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Google Maps' Moat

justinobeirne.com

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Re: Google Maps' Moat

#61

Post by dljsjr »

spaceflunky wrote: post #45
ajkjk wrote: post #9

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.

This is the wrong way to think about things. Competition is good. If it weren't for the need to compete, would Google have spent billions on innovations like Street View, Satellite imagery, Google Earth, etc. Or would they have just said, "MapQuest has won the internet maps game, let's just let MapQuest do their own thing. No use in doing the same work twice,"

I think you slightly missed the parent comment's point, which is not that they should have walked away but rather have said "man, we really want better maps and imaging for navigation, MapQuest has a great head start, we should work with them to make it even better". I'm not sure what economic model encourages that sort of behavior, though.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#62

Post by ucaetano »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #50
ucaetano wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if everyone shared data, they could compete on the UX Why? Google seems to have a gigantic advantage in data, which is highly valuable. Why would they give up that advantage, if they spent millions, if not billions, of dollars creating it? And what would be the incentive to create such data if there's no economic gain from it?

>And what would be the incentive to create such data if there's no economic gain from it? // If the data is useful then there is an _economic_ gain, just not necessarily a profit. If you meant "if there's no profit from it" then it was spoken like a true capitalist. Why do anything if you're not going to be paid for it. Why visit your mum in hospital? Why give money to the homeless for food? Why create software for o…

??

Would you invest your retirement savings into a company that plans to return no profit by mapping the world and releasing the data for free?

I thought so.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#63

Post by mastax »

Great article, but it has me thinking: what is holding Apple back?

My ideas:

- Apple is just a few years behind; they launched a decade later. Come back in 3 years and they'll be close to parity.

- Apple only needs Maps to be good enough to avoid PR disaster, since they need a reasonable default on iOS. On the other hand Google needs to be good enough to beat competitors since they want to make money on traffic, usage data, and the Maps API.

- Google's use of reCAPTCHA gives it a huge edge over competitors in mass image classification.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#64

Post by pbhjpbhj »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #29

tl;dr - Google Maps has buildings and Areas of Interest (streets with more businesses) based on satellite & street view data. "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 si…

I reckon Google's 3D building designer, that allowed people to plot buildings and place them on the map was used to train an AI to create buildings from features ... maybe. The page says satellite data, matched with street level, but I often see planes flying over my UK city and imagine they could do radar or similar tracking to match with visual data.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#65

Post by mythrwy »

jld wrote: post #7

Google Maps is my pick for the coolest website on the internet. Truly a killer app.

Well said. It kills an old Core2 laptop I have. Literally crashes Linux.

My fault of course for using that laptop, but sometimes I forget because it basically works for most other things.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#66

Post by jurjenh »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #46

When can we get a flight simulator using Google Maps data? It doesn't need the fidelity of data for names of streets, places, etc. just the imagery. If they can extrapolate building details like bay windows, then they should be able to model entire areas from enough heights and angles to represent it much better than what I've seen in flight simulators for personal use (at least last I looked).

Didn't google earth have exactly this in the early days? I can't remember exact details, but pretty sure it was an easter egg - ctrl + alt + a would launch it.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#67

Post by pbhjpbhj »

londons_explore wrote: post #38
EGreg wrote: post #32

These building footprints, complete with height detail, are algorithmically created by taking aerial imagery and using computer vision techniques to render the building shapes. I could have guessed that before the punchline. And it's not that difficult to add for a company with tens of billions in cash. What are you doing, Apple? Fix your OS and Maps!

You need aerial imagery from different angles. Thats surprisingly hard to buy from imagery providers, because most of them only want to point their cameras directly downwards.

Lenses don't work that way, surely. Any image taken directly downwards will include angled elements offset at a greater angle away from the centre line. Also, how hard is it to add an extra camera or two if you're already flying over, sure double/triple the data but that must be relatively easy to handle once you have the infrastructure for image handling and such.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#68

Post by bobdole1234 »

mastax wrote: post #63

Great article, but it has me thinking: what is holding Apple back? My ideas: - Apple is just a few years behind; they launched a decade later. Come back in 3 years and they'll be close to parity. - Apple only needs Maps to be good enough to avoid PR disaster, since they need a reasonable default on iOS. On the other hand Google needs to be good enough to beat competitors since they want to make money on traffic, usag…

About 3GW of computing power. No really.

Apple lacks the raw computing capacity to be able to pull this off, even if they had the algorithms and data already.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#69

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ucaetano wrote: post #62
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And what would be the incentive to create such data if there's no economic gain from it? // If the data is useful then there is an _economic_ gain, just not necessarily a profit. If you meant "if there's no profit from it" then it was spoken like a true capitalist. Why do anything if you're not going to be paid for it. Why visit your mum in hospital? Why give money to the homeless for food? Why create software for o…

?? Would you invest your retirement savings into a company that plans to return no profit by mapping the world and releasing the data for free? I thought so.

Well, I'd invest my time.

I've worked on OSM, AFAIK I've got nothing back from having done so other than learning a little about maps.

Your position is flawed, because you're focussing on a single element of a social system. If I invest in mapping, it doesn't remove resources, it improves them for everyone. Without the waste of resources of solely profit-driven activity then we have ample resources to meet basic needs and develop technologically too.

No, I don't yet know how such a system can work. I've been working on it ... transition is the biggest problem and the one I've been addressing. At some point I hope it will benefit us all as a species - probably at a financial loss to me and many others.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#70

Post by bschwindHN »

Maybe all those smart engineers could put their heads together and figure out how to not zoom into street view when I want to view a picture on a review. And maybe return me to where I was in the review list instead of taking me back to the top level business information. What a feat of engineering that would be.
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