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Farewell, Google Maps

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#81

Post by jiveturkey »

zackmorris wrote: post #20
ericd wrote: post #7

"Sudden change of policy by Google, which is directed specifically at startups (as smaller web sites should largely remain below even the new lower thresholds), is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor. In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick. For ex…

Is there something like Amazon or Google shopping with a list of prices for all products through time? Kind of like the Wayback Machine (archive.org) but for products. Maybe having a searchable historical database of everything imaginable and their prices would keep companies honest and prevent price gouging.

camelcamelcamel (.com)

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#82

Post by matt4077 »

supernova87a wrote: post #43
RestlessMind wrote: post #21

> Importantly, prices are the same from US to the Africa, despite the fact that revenue generation is vastly different in most developed countries compared to the others. This can be understood in two ways: 1. Cost of serving is the same from US to Africa (datacenters, network bandwidth, engineering etc), so prices are same 2. If #1 results in less adoption from developing countries, it is okay because they are not t…

Yeah, if Google had differential pricing for something that costs them the same to produce, I'm sure you would soon find innovative middlemen who make it their business to source the Maps from lower cost priced countries to higher ones. Just like travel agents or passengers find ways to take cheaper flights from countries or city pairs that airlines price differently to help capture more market, even though it doesn'…

Any such middlemen would certainly be breaking the terms of their contract with google, and possibly copyright law.

If they were willing and able to do so, they could already make a fortune by reselling Google Maps data.

Since that does not happen, I have doubts regarding your scenario.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#83

Post by spapas82 »

linsomniac wrote: post #65

I'm just finishing spinning up OpenStreetMap servers in EC2 as one of the last stages of our testing, and they look great. We almost went with Mapbox, which is probably a pretty good alternative. But as part of that move I decided to try OSM tiles and I had them up and running in an afternoon via a docker image, created an Ansible role for deploying virtual machines that evening, and had tiles for our region built th…

I totally recommend hosting your own tile-server using open street map if you have the resources. Creating your own tile-server is not as difficult as it may sound however it is really resource intensive, especially if you want to cover large areas. For a single EU country it shouldn't be that resource intensive.

I have set it up on a Centos 7 server using more or less the instructions from here https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04... (yes they are for Ubuntu but you'll get the idea) and everything works great. Even if you don't really need it, I recommend trying it to understand how it works; it has some very intuitive ideas.

Beyond the tile server I am also proposing GeoServer (http://geoserver.org) for hosting the geo points on the maps (it can integrate with PostGIS and various other datasources and output the geo points in various different formats). You can then use Leaflet (https://leafletjs.com) to actually display the map and points!

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#84

Post by alrex021 »

bflesch wrote: post #71
alrex021 wrote: post #44

In our own experience, we pleaded the fact that those dollar figures are just beyond workable if you consider the fact that we come from a developing country and we're faced with ~20x jump. I.e. it heavily messes with the unit economics. The Google representative actually laughed in our face (via Hangout).

If you get into trouble with your unit economics given such a raise, then you really need to think about your business model. How much value is your business really creating ON TOP of the maps? I don't want to be snarky, but I think many businesses don't think enough about this issue of value creation.

A 20x jump on the monthly charge, especially in lower margin business, will hurt whichever way you look at it, IMHO.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#85

Post by kirbypineapple »

linsomniac wrote: post #65

I'm just finishing spinning up OpenStreetMap servers in EC2 as one of the last stages of our testing, and they look great. We almost went with Mapbox, which is probably a pretty good alternative. But as part of that move I decided to try OSM tiles and I had them up and running in an afternoon via a docker image, created an Ansible role for deploying virtual machines that evening, and had tiles for our region built th…

How does Mapbox stack up against what you've built? Does Mapbox provide any advantages or is are the two not very comparable? How difficult would it be to spin up a Mapbox competitor?

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#86

Post by megous »

megous wrote: post #75

> Google Maps is objectively the best product on its market, in many regards positioned light years ahead of its competitors. No. Google maps is an absolute, washed out turd style wise. We have much better local competitor. Compare this: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.081478,14.4272906,13z https://mapy.cz/zakladni?x=14.4068130&y=50.0892746&z=13 You can try various zoom levels, and mapy.cz is always better. Much more…

I could navigate the city with a map printed even at that zoom level, but good luck trying to do that with google maps.

That's the single most important point for the map.

I didn't consciously try to compare the maps before, but looking at the differences now, google maps seem thoughtless and completely random at what is highlighted, how parts of the city are named (some use names, some numbers, for no reason), what parts are shown and what are not.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#87

Post by schoen »

wyldfire wrote: post #3

> OpenStreetMap is not supposed to be directly used by commercial sites. Not if I understand their terms correctly [1] [2]. Maybe there's a distinction between the terms of the map data itself and the software published to interact with it? [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright [2] https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/summary/

I felt like the original article's way of phrasing this is slightly misleading, maybe based on confusion on the author's part. As other commenters here have made clear, OSM specifically intends to allow commercial and other downstream uses, but you have to host the tiles yourself or pay someone else to host them. That's certainly different from other services and may involve much more up-front effort and infrastructure, but it absolutely intends to create a meaningful option for mapping tools that can be used in commercial sites.

(Having said this, when I once had to do a one-off mapping project for a colleague, I found the OSM tools pretty daunting as a beginner, even though I appreciated how they'd reward effort with customizability and extensibility. I could certainly imagine that a lot of sites wouldn't be prepared to set up this toolset, and I realize that OSM doesn't provide a simple drop-in replacement for Google Maps that can be used by commercial sites.)

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#88

Post by UncleEntity »

I'm kind of unclear on what value they add above just using Google Maps to find a pharmacy?

If all they do is repackage Google's data then I don't see Google as being particularly evil in this case, why should they give "the competition" a free ride?

I have to guess they do add something (inventory data maybe?) to make it worthy of going to their website though.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#89

Post by C7H8N4O2 »

ericd wrote: post #7

"Sudden change of policy by Google, which is directed specifically at startups (as smaller web sites should largely remain below even the new lower thresholds), is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor. In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick. For ex…

> In the case of maps, there weren't many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen/profit potential out of the field with their excellent free offerings.

There was a related discussion[0] on HN a few weeks ago that I found enlightening. Commentator ucaetano's phrasing of the strategy was "create a desert of profitability around you". The discussion of moats vs deserts found here [1] is also useful.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17047348 "Laws of Tech Economics: Commoditize Your Complement"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17048492

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#90

Post by ericd »

bflesch wrote: post #71
alrex021 wrote: post #44

In our own experience, we pleaded the fact that those dollar figures are just beyond workable if you consider the fact that we come from a developing country and we're faced with ~20x jump. I.e. it heavily messes with the unit economics. The Google representative actually laughed in our face (via Hangout).

If you get into trouble with your unit economics given such a raise, then you really need to think about your business model. How much value is your business really creating ON TOP of the maps? I don't want to be snarky, but I think many businesses don't think enough about this issue of value creation.

If you're a consumer business with low margins but very high scale, this is a killer. Before, you could be providing value to a lot of people at a low price point (or free/ad supported). This makes ad-supported much, much harder.
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