The reasonable question is - why is this better than the existing mechanisms for governing things? Corporate law allows for an almost infinite number of ways to structure organizations. And the things it doesn't allow for are mostly things which society has deemed they don't want (ie, laws/regs disallowing something).
This isn't to say DAOs aren't useful - but it would be nice to see a concrete value proposition. Like "that thing which people want to do, like in example X, can be done significantly cheaper/faster/more conveniently than the current way to do it."
Some of dOrg's projects are good examples (They're a BBLLC who consult and develop other DAO projects): https://www.dorg.tech
I think, maybe obviously, that more distributed organizations stand to benefit more immediately from being a DAO than more centralized traditional corporations do. For example if a bunch of cabbies want to run their own homebrewed clone of Uber / Lyft (As cabbies in some cities actually do), a well-programmed DAO could save the group hundreds of thousands of dollars that would normally be spend on servers and staff to maintain them. Essentially, smaller distributed organizations can be freed of the need for centralized touch points and thus the costs associated.
a well-programmed DAO could save the group hundreds of thousands of dollars that would normally be spend on servers and staff to maintain them
No. Doing anything on-chain is far more expensive than renting servers. Because there's a massive bubble going on, people are willing to work for DAOs in exchange for stock (whoops, don't call it that) but that won't last and over time salaries will equalize.
> For example if a bunch of cabbies want to run their own homebrewed clone of Uber / Lyft (As cabbies in some cities actually do), a well-programmed DAO could save the group hundreds of thousands of dollars that would normally be spend on servers and staff to maintain them.
That isn't a DAO. That's a dApp. It could in theory also be organized as a DAO, but the two aren't synonymous.
As others have mentioned, a dApp would be a spectacularly bad choice of technology for this type of application -- it's slower, dramatically more expensive to run, and would run a significant risk of permanently leaking users' PII (like their ride history) to the blockchain.
This isn't to say DAOs aren't useful - but it would be nice to see a concrete value proposition. Like "that thing which people want to do, like in example X, can be done significantly cheaper/faster/more conveniently than the current way to do it."