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Farewell, Google Maps

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#191

Post by IkmoIkmo »

This is pretty insane, I think it's about time that tech companies start to honour longer-term contracts and give more notice, even on their hobbyist service offerings.

I mean, imagine a local grocery store who's rent would go up by 28x, 1 month notice. Or his procurement costs? That means literal bankruptcy or closing down his shop, virtually overnight. That's just not okay, not after years and years of service. You need to honour contracts for at least a year at a time and give notice. You can give two months notice on a 5% price hike, not a 3000% one.

Few other businesses operate in this manner, and those that do we tend to call shady, exploitative, inconsiderate etc.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#192

Post by FireBeyond »

cannonedhamster wrote: post #129
ajross wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable . I mean, there's a real cry-me-a-river aspect here. No one has a Google-granted fundamental right to mapping. It's a free product Google released to drive traffic to their own offerings, and which they happen to make available for free for a lot of purposes. As it turns out, y…

The article said nothing about making it free, it said that the costs, which were previously in line with competitors, increased by very, very large amounts without any perceived increase in value. Then they looked at options which were commercial offerings which cost dramatically less. They are paying for the service, it's not subsidized or free. It's like you didn't read any of the article.

Sounds like a great opportunity for their competitors, then!

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#193

Post by hatchoo »

Wow! I've recently uploaded all my old photos to Google photos to take advantage of the free offering. I guess I should prepare myself for the time they start charging for it.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#194

Post by writepub »

fenwick67 wrote: post #172
writepub wrote: post #159

This is bad design on the OP's part. I hail from hardware where, for instance, Apple chooses 3 providers for it's SSDs (SanDisk, Samsung, Intel, ...) to shield itself from price gouging, supply issues with any single party, business concerns, etc.. However, I routinely see entire companies based on single providers despite choice existing in the marketplace. The OP should have designed their service around multiple m…

SSDs all have standard interfaces (SATA or whatever), so you can easily swap them out. Conversely, Google Maps doesn't let you implement your own pan/zoom layer on top of their maps API, you have to use their APIs. Yes you could create a compatibility layer for this, but really that seems like a lot of pre-work for something so unforeseen.

Depending on the SKUs of parts used, a single product (say MacBook pro 128GB ) may have multiple SKUs, i.e. versions of the underlying board, to accommodate for different parts and their dependencies.

If you're under the assumption that Apple and Co don't spend the effort in abstracting out dependencies on their hardware, your deeply mistaken.

A significant portion of engineering in hardware circles is spent in this effort

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#195

Post by IkmoIkmo »

bflesch wrote: post #128
Symbiote wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you miss where they wrote "a developing country"? There are places where a software developer's good salary is $10,000 a year. Google doesn't need to provide a service in that country, but it's understandable that a 20× increase is going to hit harder than in a wealthy country.

No I did not miss it. Also I'm based in a neighboring country to Poland. The salary you mentioned won't get you a software developer anywhere in the EU. I am only pointing out that entrepreneurs need to rethink their business models if they are hit by this price increase, as this is a very strong indication they are not working on a healthy, high-margin business.

A 20-30x increase in costs being a problem for your business isn't indicative of being in an unhealthy low-margin business per se, quite the opposite. If you were operating in a 95% profit margin industry, which is an insanely generous hypothetical, increasing the 5% cost component by 20-30x would destroy you overnight.

This is what happened to OP, and they were able to switch to haf a dozen competitors at a fraction of the price with almost equivalent service offerings for their use-case. The notion they have a fundamentally unworkable business model doesn't apply here.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#196

Post by chrischen »

ericd wrote: post #68
6cd6beb wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. ianal and all that, but isn't somewhere antitrust- or monopoly- adjacent? I know if walmart moved into a new city and started giving away hardware for free, then waited until all the local hardware stores had been shut down for 10 mont…

IANAL either, but yeah, the practice you're describing, using revenues from other parts of a business to subsidize the areas it wants to compete hard in until the competitors are dead, is typically known as "predatory pricing", which is illegal. IIRC, Standard Oil was a big user of that playbook. I don't know if this qualifies, and I don't know how much appetite there is for prosecuting Google for offering useful thi…

Isn't this done all the time by Google though? They offer so many services for free, such as the consumer version of Google Maps, or YouTube (in the early days before ads)?

Not to mention Internet.org from Facebook, TOM's (free) shoes in Africa.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#197

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#198

Post by pwg »

martin1975 wrote: post #92

Google Maps strength is largely due in part to their surveying of roads with those funky looking vehicles I think most of us have seen. If one were to develop an app that could use anyone's GPS to do the same as what Google is paying money for... it could pose a real threat to them. A "crowdsourced" map of sorts..

Look into OpenStreetCam: https://openstreetcam.org/

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#199

Post by CodeWriter23 »

snarf21 wrote: post #166
kirchhoff wrote: post #45

It's as much as a 28x increase in price. For Street View imagery, the cost has gone from $0.5 per 1000 views to $14 / 1000. Unlike with maps, Street View lacks a real alternative. I'm seeing my own costs, for a site which I run on my own, rise from $1,500 / month to around $30,000 / month. Their rationale is essentially that they did not want commercial users abusing their free tier. Before this change, they had been…

I think there is a different reason for charging for StreetView. The need to make their money back and quick. Self driving cars will have cameras that will give reasonable results for a lot of use cases (maybe not 360 but who cares). It is also a potential combo monetization strategy for the autonomous vendor.

The standard license prohibits use in autonomous vehicles. Para 2.e https://maps.google.com/help/terms_maps.html

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#200

Post by emodendroket »

laGrenouille wrote: post #182
ajross wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable . I mean, there's a real cry-me-a-river aspect here. No one has a Google-granted fundamental right to mapping. It's a free product Google released to drive traffic to their own offerings, and which they happen to make available for free for a lot of purposes. As it turns out, y…

The problem isn’t that Google wants to charge for a service. The issue is that they offered it for years for free or below cost effectively price gouging any competition. Now, with no alternatives they jack up the price. Classic monopolistic and anticompetitive behaviour.

Essentially the Google Reader effect, right? Where killing their offering basically killed the entire medium.
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