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Farewell, Google Maps

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#481

Post by prirun »

RugnirViking wrote: post #348
tomnipotent wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you to read the article which mentions all the competitors that are available?

The simple existence of competitors in a market segment is not proof that there is no monopoly. We wouldn't say for example that there are realistic copetitors in the web search space or in the desktop OS space - maps is similar to both of these sitations. (Now I realise that some people like to argue the toss about whether search and desktop OS are monopolies and to that I have no comment)

It's helpful to think about market share per "competitor", not number of competitors:

"However, from a regulatory view, monopoly power exists when a single firm controls 25% or more of a particular market. For example, De Beers is known to have a monopoly in the diamond industry."

https://www.intelligenteconomist.com/monopoly-market-structu...

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#482

Post by Qub3d »

arendtio wrote: post #395
linsomniac wrote: post #65

I'm just finishing spinning up OpenStreetMap servers in EC2 as one of the last stages of our testing, and they look great. We almost went with Mapbox, which is probably a pretty good alternative. But as part of that move I decided to try OSM tiles and I had them up and running in an afternoon via a docker image, created an Ansible role for deploying virtual machines that evening, and had tiles for our region built th…

I was wondering too why they skipped OpenStreetMap so quickly. Living in Germany, I find the map quality of OSM much better than Google Maps. Sure, it lacks the integration with the other Google services like a good search and live traffic, but speaking about the pure map quality, Google is lacking a lot of detail here.

From the article (emphasis added):

"Which maps should we investigate deeper?

Some options we could reject quickly for various reasons. OpenStreetMap is not supposed to be directly used by commercial sites. Apple Maps, even though we wouldn't mind having Apple logo on our site somewhere, was just released as beta and requires Apple developer account to test properly."

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#483

Post by aeorgnoieang »

roadbeats wrote: post #345

I would never trust Google as a business partner based on only my personal experiences. Here is a list of problems I had with Google and its services; - Firebase suddenly changed its pricing, claiming that they were calculating prices incorrectly. A tiny multiplayer game that I made for kids were not fitting the free tier anymore, and my account was locked until I make payment. A sudden e-mail at 6am in the morning w…

> Someone began impersonating me using my full name on blogger

There are a lot of people in the world so the odds of someone having the same full name as anyone else isn't that low. Was this person impersonating you specifically beyond claiming that they have the same name?

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#484

Post by Zooper »

stevefan1999 wrote: post #297
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…

Remember when Google once said “Don’t be evil” as their motto? Well what Google did at this instance and on nowadays is evil. But on the other hand, I think it is necessary, because at the end of the day Google is still a company that needs to make money and most importantly compete with each other, I’m really disappointed at Google to abuse their trust to hurt others.

That motto was removed some years ago: people using to too much to call them out.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#485

Post by aeorgnoieang »

SllX wrote: post #272
beerlord wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Advertising's place is as a vehicle for emotional manipulation and stuffing all available channels with propaganda selling the advertiser's particular brand of product or politics. Certainly it can also be used to dispense useful information, but if someone is spending money to dispense that particular information, they have an agenda. It might be innocuous, "buy our product!". Or it can be malicious. Either way ther…

Your comment seems like an attempt at emotional manipulation and propaganda for your particular politics. Your argument doesn't seem to reasonably distinguish between good or bad behavior generally.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#486

Post by linsomniac »

arendtio wrote: post #395
linsomniac wrote: post #65

I'm just finishing spinning up OpenStreetMap servers in EC2 as one of the last stages of our testing, and they look great. We almost went with Mapbox, which is probably a pretty good alternative. But as part of that move I decided to try OSM tiles and I had them up and running in an afternoon via a docker image, created an Ansible role for deploying virtual machines that evening, and had tiles for our region built th…

I was wondering too why they skipped OpenStreetMap so quickly. Living in Germany, I find the map quality of OSM much better than Google Maps. Sure, it lacks the integration with the other Google services like a good search and live traffic, but speaking about the pure map quality, Google is lacking a lot of detail here.

It seems like they rejected OSM because they couldn't directly use the OSM site to serve tiles, but would instead need to host their own infrastructure for it. I understand that, but for us we decided to go ahead and own it.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#487

Post by namibj »

ddalex wrote: post #463
thecrazyone wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

Look what Linus and Stallman made to replace UNIX.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#488

Post by da_chicken »

dmurray wrote: post #387
da_chicken wrote: post #285

Earlier 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.

I'm not concerned about bandwidth costs. I'm concerned about support costs. People who use an API have an annoying habit of calling and submitting support tickets for that API.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#489

Post by g-b-r »

twistedpair wrote: post #424
dmurray wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dow…

Maybe they expect a big increase in the cost of imagery acquisition (from what I was able to glean they had a deal for a certain fixed price for a certain period, which might be coming to an end - https://spacenews.com/planet-confirms-google-stake-as-terra-...).

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#490

Post by linsomniac »

bonsai80 wrote: post #474
linsomniac wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh wow, that's a faster tile generation rate than I was expecting. What are the specs on the machines/VMs you're using to get those rates?

They are both virtual machines, 32GB and 32 CPUs for the 1,300/sec and 20CPUs for the 2,500/sec. The 32 cores are on a host machine with two "Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4108 CPU @ 1.80GHz", the 20 cores are "Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2637 v2 @ 3.50GHz". You know, 7,001.21 bogomips (TM). :-)
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