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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I launched Google Maps for mobile in 2005. In 2006, Eric Schmidt was worried that Yahoo Go was a killer app. My claim that Google Maps was the real killer app fell on deaf ears. :)
If Schmidt's worry about Yahoo Go led to Google's purchase of Android Inc. around the same time frame then I would say you were both right.
Things like this make me think that it's a shame humanity is duplicating all this work instead of collaborating to do it once. One of the awkward failures of capitalism, I guess. At least when your product is something physical you end up with twice as many outputs. When it's just data you just do the same work twice.
Monocultures are dangerous too.
People differ on what to measure and how. Competition gives us an opportunity to try something new and potentially better. Especially when there isn't a network effect (e.g. phone protocols).
Also, the cost of this mapping apparently isn't especially high.
I'm still wondering why Waze doesn't incorporate Google Maps data and Google Maps doesn't incorporate Waze traffic data? Or does this already happen since Google has owned Waze for a while now? If not, I find it strange for the two to continue to be silo'd.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can maps be a killer app?
It was pretty mindblowing when it came out, and was the first instance I recall encountering meaningful usage of AJAX.
I'm not trying to randomly snipe at Apple here, I just know very little about Apple Maps beyond the bad press its gotten and Apple's general software product competency weaknesses.
EDIT: Thanks for the responses, that's all pretty much the kind of thing I was wondering about
Is there a reason anyone uses Apple Maps, aside from wanting to avoid Google out of principle/privacy/monoculture concerns? To be clear, these are entirely legitimate reasons, but I was wondering if the product has any direct benefits for the user (which is a coherent subset of reasons given the modal users' level of concern about systemic issues). I'm not trying to randomly snipe at Apple here, I just know very litt…
Is there a reason anyone uses Apple Maps, aside from wanting to avoid Google out of principle/privacy/monoculture concerns? To be clear, these are entirely legitimate reasons, but I was wondering if the product has any direct benefits for the user (which is a coherent subset of reasons given the modal users' level of concern about systemic issues). I'm not trying to randomly snipe at Apple here, I just know very litt…
Google Maps is my pick for the coolest website on the internet. Truly a killer app.
"Google is creating data out of data ... It makes you wonder how long back Google was planning all of this—and what it’s planning next"
My guess is that they weren't planning it. Somebody decided to use their 20% time to learn TensorFlow and process the Street View imagery for fun, and that side project got promoted into Maps.
When I downloaded 10 years of church notice sheets, I was trying to get the lyrics of the songs in Chinese. I later realised that I could also find the most common song names, and then focus my Chinese-learning on those songs. Big data is all about gathering more data than you know what to do with, and figuring it all out as you go.
What an incredible post. I just love this guys blog, I wonder how long it took to research all of this. As a side note this gives me great confidence that Waymo will come out of the self driving car race in pole position.
Up to a point. At that point an autonomous system needs to be able to interpret and react to the physical world as it actually is at the moment as opposed to how it's supposed to be.