I have friends in South Africa who built a small business similar to uber in 2004 on SMS and future phones. Worked really well, however, at the end of the day an idea does not build a business like uber.
Extremely well executed startups does, which of course requires a team in just the right milieu and timing.
> I have friends in South Africa who built a small business similar to uber in 2004 on SMS and future phones.
(I assume you meant "feature-phone" there?)
You should tell your SA friends to reach out to some tech journos, they'd love to write a "Uber before Uber" story, and I'd like to know the reasons why their project didn't pan-out myself. SMS-based applications had a lot of potential in the mid-2000s, often the failures were elsewhere, and doesn't SA also have SMS-based billing too? that could have been an amazingly successful service...
Yeah, if I had to guess, it was so extremely hard for them to recruit taxi drivers in South Africa. The metered taxi industry has always been extremely untrusted (my personal opinion), and basically non-existent.
They approached these guys and also the hand full of companies that existed back then, but it really wasn't until Uber established a trusted driver experience that we really started using taxis on a daily / weekly basis. So they simply did not have the funding / momentum to establish such a large scale transition in transportation and consumer trust within SA.
For years prior to Uber, the segment for "upper / middle class" public transport was not served and for sure not accessible. You could phone a cab company in Cape Town and get a taxi, but then it was super expensive and that was basically the only option – service which was also not available in most other cities.
When Uber arrived, they (and other companies) helped jobless drivers secure funding for cabs and within a year or two there were thousands of drivers, cabs and Ubers in all metros.
For the first time, when I had to go to the airport, I could get a Uber instead of asking a friend to drop me off. Crazy but this was the reality.
I would guess they did not have the timing right with the advent of 3G internet with minimum viable bandwidth to be able to operate things like maps and GPS and payment processing in real time, combined with the advent of usable mobile phones with sufficient qualities of battery life, touch screen sizes, and computing power.
The 2007 to 2012 period was a perfect storm of bringing together connectivity with never before utility from newly developed devices, and if you were in the right place at the right time to stake a claim, then you had significant first mover advantages.
It was discovering new land that had not been settled yet, similar to when computing and society advanced to allow for computers in every home, and then internet connectivity, and then finally, 24/7 computing plus internet computing in your pocket.
Of course, having deep, deep pockets to hire the people at the forefronts of this land rush is also a huge advantage.
> advent of 3G internet with minimum viable bandwidth to be able to operate things like maps and GPS and payment processing in real time
I just realized that GPS was probably the reason: I remember my first time using Uber and it was the fact you could see the location of the car and yourself on the map in real-time, and so you could easily get to the car without the usual hassle of trying to locate and identify each other. That's just not possible with SMS (even if a phone did support GPS, I've never seen anything like "send coordinates by SMS" on a feature-phone, and even if the server could render a map it wouldn't be downloaded in real-time to be useful.
...though if it was a Java mobile app for each platform, that might have worked (even over GPRS), but considering how expensive mobile-data was at the time, hmm, yeah.
Extremely well executed startups does, which of course requires a team in just the right milieu and timing.