I’m not sure where you are from, but this is not my perspective from Northern California.
1. Apps in general, and Uber in particular, have very much revolutionized the part-time work landscape via gig work. There are plenty of criticisms of gig work if/when people try to do it full time, but as a replacement for part time work, it’s incredible. I always try to strike up a conversation with my uber drivers about what they like about driving, and I have gotten quite a few “make my own schedule” and “earn/save for special things” (e.g., vacations, hobby items, etc.). Many young people I know love the flexibility of the gig apps for part-time work, as the pay is essentially market rate or better for their skill set, and they get to set their own schedule.
2. AirBnB has revolutionized housing. It’s easier for folks to realize the middle class dream of buying an house and renting it out fractionally (by the room). I’ve met several people who have spun up a a few of these. Related, mid-term rentals (e.g., weeks or months rather than days or years) are much easier to arrange now than they were 20 years ago. AirBnBs have also created some market efficiency by pricing properties competitively. Note that I think that many of these changes are actually bad (e.g., it’s tougher to buy a house where I am), but it’s revolutionary nonetheless.
We clearly live in two completely separate parts of the world. I'm from Denmark (where Uber ran away after being told they had to operate as a taxi company) and calling a taxi was never a problem for me. You called the dispatch, said roughly where you were, and they can by with a dude in a car who you then told where you wanted to go. By now the taxi companies have apps too, but the experience is roughly identical.
The prices suck, but that's not really a usability problem.
Tech companies forget that software is easy, the real world is hard. Computers are very isolated and perfect environments. But building real stuff, in meatspace, has more variables than anyone can even conceptualize.
and is also exactly what people want. Having and app is fine and maybe cool, but at some point what I want from my taxi company is to get in a real car with the person who is preferably not a murderer and drive somewhere. The app is not very valuable to me unless it somehow optimizes that desirable part of the exchange.
I've worked a few years in the enterprise now, and the same thing keeps popping up. Startups think they have some cool cutting-edge technology to sell, but we aren't buying technology. We will gladly pay you to take away some real life problem though, but that also means you have to own any problems with your software, since we will be paying for a service, not software.
Digital devices that track everything you do, that then generated so much data that the advertising actually got worse. Thereby the data was collected with the promise that the adverts would get more appropriate.
Now comes AI to make sense of the data and the training data (I.e., the internet) is being swamped with AI content so that the training data for AIs is becoming useless.
I wonder what is being invented to remove all the AI content from the training data.