The way I would approach this is to kindle their imagination to build stuff. If in the process of building that thing, they need to use software then have them learn programming. If it requires them to use hardware, introduce them to Legos, hardware kits. If your kid wants to use colors and a canvas to bring alive their imagination, so be it. Be the enabler.
"The lack of proper monitor is never the sole cause of a problem, but it’s often a serious contributing factor."
I am continuously amazed that downtime issues go undetected until a) customer notifies you b) things go downhill and alarms are blazing. Our central principle is that monitoring and alerting has to be part of your deployment. The way we apply at my work place is that every design doc has a monitoring section which has to be filled out.
It was a perfect business that didn't get the timing right. Their business would have thrived during 2000, 2008. Now if they lasted a few more months, they would have been perfectly positioned to take major market share in the Fall 2015 recession.
I have moved on from Comcast almost an year ago and I couldn't have been happier to with my current ISP, frontier. The pain I endured while paying Comcast my top dollars make me wish that they face a similar demise like Blockbuster, B&N and others.
We don't have access to their pitch deck - market size, roadmap and traction. If we were privy to that info, am sure some of this would make more sense.
I would be surprised if the prevalent economic models will continue to apply. Think Walmart, Costco, Amazon and how they leveraged their scale to drive efficiency through the ecosystem.
The prevailing models during those times were revisited which included prices, contracts, payments.
In your specific example about car washes, I envision a huge warehouse with multiple floors to do automated car washes which is super efficient. This will happen as there will be a metric that will show how a minute saved on the car wash floor can save the company millions of dollars because of their scale. There will be no "car wash" dealership to negotiate with.
Economies of scale that it can drive from its platform given that it will have the largest base of customers as well as suppliers. It is very close to what Amazon did to bookstores and eventually to ecommerce business.
Uber is best positioned to usher in self-driving cars. If they are successful at it, their market opportunity is much larger than the Taxi-cab industry.