Real simple. Uber got us to understand that hailing a taxi sucked and there was a different way to solve that problem.
Kalanick and Camp discovered that we had an old, ongoing problem. People didn’t know it was a problem that could be solved in a new way. Uber got them around to that understanding. Their solution was different, not just better. They replaced our current point of view with a different point of view.
They marketed the problem, not just the solution. Once people understood the problem, they latched onto the most popular solution, Uber. It was easier to get people to think in terms of the problem they want to solve.
You can think of the problem in this case as a category. The new category that Kalanick and Camp created. And in so doing Uber got crowned category king.
