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Farewell, Google Maps

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#221

Post by matwood »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #199
snarf21 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the comment you replied to was saying that StreetView will soon be commodotized, so they need to make the money back now.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#222

Post by ericd »

chrischen wrote: post #196
ericd wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does sound a lot like it, but I don't know if there's some other element you have to do to make it engaging in predatory pricing, or if there's just been no will to prosecute them yet. The FTC seems like it's been relatively lax on antitrust recently, so I could believe it's just the latter. Or maybe it's just the remnants of the free pass that governments gave the early internet, and we'll start seeing more.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#223

Post by TheKarateKid »

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…

If they were concerned about abuse from free tiers, there's much better ways to handle it than this. It's Google we're talking about.

Also, it's a lame excuse because this affects paid users such as yourself who have nothing to do with the abuse.

In Google's defense, a hobby project wouldn't need 750k requests a month. At that point it's more than a hobby. But, the 28k limit is low.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#224

Post by TheKarateKid »

magicalist wrote: post #179
bhhaskin wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the problem. When Google first launched Maps it was free and they ran all of the other competition out of business. Now that all their competition are dead they want to charge for it. If that doesn't scream antitrust I don't know what else does. Google has grown maps using pretty shady tactics. Their data is only so good due to mining data from all the Android users and I bet Street View has a lot of governme…

> When Google first launched Maps it was free and they ran all of the other competition out of business. Now that all their competition are dead they want to charge for it. Were there any significant competing maps APIs for the web in 2005? There may have been (and you seem so certain I'm sure you could name them all :P), but it's crazy to claim that there aren't far more competitors in the last 5 years than there we…

> Were there any significant competing maps APIs for the web in 2005?

Don't forget about services beyond providing Maps APIs. Google Maps basically killed the need for a standalone GPS purchase (Garmin/TomTom) as well as purchasing upgraded maps for existing GPS systems, including those built into a car.

Am I complaining? No, but Google gave away for free something that once would've been hundreds of dollars in software. I'm surprised TomTom and Garmin weren't put out of business yet from it, but they survived on their niche products.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#225

Post by skybrian »

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…

What do you think about startups that give away webviews for free?

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#226

Post by vocatus_gate »

__jal wrote: post #127

Google doesn't care about you or whatever you're building, unless you are building something that might threaten them. You would be well-advised to reciprocate. To the extent that third-party services are essential to your survival, making efforts to bring it in-house, get long-term contracts, have backup providers, etc. is simply prudent. Dependency is control. If you build your business in someone else's sandbox, i…

This is why I oppose "cloud services" at all points unless it's absolutely something we can't do ourselves. The second you start relying on another business for a critical service, you've ceded control of your operation. In house is more work, but worth it in the long run.

Someone you pay to care about your stuff will never care about it as much as someone who works and maintains it themselves.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#228

Post by Vendan »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #170
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…

Google did something similar with Stackdriver logging, where they went from a generous free tier to an insanely expensive $.50/Gb in roughly 2-3 months. Very annoying. Especially because by default every GCP service logs a bunch of crap to Stackdriver. Our log cost was going to be as high as our compute cost.

They've got easy to use exclusions that eliminate the cost if you don't want the logs (and can be pretty picky about what to exclude, even to the point of doing percentage exclusions) and they announced it in advance and pushed the date back a few times.

My issue is with devs that write software that spits out a couple of gigs an hour and refuse to trim it down or exclude things.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#229

Post by martimarkov »

ajross wrote: post #201
laGrenouille wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Uh... the linked article compared 8 different competitors on various metrics. There are reasonable ways to disagree with Google's policy here, but "no alternatives" and "monopolistic" are just laughably silly.

I’d disagree a bit. There are competitors but the quality and the service is not on the same level. Google have made it hard to compete so that they stay in the leadership position. More importantly google maps “owns” more market share than all of them combined so it is kinda a monopoly.

I might not have explained my point well but I do think you get what I’m saying.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#230

Post by wongarsu »

beerlord wrote: post #157
majewsky wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just as in favor of GDPR as you, but I shall reserve my cheers for when the first actual GPDR fines are handed out. For now, I'm mostly seeing annoyed SMEs on one side who go to ridiculous lengths to be compliant in the face of missing precedents. And on the other side, big internet corps are implementing joke consent pages with tons of dark patterns that clearly go against the spirit of the regulation. I think t…

I'm not really a fan of GDPR actually. I think advertising has its place, and the more targeted it is, the better the results for everyone. The worst thing that people can point to that this kind of advertising has caused is fake news on Facebook, which is more of a problem with America's campaign financing (non)restrictions than anything (and probably the fact that the candidate who used it was quite anti-establishm…

>Why can't I just pay the website that as a microtransaction directly?

There have been multiple attempts at offering that. The most prominent is probably the current iteration of flattr [1], but it seems really hard to get people excited for that model which in turn means it isn't worth the hassle of signing up for content creators.

Patreon is probably the closest to a working model, but that means a few people have to really love your service.

1: https://flattr.com/

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