Uber’s magic ingredient is inequality

Leo Minari writing for Quartz:

There are only two requirements for an on-demand service economy to work, and neither is an iPhone. First, the market being addressed needs to be big enough to scale—food, laundry, taxi rides. Without that, it’s just a concierge service for the rich rather than a disruptive paradigm shift, as a venture capitalist might say. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there needs to be a large enough labor class willing to work at wages that customers consider affordable and that the middlemen consider worthwhile for their profit margins.

To compound this, it’s very (very) likely that once more the millions of workers who create value in Uber will see nothing at the value point (be it IPO or being taken over), just as those who created the value in Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, and so on throughout the ‘Web 2.0’ boom, saw nothing.

Which simply increases the inequality in the world. What we really needs is an ‘Uber for Vicious Circles’.