Those companies already got the cars, trained drivers, a complete support network, decades of experience... They would bury Uber in any case where they would be allowed to play by the same rules.

Hell... they could probably forgo on the whole "mobile app" thing. Calling a dispatcher and getting assigned and forwarded the closest car is nothing particularly innovative and has worked since... well since one was able to use a phone to call a taxi. No need for GPS or touch screen or whatever...

Hell... call it a feature. "Retro-Taxi". For all the hipsters out there.

You might want to look up Edwin de Castro, and Ken Olsen.

I personally, look up to both of them.

Space (specifically the Apollo program) was responsible for a purchasing program that drove logic ICs down to consumer level pricing - without which PCs would not have reached the volume that drove the prices far lower.

Analog ICs would not have got far without the logic ones, because production tolerances were so loose that the concept of "it works or it does not" was critical to volume production of ICs in the early days. (Yield was under 3% for the 7400 family (first TTL logic ICs)).

Don't get me started on stacker, which was eventually bought by MS and incorporated into DOS (6.20?). It was brilliant for the time and at the same time dangerous. Many lost their data to it. The least hardware or disk corruption and you were toasted.