471–480 of 545 posts
If I understand correctly, it's not that the database's licence prohibits commercial use, it's just that you're expected to host it yourself, right?
How is this a problem?
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Thanks for the docker image pointers; just what I was looking form. What kind of traffic volume can you handle on what size VM's?
We found some references saying that each box could probably handle around 10,000 map tiles per second. Our full tileset is under 30GB, so it is easily cached. One of our machines can generate Tiles at a rate of 2,500/sec, another is 1,300.
> OpenStreetMap is not supposed to be directly used by commercial sites. If I understand correctly, it's not that the database's licence prohibits commercial use, it's just that you're expected to host it yourself, right? How is this a problem?
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> But the other mapping services will very soon adjust their prices also. It makes no sense to be 10x cheaper than Google when 2x cheaper does the same. There's a great deal of competition and that generally results in a race to the bottom. The market leader just removed themselves from the market and the best way to capitalize is stay low and build your userbase. We won't see price changes by any of these companies.…
When you have a service that’s ten times cheaper than the best service, people start to raise eyebrows. They perceive it to be much worse. It isn’t always true, but it’s not uncommon either. I doubt companies are going to race to the bottom.
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…
>According to contemporary biologists the premise is false: a frog that is gradually heated will jump out.[3][4] Indeed, thermoregulation by changing location is a fundamentally necessary survival strategy for frogs and other ectotherms.
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How does Mapbox stack up against what you've built? Does Mapbox provide any advantages or is are the two not very comparable? How difficult would it be to spin up a Mapbox competitor?
How does Mapbox stack up against what we've built? Well, they have way more people working on the problem, so there's going to be more support and more eyes on the problem. I didn't directly compare map tiles, that was a couple other people on my team. We decided to try moving forward with our own OSM-based tiles, so the conclusion I've come to is that it compares favorably. How difficult would it be to build a compe…
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>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…
It isn't a bait and switch. It's introductory pricing. They attracted developers and businesses to a product people essentially weren't using, they let people work with it at or near a loss and now that they have a customer base they are trying to make it profitable.
Yes, they'll lose some of their users that want a free ride. They'll also retain many users that will happily pay under the new pricing scheme because they recognize the value add and find it to be a worthy business expense.
It's no different than companies like MailChimp offering free-for-so-many-subscriber pricing and then requiring you to pay once you reach a threshold they've determined makes you a billable customer. Or a company like Evernote allowing you to save so much data (what a map tile is) and use so many devices a month for free before requiring you to subscribe at one of the paid tiers. Or a company like Pushbullet allowing you to mirror so many SMS messages a month before charging.
If you can't easily handle the pricing change, then you are probably wasting your time using it in the first place and need to discontinue using maps anyway or reassess your own business model.
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Bing Streetside and OpenStreetCam are a thing. They just aren't very good. There's a huge up-front investment for street view images that other companies didn't want to take. Microsoft invested in it, released a product and the product wasn't as good as the market leader. That's not predatory.
Other companies didn’t want to make that huge investment BECAUSE of Google. Google offered the same service for free, which meant they had no recourse for recouping that investment. Now that has changed, and the lack of standing competitors is a direct result of that history.