I didn't say it was rocket science but if it was so easy and profitable, it would already have been done.Joe Shlabotnik wrote:Again, this is not rocket science. You could make it work. In fact, you could be the entrepreneur that builds the platform that gets licensed to cities for their use.
I've been in mobile development for 8 years and a lot of the performance and platform issues are more difficult than you're giving credit for. For instance, I work with the company that built HBO Now. It was season 6 or 7 of the Game of Thrones preview when HBO Go crashed a ~3 million views while HBO Now was running over ~7 million concurrent views without an issue. Just because it isn't rocket science and it can be copied doesn't mean all of the performance or features will be on par with existing solutions.
Uber was founded 10 years ago. They've been in Indianapolis since at least 2014; 5-7 years of testing helps smooth out a lot of software issues a few junior developers won't be able to just straight copy. It's certainly not impossible but it's not as simple as starting a company, hiring 4 android devs, 4 iOS devs, and 6 web devs to just build a white label solution for taxi's on demand and then start selling to cities. Even if you did that, after the first city bought a license, before you could close the next deal Uber or Lyft would just turn on the same functionality and underbid you with a better product for the next city.
It's not rocket science but there are a lot of hurdles and hiccups that would make it a difficult solution to market.