Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

joemorrison.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 442 posts

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#41

Post by afavour »

howlgarnish wrote: post #3

> They appear, to me, to be acting from a place of fear and conservatism rather than innovation. Bingo. Here's a fun exercise: try to find the last genuinely useful feature added to the Maps API in the release notes. https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/... To give you a taste, here's the largest change made in 3.42: > InfoWindows now have a default max width of 648px which can be overridden by…

I see this as something different: the sign of a mature product. What are competitors doing that Google Maps isn’t? Maybe I’m missing something but I see no significant features.

(Not to mention, the Maps API != Google Maps the product)

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#43

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I've avoided using Google Maps API for Apple devices.

The main reason, was that I knew someone that used it, and got the "Google $urpri$e," where, all of a sudden, they owe four-to-five figures a month, for a narrow-demographic $0.99 app. They switched over to MapBox. MapBox doesn't have quite the feature set and quality that GM does, but it's a great library, and won't give you sticker shock.

Google has a lot of money for a reason.

I have found that Apple Maps is fine for my purposes. I don't really need some of the fancier stuff that GM and MapBox gives you. If I needed the fancier stuff, I'd probably go with MapBox.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#44

Post by hliyan »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #30
hliyan wrote: post #8

This is a familiar refrain I've recently begun to hear about many of Google's products and I'm starting to see the point. Technology has evolved significantly in the last ten years. It is now significantly easier to build a search engine with its own index and crawl the entirety of the Internet than it was ten years ago. Maps too, will go that way soon. It took IBM and Intel, who were regarded the same way Google is…

I hope for the startups too, but I'm not as optimistic. While the HP/Intel/IBM/etc. dinosaurs are slowly being sapped of relevance, I don't think Google will fall victim to the same fate. Those dinosaurs largely saw their maturation before the rise of Internet, and as such still have a lot of pre-Internet culture in them, especially in the C-suite. Google (largely) doesn't have that. And they, along with the rest of…

My thought on this is: while technology and circumstance changes, human beings and groups of human beings, are subject to the same fundamental forces of ascendance, consolidation, plateau and decline. The human beings that make up Google are fundamentally no different from those that made up IBM (or even the Roman Empire). They may have the knowledge of what happened to the previous generation of tech companies in their collective memories, but then again, one could argue that IBM too, had in their collective memories, the fate of the industries that they supplanted.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#45

Post by franciscop »

Meta: could someone explain/clarify the sentence "Back in 2012, I had not yet been born (I am, in fact, only six years old)." please? I highly doubt a 6-years-old wrote this article, so is it a joke? Or is it alluding to some mapping alternative being 6 years old?

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#47

Post by [deleted] »

franciscop wrote: post #45

Meta: could someone explain/clarify the sentence "Back in 2012, I had not yet been born (I am, in fact, only six years old)." please? I highly doubt a 6-years-old wrote this article, so is it a joke? Or is it alluding to some mapping alternative being 6 years old?

[deleted]

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#48

Post by maest »

saberience wrote: post #18

I live in London and for commuting around via public transport OR walking I always use Citymapper, which is massively superior than Google Maps for directions. I suspect they are using Googles APIs underneath it all, but their UI is better than Google maps and also their recommended public transport directions are orders of magnitude better than Google Maps. Citymapper will get you between any two locations in London…

Citymapper compute their own routes, so that definitely doesn't come from Google. I'm not sure where they get their map data from, though.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#50

Post by [deleted] »

franciscop wrote: post #45

Meta: could someone explain/clarify the sentence "Back in 2012, I had not yet been born (I am, in fact, only six years old)." please? I highly doubt a 6-years-old wrote this article, so is it a joke? Or is it alluding to some mapping alternative being 6 years old?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN