The average American in prime working age drives more than 15 thousand miles a year. For these commuters, the thought of not owning a car is ludicrous. With hours each day spent in transit, it’s no surprise they often obsess over what type of car to own and what routes to work to take.
But despite the prominence of today’s driving culture, disruption has planted its roots firmly in the transportation industry. Innovations in ride-sharing, car-sharing, and long-distance transportation are bringing us closer than ever to a world in which car ownership is a choice—not a requirement.
The businesses attacking this massive market are quickly finding both a variety of customers and enormous access to funding. Companies like Uber and Grabtaxi have quickly become dominant. But even with the emergence of large global players, there is still lots of opportunity for new transportation disrupters to claim new niches in the market.
For potential investors, entrepreneurs, and anyone with an interest in getting where they need to go, the billion dollar question is, “How will this market look after the dust has settled?” Although the market is enormous, some approaches to its revolution are better than others. And developing a thesis on the future of this industry is particularly challenging. To make any sort of prediction here, you need to consider changes in the sharing of transportation infrastructure, the driverless revolution, and the dramatic shift towards electric and hybrid architectures of cars. The impact of any of these trends represents a tidal shift. Thinking through all three simultaneously creates a thought experiment we might not see again for a long time.
It’s easy to foresee that transportation’s future will be be very different than its present. But what will that future look like? To bring it into focus, it’s useful to turn to an orthogonal industry: information technology, specifically cloud computing.
Twenty years ago, the world only had inklings of how the internet would revolutionize IT. When Marc Benioff introduced “Software as a Service,” skeptics emerged from every corner of the industry. It was heresy to claim that large businesses, with highly customized hardware and software solutions, would move their resources into someone else’s data centers. SaaS might be a decent solution for the small businesses who couldn’t afford their own infrastructure—but it was never going to be appealing to those with more complex demands.
We know how this story has played out. Today, cloud isn’t just the preferred delivery model for applications. Instead, cloud permeates everything in information technology. Cloud infrastructure provides a shared, flexible infrastructure for computing and storage resources. There have been almost two decades of innovation in hardware and software since SaaS emerged. Cloud vendors have worked diligently to ensure that all that innovation is available to each of their customers. With years of R&D, there are very few use cases that can’t be replicated relying on rented servers in an Amazon, Salesforce, or Microsoft datacenter with far more flexibility and far less headache.
Transportation seems to be following a very similar path to cloud computing. Renting a ride for point-to-point transportation with a click of a button (Uber), is a lot like renting some capacity within a server for web hosting (Amazon Web Services, or AWS). Today, it’s an absurdist claim to argue we’re near the point where we don’t need to own cars. In a couple of decades, owning a car will be much less critical.
A few factors play into this. First, the world is increasingly urban. 50 years ago, approximately three out of ten people lived in cities across the globe. Today it’s more than five out of ten and growing rapidly. More people in densely located areas means the cost of parking will rise ever higher, discouraging car ownership. At the same time, more people living close to work means it will become easier to manage a commute on public transportation.
Second, we’re getting ever closer to the point where renting is frictionless. The mobile internet is making the process of accessing resources on demand cheap and easy. Adam Smith’s invisible hand is getting a bit of an assist from AT&T, GPS satellites, and a slew of app providers. This ease of access to transportation will only increase once we have a fleet of autonomous vehicles roaming the roads. As the technologies improve, the relative benefits of car ownership will diminish.
It’s true that only a tiny segment of the population truly can view disruptive transportation services as real substitutes for car ownership in today’s market. However, it seems inevitable that innovation will make this option appealing to an ever larger group of people over time. Uber has already showed us glimpses of how this will occur by adding cars of all varieties: cars with car seats, wheelchair accessibility, and SUVs for larger groups. For new parents who couldn’t use the service before, Uber is finally an option. For people who sometimes need a car seat, sometimes need an SUV, and sometimes just want a ride in a sedan, it’s one of the better options.
As with all waves of disruption, cloud transportation vendors have every financial incentive to innovate in ways that allow them to serve more demanding customers over time. There will also be stumbles along the way. We’re seeing some of those as vendors battle regulators over the employment status of drivers. But the advantages of cloud transportation are too large to ignore. Despite stumbles, consumers will continue to seek on-demand transportation. Over time, cloud transportation services will offer solutions that help more and more people minimize car ownership—either by abandoning their cars completely or going from a two-car household to a single-car home.
The cloud computing wars started with a focus on buyers in the small business market who couldn’t afford expensive IT solutions. Cloud transportation started with a focus on urban residents who only owned cars as personal luxuries. Over time, cloud computing added the features and functionality that allowed it to compete in the most complex environments. There is no doubt that innovators in the transportation will follow the same path.
อเมริกันโดยเฉลี่ยอายุการทำงานเฉพาะในไดรฟ์มากกว่า 15 พันไมล์ต่อปี การสำรวจเหล่านี้ ความคิดในการเป็นเจ้าของรถไม่ได้ ludicrous ด้วยเวลาที่ใช้ในการขนส่งแต่ละวัน จึงไม่แปลกใจที่พวกเขามักจะวิพากษ์มากกว่าชนิดของรถไปเองและว่าเส้นทางการทำงานจะ แต่แม้ มีความโดดเด่นของวัฒนธรรมการขับขี่วันนี้ ทรัพยมีปลูกรากของมันอย่างแน่นหนาในอุตสาหกรรมขนส่ง นวัตกรรมในการขนส่งร่วม กันขี่ รถร่วม และทางไกลจะนำเราใกล้กว่าเคยในรถซึ่งเจ้าของเป็นทางเลือกที่โลก — ไม่มีความต้องการ ธุรกิจตลาดใหญ่นี้โจมตีอย่างรวดเร็วกำลังค้นหาทั้งความหลากหลายของลูกค้าและขนาดมหึมาถึงทุน บริษัทเช่นรสนิยมและ Grabtaxi ได้อย่างรวดเร็วเป็นหลัก แต่แม้จะ มีการเกิดขึ้นของผู้เล่นส่วนกลางขนาดใหญ่ ยังมีโอกาสสำหรับ disrupters ขนส่งใหม่จะเรียกร้องตรงไหนใหม่ในตลาดมากมาย สำหรับนักลงทุนที่อาจเกิดขึ้น ผู้ประกอบการ และผู้ที่สนใจในการที่พวกเขาต้องไป คำถามพันล้านดอลลาร์เป็น "ตลาดนี้ลักษณะหลังจากมีชำระฝุ่น" แม้ว่าตลาดเป็นอย่างมาก บางวิธีของการปฏิวัติได้ดีกว่าผู้อื่น และพัฒนาเป็นวิทยานิพนธ์ในอนาคตของอุตสาหกรรมนี้เป็นความท้าทายอย่างยิ่ง ต้องการเรียงลำดับใด ๆ ของการคาดการณ์ ที่นี่ คุณต้องพิจารณาเปลี่ยนแปลงอายุ ของโครงสร้างพื้นฐานการขนส่ง การปฏิวัติ driverless กะละครต่อไฟฟ้าและแบบผสมผสานสถาปัตยกรรมของรถยนต์ ผลกระทบของแนวโน้มเหล่านี้แสดงถึงกะบ่า คิดถึงทั้งสามพร้อมสร้างการทดลองทางความคิดเราคงไม่เห็นอีกเป็นเวลานาน ซึ่งง่ายต่อการเล็งเห็นว่า อนาคตของขนส่งได้จะมากแตกต่างจากปัจจุบัน แต่ว่าจะมองว่าในอนาคตเช่น ให้ชัดว่า จะมีประโยชน์กับอุตสาหกรรม orthogonal: เทคโนโลยีสารสนเทศ cloud โดยเฉพาะคอมพิวเตอร์ ยี่สิบปีที่ผ่านมา โลกมีเพียง inklings ของวิธีอินเทอร์เน็ตจะ revolutionize มัน เมื่อ Marc Benioff แนะนำ "เป็นตัวซอฟท์แวร์" สงสัยเกิดจากทุกมุมของอุตสาหกรรม คอกเพื่อเรียกร้องให้ ธุรกิจขนาดใหญ่ สูงเองฮาร์ดแวร์และซอฟต์แวร์โซลูชั่น จะย้ายทรัพยากรของพวกเขาเป็นศูนย์ข้อมูลของบุคคลอื่นได้ ซาสอาจจะแก้ปัญหาเหมาะสมสำหรับธุรกิจขนาดเล็กที่ไม่สามารถโครงสร้างพื้นฐานของตนเอง — แต่มันไม่เคยไปได้น่าสนใจสำหรับผู้ที่มีความซับซ้อนมากขึ้นได้ We know how this story has played out. Today, cloud isn’t just the preferred delivery model for applications. Instead, cloud permeates everything in information technology. Cloud infrastructure provides a shared, flexible infrastructure for computing and storage resources. There have been almost two decades of innovation in hardware and software since SaaS emerged. Cloud vendors have worked diligently to ensure that all that innovation is available to each of their customers. With years of R&D, there are very few use cases that can’t be replicated relying on rented servers in an Amazon, Salesforce, or Microsoft datacenter with far more flexibility and far less headache. Transportation seems to be following a very similar path to cloud computing. Renting a ride for point-to-point transportation with a click of a button (Uber), is a lot like renting some capacity within a server for web hosting (Amazon Web Services, or AWS). Today, it’s an absurdist claim to argue we’re near the point where we don’t need to own cars. In a couple of decades, owning a car will be much less critical. A few factors play into this. First, the world is increasingly urban. 50 years ago, approximately three out of ten people lived in cities across the globe. Today it’s more than five out of ten and growing rapidly. More people in densely located areas means the cost of parking will rise ever higher, discouraging car ownership. At the same time, more people living close to work means it will become easier to manage a commute on public transportation. Second, we’re getting ever closer to the point where renting is frictionless. The mobile internet is making the process of accessing resources on demand cheap and easy. Adam Smith’s invisible hand is getting a bit of an assist from AT&T, GPS satellites, and a slew of app providers. This ease of access to transportation will only increase once we have a fleet of autonomous vehicles roaming the roads. As the technologies improve, the relative benefits of car ownership will diminish. It’s true that only a tiny segment of the population truly can view disruptive transportation services as real substitutes for car ownership in today’s market. However, it seems inevitable that innovation will make this option appealing to an ever larger group of people over time. Uber has already showed us glimpses of how this will occur by adding cars of all varieties: cars with car seats, wheelchair accessibility, and SUVs for larger groups. For new parents who couldn’t use the service before, Uber is finally an option. For people who sometimes need a car seat, sometimes need an SUV, and sometimes just want a ride in a sedan, it’s one of the better options. As with all waves of disruption, cloud transportation vendors have every financial incentive to innovate in ways that allow them to serve more demanding customers over time. There will also be stumbles along the way. We’re seeing some of those as vendors battle regulators over the employment status of drivers. But the advantages of cloud transportation are too large to ignore. Despite stumbles, consumers will continue to seek on-demand transportation. Over time, cloud transportation services will offer solutions that help more and more people minimize car ownership—either by abandoning their cars completely or going from a two-car household to a single-car home. The cloud computing wars started with a focus on buyers in the small business market who couldn’t afford expensive IT solutions. Cloud transportation started with a focus on urban residents who only owned cars as personal luxuries. Over time, cloud computing added the features and functionality that allowed it to compete in the most complex environments. There is no doubt that innovators in the transportation will follow the same path.
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