I felt this article is more about how to use microservices right way vs butchering the idea. It is not right to characterize this as microservices vs monolith service.
Initial version of their attempt went too far by spinning up a service for each destination. This is taking microservices to extreme which caused organizational and maintenance issue once number of destinations increased. I am surprised they did not foresee this.
The final solution is also microservice architecture with a better separation of concerns/functionalities. One service for managing in bound queue of events and other service for interacting with all destinations.
If you read other articles you can see that Uber spent 170M in Russia till now. Along with this 225M its a total 395M of spending. And now they got 36.6% stake in a company (now a leader in Russia) worth 3.4B. So Uber got 1.4B. How is that not coming out with anything? Uber did same thing in China. While we all think they lost in China, Uber seems to have spent around 2B or so but got away with close to 8B stake in Didi (leader in China). Any investor will be happy with those returns.
They own a minority stake in an entity that has to pay Yandex for infrastructure, licensing rights and advertising which Yandex controls.
So this entity racks up a lot of debt (to Yandex) while making transfer payments to Yandex and then in a few years: "whoops, bankrupt!"
Now the equity holders (Uber) get wiped out and the company re-organizes and sells its assets (to Yandex) to pay off its debts (to Yandex) and Uber gets nothing.
Oh, NO! That's not legal! That's not fair! Good luck in Russian court buddy.
They are losing everything. They are burning another $225M to forestal the inevitable and pretend like it is not a complete loss but it is only a matter of time.
Yandex.taxi is a service provided by Yandex. The deal talks nothing about licesing agreement for Yandex infrastructure (maps etc).
So the claim you make above is under premise that ride sharing will not make money at all and money spend on infrastructure will be far more than what ride hailing can generate.
So if this assumption is wrong then we are in different argument on whether ride hailing is a sustainable business at all.
Every investor is investing hoping ride hailing will be a profitable business. If it is then this combined entity has more to gain than lose.
But I do agree with media bias. The main case was "Injunction". Not a case against Anthony. "Actual case" was Waymo seeking protection for what they claim 121 trade secrets and hence prevent Uber from dong self driving tests.
Specifically on that Judge ruled following
“General approaches dictated by well-known principles of physics, however, are not “secret,” since they consist essentially of general engineering principles that are simply part of the intellectual equipment of technical employees,”
This clearly shows that Judge believed Waymo over-reached when asking for injuction.
Journalists dont find it saucy. So they are just quoting the parts about Anthony downloading files and skipping the above excerpt.
This. Make some company out to be the boogeyman du jour, then tell that lie often enough until most people believe it and it has spread all the way around the world with no chance of the truth catching up. It's bullshit, and I'm amazed that so many HNers that typically express healthy skepticism fall for it.
While I agree there is a bias in the media regarding Uber, that didn't form in a vacuum. There have been numerous fairly bad missteps from the company. I think it's less a case of the media steering the public as is is the media conforming to public opinion in some cases and showing the public what it expects, since the public is getting a fairly bad impression of Uber, and that's not entirely because of how the media has presented the stories.
Selectively quoting only stuff about Engineer and not quoting anything on actual injunction (which is a win for uber) seems like steering towards a negative narrative against Uber.
Again we can dislike Uber's policies etc. But journalist also needs to lay out facts as they are. Not actually try to steer the argument in one direction.
> Selectively quoting only stuff about Engineer and not quoting anything on actual injunction (which is a win for uber) seems like steering towards a negative narrative against Uber.
In my opinion, calling any of this a win for Uber is a bit of a stretch. If there were no court case, Uber would be entirely unrestricted. Waymo asked for a lot of restrictions, and was granted relatively little. That's better than it could have been for Uber, but still not as good as no injunctions. It's a "win" in the same way that if someone mugged me and only took my inexpensive watch instead of my wallet and smartphone I would have "won". Sure, it could have been worse, but calling it a win seems odd to me. It only makes sense when you narrow your scope to the battle, instead of the war, and to my eyes puts it in the realm of propaganda. I much prefer "good for Uber" or "bad for Uber" or "better than widely expected".
That said, it doesn't change my earlier point at all. If at this point the public is very receptive to and feeds off more evidence of Uber's wrongdoing, then playing to that by the media is to be expected (if still to be condemned). Uber, because of its entire business model is based on disruption that different people see as extremely positive or extremely negative, likely never had a chance at being represented in an unbiased way. In the beginning, that bias probably went both ways. As time has gone on, there's been more negative news to feed to the the thresher than positive, and at this point it's a feedback loop.
I felt this article is more about how to use microservices right way vs butchering the idea. It is not right to characterize this as microservices vs monolith service. Initial version of their attempt went too far by spinning up a service for each destination. This is taking microservices to extreme which caused organizational and maintenance issue once number of destinations increased. I am surprised they did not foresee this.
The final solution is also microservice architecture with a better separation of concerns/functionalities. One service for managing in bound queue of events and other service for interacting with all destinations.