If taking a billion dollars from the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia says something about a company's stance regarding women's equality, what it says is not terribly inconsistent with Fowler's story.
That's an interesting angle that I had not considered. That money is such a weird thing from another viewpoint as well, it means that Uber doesn't have to perform at all for the next decade or so, they can basically wait out all of their competition. It removes every incentive to actually perform which might be just what it takes to kill them.
I hate to use the phrase 'it's only a billion dollars' but at the sort of scale it strives to operate, that's not a massive warchest without follow on investment: e.g. Delta Airlines turns over about $40 billion in revenue a year and a 2.5% subsidy would gobble up a billion. If the actual subsidies are in the double digits that billion starts to look more like a normal 12-24 month funding round [1].
If it dies, it will be via dependence on meat space. There's only so much of moving atoms that can be digitally replaced and the core business is a commodity: it could compete with taxis because rides between A and B are mostly fungible and being better than existing taxi service was not a very high bar and being better than standing in the rain waving your arm was not a high bar either.
I'm sure it's software engineering is really good. But over the long term, it can only provide marginal advantages to a business that boils down to personal services.
I've always wondered what Uber is going to do when their self-driving cars can legally drive in Saudi Arabia, but women can't. Seems like they're going to run up against that pretty soon.
