pattern Language) about designing a room people love:
Light on two sides of every room. When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.
This pattern, perhaps more than any other single pattern, determines the success or failure of a room. The arrangement of daylight in a room, and the presence of windows on two sides, is fundamental. If you build a room with light on one side only, you can be almost certain that you are wasting your money. People will stay out of that room if they can possibly avoid it…
The importance of this pattern lies partly in the social atmosphere it creates in the room. Rooms lit on two sides, with natural light, create less glare around people and objects; this lets us see things more intricately; and most important, it allows us to read in detail the minute expressions that flash across people’s faces, the motion of their hands … and thereby understand, more clearly, the meaning they are after. The light on two sides allows people to understand each other.
Also check out the behind the scenes video:
How a simple rice cooker uses the physical properties of water and magnets to cook perfect rice.
Andy Grove passed away the same day that Apple announced the iPhone SE. One of Grove’s best decisions reminds me of this launch.
Apple’s Phil Schiller explains how Apple has perfected its attention to detail over time, and how it manifests in products like the new MacBook.
A collaboration between a Stanford ant biologist and a computer scientist has revealed that the behavior of harvester ants as they forage for food mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet.
James Altucher knows what he’s talking about.
Hans Brattberg from Crisp shares his mindmap.
Many people that call themselves product managers are something else: Project managers, agile coaches, Scrum product owners, …
So what does a product manager do?
I love Marty Cagan’s definition. A product manager’s job is “to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible”.
Marty Cagan knows what he’s talking about.
You could summarize: Good product teams care about the product, bad teams care about their paycheck.