Services like Uber / Hailo (transportation logistics) and Homejoy / Exec / Handybook (home services) are creating more efficient marketplaces of labor. Their software adds value to both agents performing the service (appointment scheduling, payment processing, marketing) and consumers (consistent quality and pricing; customer service; insurance; easy to order). It's obvious these companies are changing how local services work.
When I get into a cab, I always see a smartphone on the dash with Uber or Hailo installed (often both) next to the radio dispatch. I've asked several drivers about which they prefer, and they always sound agnostic. They don't care if the customer hailed from the street, booked on an app, or called the dispatcher (though some felt customers from the apps were better tippers).
It must be similar for home cleaners: they have a smartphone with some combination of booking services like Homejoy or Exec, and maybe get some customers from their own local marketing. Like the cab drivers, the goal is to maximize booked time at the highest average price point while avoiding double-booking. But they're agnostic - a customer is a customer. I wonder if it gets tricky to remember which t-shirt logo to wear when going to appointments.
What these services have in common is the structure of a network of laborers with some thin software wrapped around to manage and book appointments, some local operations to provide value like basic quality screening of agents and customer service for customers. From the consumer perspective, the services are fungible. As long as my ride is minimally safe, my house is cleaned, and I'm not paying too much, I don't care who is providing the service.
A key challenge for these companies is marketing -- the first to reach the consumer is the first to get their app on the phone / their cleaning subscription locked into their platform. (Side note: it's no wonder Rocket Internet is launching Helpling, a Homejoy clone, to snatch these customers before Homejoy can make it to Europe. It's their standard MO and is a reflection of the importance of first-mover marketing to the model).
Companies with large marketing channels have an opportunity to take market share here. Imagine if Google integrated booking an appointment and ordering a car into search. I ask Google for the services I need, and it connects me to a consistently priced, high quality agent to perform the service. As a consumer, I don't care what's happening behind the scenes to make the connection. So why pass the interested customer directly to a 3rd party vendor? The answer is the extra value these companies currently provide in hard-to-scale areas like customer service and screening of agents. Scaling local operations across all the cities you want to operate in is hard. Screening lots of candidates is hard.
But these challenges aren't insurmountable. Agents will continue to become unbundled from these services. For example, agents will have de-facto credentials by virtue of another company's screening processes (if you see a cleaner that worked at Homejoy, you can at least know they passed the Homejoy screening process). I can imagine some simple cross-platform credentialing happening organically when enough of these competing services exist.
As these thin layers of software continue to wrap around local providers and make the supply of labor more efficient and standardized, it'll become easier to offer 'store brands' of localized services. It could be the same agents and products, similar packaging, less expensive, a better purchasing experience, all with higher margin for the seller. In cases where there is more money from a house cleaning sale than a PPC click-through, it's a tempting value prop.
So will we see Google opening up cleaning services? I doubt it. Google likes being horizontal (they build platforms, they mostly don't sell widgets), and this would be a 'vertical integration' play. A better fit might be review aggregators like Yelp, Angie's List, or daily deal companies. A more 'out there' possibility would be Apple: they could install a 'booking app' as a default on their phones and blow out the market (ignoring the legal issues a la Microsoft and IE). When Apple has a local provider of the service with preferential margin, they could promote it in the app; when they don't, just fall back to Homejoy or Uber.