311–320 of 545 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which most likely meant the startup was a feature or a product, not a company with a viable business model.
Gmail is free. Does that mean email service is not a product? Why does fastmail exist?
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…
Please contact the US Department of Justice and let them know about how the price increase is affecting you in regards to Street View. They seemed to buy into my reasoning that Google has effectively made sure that they won't have any Street View competition by artificially keeping prices low for years. The more people that complain, the sooner the DOJ will probably take action. For European users I recommend complai…
I think it is positive that google finally reaches a sane price point with maps. As the comparison in the blog post shows, the whole market of map providers looked at what gmaps is charging and kind of went along with a price in the same category. The higher price allows them to actually get paid for the value they provide to various startups, which - as they pointed out in the blog post - would not exist without the…
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…
> we would be wary on taking free Google Analytics for granted It is not free. Your users pay for that with their privacy and Google gets your user's browsing history for free. It is unfair and you should not have used it in the first place.
I have refused to use dozens of service which required me to click pictures to prove that "I am not a robot" and sent the service provider an email informing them of my decision. I would urge everyone to do the same.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies with deep pockets trying and failing to gain a meaningful share in a market is more proof of a monopoly or other anti-competitive behavior, not less.
Could you point to this supposed behavior? Price and quality are, in themselves, not anticompetitive.
Anyone can use Leaflet together with OpenStreetMap for free* for heavy commercial purposes[0] if you make your own mirror/render of OSM tiles. Also simple reverse proxy cache[1] can keep public servers usage acceptable. Styles can be also modified at render stage, e.g. [2].
*The cost is only your one time setup work and then any monthly hosting bill.
I encourage anyone to prefer these open alternatives and of course donate money, time or hosting to help develop them.
[0] https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/4669/can-i-use-open...
Why not host you own OSM data for Poland and Germany? Just reduce the detail level and unneeded layers and deliver vector tiles. This way you are the master of your own destiny and bear (most) of the true cost of your service without any middlemen to charge usurious tolls. Then just make an annual token donation to OSM for their data services and you are done.
That email is fake: they have forged the screenshot. In the first paragraph you can clearly see how the typeface changes to something different (starting with "enterprise-grade") Compare these two "g": https://i.imgur.com/8Ja6pl2.png I've archived the post in case they decide to fix their "mistake". https://archive.is/w2swh
Couldn't that be subpixel anti-aliasing? Besides that, there's nothing difficult to believe about that experience with google. And besides THAT, there's a far more trivial method of 'forging' an email - using the devtools to modify the DOM. No need to bust out photoshop at all. Your accusation makes no sense and is based on almost nothing.
DOM manipulation, of course. But not everybody knows about it. So most people default to Photoshop, which is what these people did.
This email is FORGED, and I'd like to know why.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a startup needs a giant system of subsidized roads for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable. You see where this argument leads to?
Is Google infrastructure now? Should we fund Google with tax money? Nationalize it?