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Farewell, Google Maps

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#461

Post by bad_user »

ryanmercer wrote: post #451
chrisan wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

>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. Netflix raised their prices what they felt they needed to. Google raised their prices what they felt they needed to. If people don't like it they're more than welcome to go to the competition... which in both cases generally has inf…

Your analogies make no sense.

We’re talking of Google Maps the platform and its B2B offering whereas Netflix, cable and phone companies are services for consumers with fixed and reasonable consumer-level monthly subscriptions.

If you haven’t built an app on top of Google Maps, then you pretty much have no idea how much it costs and have zero valuable input you can give.

Also, this isn’t the first time Google is doing this bait and switch. They did it before with App Engine as well, first fooling early adopters in order to gather popularity and then raising prices enough that it made plenty of startups to move off the platform.

Along with other blunders in their products, it makes one wonder how anyone can trust any of their offerings long term.

Too bad the US has lost its anti-trust teeth btw, because what Google is doing is to subsidize its offerings until they get popular, effectively using their monopoly to gain popularity in other markets, thus hurting their competition unfairly.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#462

Post by bawana »

Everything google does is to generate data points. Although the rest of the world raises prices to cover costs, increase profits, etc., Google plays with APIs, pricing, availability as a way to generate data to model the behavior of its customers. Simply raising prices to make more money is besides the point. Although the price hike may have been instigated by mundane factors, the way they do it is to understand who is using their product. They could have sneakily inched their way up. Like the frog in the water on the stove, it wont know its cooked until it's too late. Also Google could have (OMG) added ads to map tiles. Or they could have a price scale that changes as you engage more of their services (move your website to GCloud, get more map views for free). By making this most unlikely move ( a move that would alienate customers in most other markets) Google is implementing a limit theorem. It is trying to segregate its customers' behavior into different groups- groups that the customers themselves do not know exist or which they belong in. This kind of data is what they will use to inform their future investment.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#463

Post by ddalex »

thecrazyone wrote: post #456
emn13 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since API's aren't standardized and conversion from one product to another likely requires development work and probably impacts your usage in some way even then - the barriers to switching are high enough that the availability of alternative maps still doesn't represent a whole lot of competition.

A good competitor can make a drop in replacement possible by aligning their api with that of google's

look how good it went for Microsoft's competitors trying to build a Win32-compatible OS....

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#464

Post by Jiri_Komarek »

A lot of people is choosing a map because of visual appearance. This is a great advantage of MapTiler, which has a tool where you can with a few mouse clicks totally change the map design, select one of 57 languages or a font for labels[0].

Advanced users can totally change the whole map by switching on/off map elements (schema based on OpenStreetMap tagging)[1] or add own data (MBTiles format - both raster/vector)[2].

There is a support for multiple JavaScript APIs like Leaflet, OpenLayers, Mapbox GL JS (source code snippets in the administration), mobile SDKs (Android as well as iOS) and desktop software development (QT + Unity game engine)[3].

Price calculator is available at [4].

[0] https://www.maptiler.com/how-to/make-own-map-design/ [1] https://www.maptiler.com/how-to/completely-change-the-map-de... [2] https://www.maptiler.com/how-to/hosting-on-maptiler-cloud/ [3] https://www.maptiler.com/blog/2018/05/openmaptiles-gives-you... [4] https://www.maptiler.com/google-maps-platform-alternative/

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#465

Post by mnutt »

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…

Having interacted with the Google Maps sales team, I would imagine these posts are a result of these companies hopping on a sales call expecting something ‘google’-like and are surprised that the Oracle sales team is on the call. The value extraction mentality was a bit surprising compared to the image the rest of google presents.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#466

Post by cullenking »

linsomniac wrote: post #440
spapas82 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vector tiles is interesting and they are actually supported by GeoServer http://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/extensions/vectorti... . However I wasn't able yet to integrate them to my GeoServer installation. Has anybody else been able to try this?

We are looking at moving to Vector tiles after the deployment of openstreetmap raster tiles is completed. We need to look at the performance closely though because on some devices it was slower with Vector tiles. I think we still want to go that direction we just have to quantify some of the performance.

You can render raster on the fly from a vector based tileserver, and optionally use vector maps for clients where it makes sense (mobile for example).

I've been running a large OSM raster rendering stack for a while, for the whole planet. Moving on to a vector based stack right now, which is what you should do if you are starting today. The reason being the server, with vector tiles pre-rendered, can very quickly render raster tiles on the fly. It's fast enough that for most cases, there is no need to cache them. Once I get the new stack fully burned in, we'll swap our raster rendering stack out for the new vector stuff and do raster on the fly. I might cache the rasters depending on throughput, but from what I can tell it should be basically a non-issue.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#467

Post by sullyj3 »

imron wrote: post #210
ucaetano wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which most likely meant the startup was a feature or a product, not a company with a viable business model.

Being bought/aquihired by Google/others seems to be a business model several companies aim for.

A lot of the time they have enough in house talent to not need to

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#468

Post by freehunter »

schoen wrote: post #87
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 infrastructu…

Are there any sites providing OpenStreetMap-as-a-Service? Something licenses and provided just like the Google Maps API, but using OSM?

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#469

Post by culot »

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…

> Much more contrast.

I have to say the satellite imagery on Mapy.cz lacks sharpness in comparison to Google Maps' satellite view. Google's view actually looks over-processed, which I think would lend it greater acuity when zoomed out. They look like they hold a comparable level of detail, just Mapy.cz could use a photoshop massage.

Also, Google Maps seems to have, at least from the small area I'm zoomed in at from your links, better location labels. ie: https://i.imgur.com/yUOlWO0.jpg

The non-satellite view I do like better on Mapy.cz, though -- it looks significantly more readable as far as structures and streets go, at every zoom level. More useful, maybe, more like a map ought to be.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#470

Post by lallysingh »

amelius wrote: post #418
wwweston wrote: post #16

Earlier 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…

This is why Google's generic services should be commoditized as quickly as possible.

Which ones aren't?
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