Yes, but there's a big difference between perfecting the tech and implementing it for a use case. Uber would have the logistics and infrastrcuture to implement it, that's an easy call to license the tech from someone that has the tech down pat but no interest in being a taxi company. Heck they could probably have partnered with Google as a testing partner.
Well, but leverage matters. Whoever owns self driving patents will take close to 100% of the profit margins involved in taxis for the life of the patents.
For example, Apple gets most of the margin out of an iPhone. Apple could switch hardware vendors. The hardware vendors can't find anyone else who sells the iPhone OS.
Same thing here. If you have the self driving tech, the logistics and a shiny app and the dumb car hardware are the easy part you can buy for the lowest price available from many competing vendors (or conversely, license your technology exclusively to whoever pays the highest price -- either way, you have total leverage here and they have none, because without self driving tech there is no business)
Anyway, Waymo does not seem at all disinterested in the taxi business, probably because they realize that's the easy part. Alphabet engineers can put out a decent dispatch app in a fiscal quarter easily, and it markets itself. Or they could create a bidding war between Uber, Lyft, Via, etc.... Even with massive investor subsidies, nobody will be able to beat the rock bottom prices of a true driverless taxi service.
Uber investors know this, which is why Uber was forced to pretend to develop driverless tech, because if they don't, then Uber stock should be selling at earnings multiples more appropriate for a steel mill, not a software company.
They choose this path long ago when they took over a billion in investment + debt, and probably could be argued it was locked in even sooner than that. This a vehicle to get investors to that important rentier position and they have to make it or implode in debt trying. Their valuation has this fate baked in.
