Non-taxi on-call cars have existed for many, many decades before Uber. Especially in NYC where this article is relevant, car services are a dime a dozen and have been a regular part of city life for decades.
The difference is between picking up your phone to get one vs. using your smartphone. Uber was first to market, but it's silly to pretend that without them it wouldn't have happened. That's like calling the Pizza Hut app a clone of the Domino's app, because they both order pizzas and Domino's came out first. Ultimately Uber is a newfangled (and more convenient) front-end to a service that has pre-dates itself by a wide, wide margin.
The extension from "call the car company to get a car" to "use an app to get a car" is a pretty obvious innovation, particularly in NYC.
So what? You can say that about any large tech companies.
Google wasn't the first search engine. Apple didn't make the first music player. Facebook wasn't the first social network.
Being unique doesn't matter a single bit. Only thing that matters is that people are using them. And that's the case with Uber. Judge however you will their shady tactics, but it's ridiculous to downplay their success based on that.
You're reading dismissiveness into my post that was not intended. Uber has done something remarkable, but it is not so novel as to justify calling everyone doing the same thing a "clone".
Not to mention Uber is not the first GPS-based car-hailing app. They were the first ones that were able to gain mass traction - which is an achievement in and of itself, to be certain, but also makes claims that "X cloned Uber" somewhat laughable. If we're going to split hairs about who copied whom, Uber is on the wrong end of that statement.
But it's precisely because Uber was able to get such traction, that other companies followed into the field. Lyft and Gettit may not be "clones", but I'd wager the followed the industry leader (Uber) in the the field.
Gettit is as much a clone of Uber as Androids a clone of iPhone. Not an exact copy, but probably wouldn't be existing without the other paving the path.
I'd wager that people in ancient Athens would send a messenger to the local chariot service when they needed to get around on short notice. The idea that Uber is somehow doing something new is ludicrous.
The difference is between picking up your phone to get one vs. using your smartphone. Uber was first to market, but it's silly to pretend that without them it wouldn't have happened. That's like calling the Pizza Hut app a clone of the Domino's app, because they both order pizzas and Domino's came out first. Ultimately Uber is a newfangled (and more convenient) front-end to a service that has pre-dates itself by a wide, wide margin.
The extension from "call the car company to get a car" to "use an app to get a car" is a pretty obvious innovation, particularly in NYC.