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Google Maps' Moat

justinobeirne.com

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Re: Google Maps' Moat

#171

Post by djsumdog »

encoderer wrote: post #43

I recently switched to Apple maps primary for car play after 10+ years. I haven’t looked back. Building outlines are not much of a moat for me.

I was thinking the same thing of "who cares."

I take the train and walk a lot more than I drive. I need street names, and GMaps have made them harder and harder to see for years:

https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps/

I gotta pinch zoom all the way in, jiggle the map around a bunch, just to see street names. It's annoying as fuck since it's the most important thing on the map when walking in a city to orientate yourself (because we all know those digital compasses are garbage).

I should really just carry a magnetic compass on my key chain again.

I really miss the classic maps interface. More streets, more relevant detail and much much faster. Classic maps that used the whole screen without the white area on the left, and the vector rendering tech would have been way better than their crappy web interface now.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#172

Post by golfer »

klodolph wrote: post #135
irrational wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem for Apple is why would anyone want to use "good enough" when the alternatives are better, free, and easily available?

I don't understand why this would be a problem. Apple Maps is not competing with Google Maps. Apple Maps is simply there so Apple can provide turn-by-turn navigation out of the box without paying Google for it. The fact that Google Maps is free to consumers is irrelevant, because it's not free for Apple to bundle with iOS.

> because it's not free for Apple to bundle with iOS

Would love to see a citation for that. Wouldn't Google want to boost maps usage on iOS?

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#173

Post by dillondoyle »

taneq wrote: post #121
canoebuilder wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vehicle should be using its maps as a general guide, not as some kind of ground truth. Not to sound like a jerk, but I would be shocked if there were anyone working on this that was not pursuing things in this way. It just seems kind of obvious that you can't have some big hunk of metal rolling around, following some abstracted track from a map, without "looking" where it is going.

And yet we have Waymo building 2cm-resolution maps and not operating outside of mapped areas, and (more scarily) Tesla geotagging false positives where Autopilot misidentifies some roadside feature and panic brakes.

If all the cars are always mapping and collecting data will maps ever be out of date?

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#174

Post by killjoywashere »

Pxtl wrote: post #124
Stratoscope wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all true, but of course there will always be a few missing features that seem so obvious and useful that you wonder why they still don't have them. For me it's one or two announcements of the actual destination address at the end of the drive. If it's not an address I'm familiar with and not a business with a sign out front, by the time I get there I've usually forgotten the street number! But when I arrive a…

For me the problem with Google Maps is how appallingly badly it fails when things go wrong. The offline mode is prone to silently getting locked in "rerouting" and just completely leaving me hanging for 10 minutes at a time. And if it loses gps signal, it doesn't seem to think the driver needs to know about this. A Silent failure is terrible.

I was driving once, with a Google Maps engineer giving directions. We had flown thousands of miles to visit a place, which we had visited the day before. During the second drive over, from the hotel, he expounded on the awesomeness of Maps (which is truly awesome, don't get me wrong) right up until his phone said "Your destination is on the left" and all we had was a fence with a grass field on the other side. We were looking for a complex of buildings we had seen before, so this was clearly not correct.

To his credit, he immediately started thinking through what had gone wrong, but it was so awesome to be a witness to that moment.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#175

Post by noblethrasher »

iClaudiusX wrote: post #73
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…

Apple had a huge head start with Siri but has been surpassed quite handily by Google and Amazon for some time now. I'm not sure we can simply rely on the passage of time for Apple to improve these large projects.

On the other hand, Google had a huge head start in developing robust voice recognition with GOOG-411. Whereas Alexa and Siri are more or less at parity, from what I've heard.

But, I own neither an Echo, nor an Android, and I'm still running iOS 6 on an iPhone 4S.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#176

Post by mark-r »

ancarda wrote: post #161
dvt wrote: post #31

I accidentally used Apple Maps once as I was going to a (new) doctor's office. I realized I was using Apple maps halfway through my drive and I joked with myself that it wouldn't bring me to the right place. I was heading to a fairly large medical complex in Orange County (CA) and I sort-of had an idea of where I was going anyway, but boy, was I wrong. According to Apple maps, the doctor's office was literally in the…

I was using Apple Maps a few weeks ago, and wanted to get something to eat. I saw a place called “Shake Shack” and decided to go there. Not only did it not exist, I checked online, there has never been a Shake Shack in my town, there’s only a handful in my country. How Apple Maps got that wrong, I honestly don’t know. Where did the data come from, and why is it that incorrect? I reported it, and it’s since been remov…

Google's not infallible either. I was looking at a map and noticed that it labelled a restaurant called OPH in Chanhassen, MN. The Original Pancake House is one of my favorite restaurants and is sometimes abbreviated OPH, so I was intrigued. Going to the street view you can see that it's a purely residential area with a park and a pool and no restaurant in sight. Try it for yourself.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#177

Post by kevinchen »

wutbrodo wrote: post #25

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…

Apple Maps, OSM, etc are needed because even weak competition forces Google Maps to keep improving

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#178

Post by ucaetano »

AnodyneComplex wrote: post #71
ucaetano wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

?? 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.

This seems to be attacking a strawman. The original comment was bemoaning the duplicated effort instead of cooperation amongst parties. If you had a single company, you wouldn't have 10 teams doing the exact same job. The competition here isn't fruitful because so much of the work is shared. Competition is more effective when there is a diversity of approaches.

And how many approaches do you think there are in mapping? Street View, satellite, 3D modeling from airplane flights, manual mapping, etc. These are all different approaches being used more or less by all players.

Think about how mapping was done before Google. Competition is exactly why we have Google Maps, and why Google Maps is continuously improving, instead of just sitting on its advantage.

Not only competition here has been extremely fruitful, it has made maps freely available to consumers.

Do you remember how much the TomTom app used to cost?

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#179

Post by faebi »

sharpercoder wrote: post #6

Google maps is improving since the day I first saw it - that must have been around 2003 or so. The improvement on the data is phenomenal if you look at it over then past 10+ years; The amount of times I blindly trust GM to go somewhere increase every year. I suspect the edgecases will be solved slowly, like navigating to a shop inside a mall, a market stall, an ad-hoc gathering, a planned building, et cetera. Typing…

My best experience with google maps was actually finding a restaurant inside of Kyoto or Tokyo mainstation. Google maps navigated me perfectly across all floors and knew all stairs I had to take.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#180

Post by turtlebits »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #105
turtlebits wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google maps absolutely obliterates my battery life (iPhone 6S+). Last time I travelled it I was down to 40% at noon.

I've had the same experience, but is it Maps, or the continual use of GPS?

I'm pretty sure it's maps- could be a buggy version. IME Apple maps navigation causes minimal battery drain.
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