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If you need a ride, pull out your phone and load up the Lyft app. Or try Uber. Really, it doesn’t matter which you pick.

Though the two ride-sharing giants have carried on like the bitterest of enemies recently, their services have become pretty much indistinguishable. In many places, they both offer ubiquitous, cheap and mostly high-quality service.

They’ve become commodities.

That’s my conclusion based on the last two months of riding Lyft and Uber in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s difficult to say that either is much better, or much worse, than the other. From pickup speed, to driver and car quality, to price, they’re both pretty good.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Take Uber’s. This week The Verge published memos detailing Uber’s campaign to recruit Lyft drivers. According to the report, Uber hires contractors who request Lyft rides and, before the ride is out, attempt to recruit drivers to sign up for Uber.

What is most notable is the indiscriminate nature of Uber’s campaign. During recruiting missions, contractors were paid $750 for any Lyft driver they signed up. The contractors had to be warned to wait a few minutes between rides, so as not to call the same driver twice.

Uber is not going after the best Lyft drivers and cars. It’s going after any Lyft driver with a car and a pulse. And that’s the problem: If Uber itself thinks almost any Lyft ride can be easily transformed into an Uber ride, why shouldn’t we just use Lyft?

Though the two services stake out different branding positions — Uber paints itself as luxurious, Lyft as fun — the recruiting campaign renders those differences hollow. Riding in an Uber car can’t be much more luxurious, safe, clean or comfortable than the experience on Lyft.

Most of those features are out of Uber’s control. They are determined by the driver and his or her car. And the Uber car and driver you take today could well be the same ones that were on Lyft yesterday. Or not even yesterday. It could be just five minutes ago, because the most salient distinction between an Uber ride and a Lyft ride is whichever app the driver has on right now.

For riders, this is great news. Two well-funded start-ups are fighting hammer and tongs to give us better service at lower prices across the country.

The development is also pretty good for Lyft, which is younger, smaller and poorer than Uber (it has raised a few hundred million dollars in investments, compared to Uber’s $1.5 billion). A year ago, Lyft was seen as one of many Uber-wannabes. Now, thanks to wild expansion and a brilliant marketing campaign, Lyft is seen as a substitute service. The fight with Uber is a big part of Lyft’s rise. Where once Uber was synonymous with the industry, Lyft is now mentioned in every article about ride-sharing.

Uber can’t be happy about the prospect of commoditization. For promising tech companies, becoming a commodity is never good news. There are generally two ways to become an enduring tech brand. One is to build a natural monopoly, often through network effects — the economic dynamic in which the more that people use your product, the better your product becomes, leading to a happy upward spiral. Think about Microsoft’s desktop monopoly, or Facebook’s rise.

Another plan for tech dominance is to create a product so much better than the alternatives that you cement enduring loyalty. Google did that with its search engine, and Apple did it with the iPhone. Both were quickly copied by rivals, but their early lead, and their quick improvements, created a long-term legacy.

Today most search engines work more or less the same way, and most smartphones do pretty much the same thing. But almost everyone uses Google, and it makes most of the money in search ads. Apple, meanwhile, makes the vast majority of the profits in the smartphone business.

Uber does not fit into either bucket very well. There are some network effects — the more cars Uber has in your network, the faster it can serve you, which brings in more riders, and thus more drivers, and on and on. But these effects are constrained in two ways. First, as Quartz’s Tim Fernholz points out, Uber’s markets are local. Uber’s network of drivers in San Francisco doesn’t help it become a market leader in Austin; it has to create and defend its network everywhere. Second, Uber’s network has little lock-in, which is often a handmaiden to network-effects businesses.

Windows was unstoppable because apps created for Windows could not easily be ported over to the Mac. As The Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims once noted, car-sharing drivers “are completely mercenary and driven by price; they have no specific loyalty to Uber.” I suspect that’s becoming increasingly true of riders, too. If an Uber ride is too far away, why not try Lyft? It’s just an app away.

It’s difficult to see how either Uber or Lyft can rise above commodification. They are both constantly trying out new services, but if either hits on something successful, the other could easily copy it.

As drivers switch between the two companies, their brands are becoming less sharply defined, too. I’ve noticed lots of Lyft drivers dropping the signature pink mustache from their cars. Many also don’t bother with the fist-bump introduction, another Lyft convention. Where Uber drivers once carried themselves more like chauffeurs — they were quiet and didn’t speak to you until they were spoken to — the ones I’ve ridden with more recently seem just as chatty as Lyft’s drivers.

Which makes sense, I guess. They probably are Lyft drivers.

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