The Uber app is a thing of beauty.

You click a button, and it immediately shows you your location. You hit another button, and it tells you how quickly an Uber car will arrive to take you where you want to go. If you want a ride during a heavy commuter time, it will charge you more — surge pricing, as they call it at Uber — but you’ll know in advance how much extra, and you’ll be given a chance to decide whether to accept or not. On the app, you can keep track of the car that is coming to get you. Sure enough, the car arrives, you hop in and off you go. The fare is charged via the app, so no cash changes hands between the driver and the customer.

Uber does what the best Internet companies do. It disrupts a business model that has existed for a very long time. In the case of Uber, that industry is the taxi business, which, almost everywhere, is highly regulated. Taxi drivers hate Uber. In many cities, they protest against it — or fight it in court. In some cities, a service like Uber’s is against the law.

But, if you live in a place like New York City, Uber is a godsend. It is nearly impossible to get a cab in Manhattan when it is raining, or during the “shift change” that starts at around 4 o’clock or 5 o’clock in the afternoon, right when people are getting out of work and need a taxi most. There are only 14,000 or so yellow cabs in Manhattan, which is not nearly enough. Thanks to Uber, getting a ride someplace is much easier than it was before the company arrived on the scene.

What’s more, unlike many start-ups, Uber appears to be a pretty well-run company. Though it is now five years old, it is already in more than 200 cities. It dominates the rival car services like Lyft. And it has a valuation of around $17 billion.