If your product depends on another companies' product, it isn't your product.
Farewell, Google Maps
421–430 of 545 posts
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#422Earlier 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.
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There are reasonable ways to disagree with Microsoft's policy here, but "no alternatives" and "monopolistic" are just laughably silly.
Your comment completely disregarded the possibility that there's a dominant market position. Which there is. It is hard to compete with free. Ask e.g. TomTom or Microsoft.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#423Could this be a direct reaction to recent EU fines?
No. I started getting warnings about this at least 2-3 months ago.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service. It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable. They raise prices rapidly to see…
> It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable. Is the marginal cost of serving extra users really a big part of Google's costs? Bandwidth is cheap; I would have expected that building and updating the map data was the expensive part.
After all, they've long done away with the tile servers of the past and the giant render farms to make the millions of tiles at 20 different zoom levels to cover the earth. Now it's in browser rendered vector graphics.
Unless the vector information is getting much more expensive (shouldn't be, they own Waze and GMaps mobile products to make their own maps from user data), the cost of running GMaps should be going down on a per user bases, not up.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#425"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.
Diane Greene must be trying to build a profitable operation.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#426I work for a startup that has mapping/routing as one of its core needs - about a year or two ago we decided that our reliance on Google's mapping APIs was too great and decided to work on having a switchable backup provider in case something like this should ever happen. With auto complete especially, we would have had a 10-20x increase in pricing (and this is with an 'enterprise' plan pricing). As the article says,…
I'm curious about how the conversations between Google and customers went about this change. I'm finding it really odd Google would just fuck their customers over this way. They must have known how it affects startups in particular. What were the conversations with Google like? Just one-sided "This is the new price, take it or leave it!"? Or something else?
> I'm finding it really odd Google would just fuck their customers over this way.
Why is it odd?
If you're on a free tier, you're not really a 'customer', just a user.
If you're a 'startup' you probably have funding. If not, you're not the sort of 'startup' that will fit in their calculations.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#427I 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…
> On top of that people finally receive proper support from google once significant sums are involved.
Will they? If my company is now paying $2k/month (where before it was under a free tier) am I really any more likely to get 'proper support' from google? $2k/month is not even a rounding error on a rounding error for google, and will be even less so if all the other users are also paying $2k/month as well.
It would be nice to think that, and I'll change my tune when I see it, but even after working with people who were paying for google cloud platform, I didn't think they we got terribly good support.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I've experienced the frustration of having a formerly free service develop paid tiers (and policies that put me in those tiers), of all the changes a software service can make, this is the one that frustrates me the least, or at any rate less than: * shutting down the service entirely because the user base never grew into customers who actually valued the service * changing your terms of service to forbid an ac…
>A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service. See this is the important thing. Sustainable. People and companies use these free services that take quite a bit of work to maintain and then when the company decides it needs…
> People lost their damn minds when Netflix increased prices a year or two ago and I'm like "erm, I get way more value out of this than cable and it's a tenth the price, shut up".
For your analogy to work you would need to say you are content with Netflix raising their prices >10x (no longer a 10th of cable) because that is what Google just did with their pricing.
Most people I know who stream (ok all people I know) get way more value out of streaming than cable. What is your line on fair pricing for streaming compared to cable, as the service has obvious value to the user?
I don't think anyone, here of all places, would suggest a product requiring engineers and infrastructure be free for commercial use and that the company shouldn't recoup costs.
The good news is, like streaming services, there is competition and pricing will work itself out in the market (assuming no collusion :P)
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#429Has everyone been using google maps on 'internal only' projects? Their TOS has (AFAIK) never allowed free usage for intranet-style systems, only those which would be free and open to the public.
Trying to look at pricing for internal use, it was always insane (starting at $10k/year, IIRC). The price change may make it more cost effective for small internal use cases, at the expense of open/free/public use.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, that's cool for you. But you are a relative newcomer here, at least your handle is (yes, pot, meet kettle -- but I've been here 9 years and quite a few people know that) and reputation, merit of the info, etc matters to quite a lot of the members here. It matters in part because truth matters to a lot of people here. Actual reality matters to a lot of people here. It's a bunch of pedants. And if you want to mak…
There is literally no reason to ever us Imanal. Ever. It's a stupid unnecessary disclaimer that dates back to the 90s. My point was I can literally give terrible legal advice, claim to be a lawyer and their will be zero issues. The disclaimer isn't necessary
It's not [only (in some people's view)?] to avoid liability, it's to give the reader a warning that whilst the writer is convinced of the situation they don't have legal training, the writer recognises the complexity of the law and that due to that complexity their assessment may be flawed.
It's like giving a restaurant recommendation second-hand, "but I've never eaten there". Or with tech, "but I've never done it".
With people I know I disclaim _social_ liability with "this is not legal advice" -- it's not for legal reasons, it's to say please ask a lawyer before you rely on this for something serious, don't blame me you need to check for yourself.
You could call it manners.