221–230 of 442 posts
I really want to use Apple Maps full time on my iPhone, just because of how much clutter Google Maps has accumulated on the screen. If anything tells me Google is losing the ability to innovate it's the newly added pill buttons for pre-set searches and branded POIs on the map. I remember when this was added to MapQuest circa 2010, and was the transition from trying to have an excellent mapping experience to just addi…
I worked at a company that heavily used the maps API in 2018. The 1,400% price hike really was an eye opener. It wasn't just the money involved, which was large, but the fact that it came so suddenly and with so much magnitude. Google's choice to bump these prices made me realize that they could do the same thing with their compute cloud pricing or other APIs, again with little notice. That, in turn, led to the reali…
At least in the cloud computing space, Google is an also-ran thanks to Amazon. They were able to play this game with Maps because they didn't have a healthy competitor. If they screwed with pricing as a distant second place competitor they'd be toast.
> This one choice by the maps team likely cost Google significantly in the medium to long term, if any other companies realized the same things we did.
It definitely did. What they did with Maps is exactly why I would never, ever consider running anything critical with Google.
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Yes, of course, except that the decision-making has shifted towards priorities that do not benefit the customer, though they used to. I have no interest in seeing where the nearest McDonalds is, unless I search for it. POI markers for places I need to go (via bookings/appointments) are good, but POIs for places I have never been are bad. For whatever reason I can never see the street name I want to see anymore. Betwe…
> For whatever reason I can never see the street name I want to see anymore. It's been this way for years, and it's my #1 gripe with Maps. It's particularly bad in a dense grid like NYC, where some streets only appear for a block or two. If Maps doesn't decide to print the name on that block...I guess I'm not allowed to know what street that is?
I vaguely recall reading about this on HN when it happened, and the consensus was that the logic for determining whether to print the street label had been changed for aesthetic reasons.
Peak form over function.
Anecdotally, I don't see any rhyme nor reason for whether it decides to show the street name or not. Oftentimes, it will value a side-street over the main street, and in _some_ cases this makes sense (e.g. you are on the larger street, and want to see intersecting streets), but Maps doesn't seem to read contextual clues... if I am not navigating, or zooming in from further away, showing larger streets first would be better.
Bing Maps and Facebook uses HERE maps under the covers. That's a company that has had the people to really knock mapping out of the park. However, you have some major mismanagement there and lack luster direction that made google maps continue to exist. (They have lead the way in offline mapping.. no joke in 2010 you could install it on your phone, fly from Europe to the US and drive to Canada and back without having data or having to micromanage your "offline data storage") Also, to add insult to injury.. you used to get here.com to point to your customer facing maps, now you have to go "wego.here.com" if you even want to use the consumer maps anymore.
Related... when I'm in the car, and not, I often use the google assistant to search... for at least a couple months, it's gotten to be almost worse than useless as the bottom 1/3 is covered by google buttons over the stuff I'm searching for, and the mini map view at the top doesn't easily expand to the screen for pan/zoom. The assistant should be much easier to use, and while not the best, I admit I have tried to use…
Google maps started from a position of being better and snappier than (then) Nokia maps. Today, it's almost impossible to use google maps while driving, the UI is simply unusable unless you can devote your 100% attention to it, and even then the results may vary. On the other hand, Here maps (former Nokia maps) has gotten better. Oh, and my favourite google maps feature, announce the instruction to turn left or right…
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> Google's choice to bump these prices made me realize that they could do the same thing with their compute cloud pricing or other APIs, again with little notice. That, in turn, led to the realization that we needed to remove our reliance on Google's entire stack, and quickly, or we'd be in a terrible bargaining position later. Yes. You are right. The whole cloud deal is a try to rule out on premise infrastructure an…
These two comments make me see SaaS more like paying rent for housing: If we become fully dependent on a service (shelter) and then the provider (landlord) jacks up the price, we may be quickly forced to switch services (homes) or be out of business (homeless).
I worked at a company that heavily used the maps API in 2018. The 1,400% price hike really was an eye opener. It wasn't just the money involved, which was large, but the fact that it came so suddenly and with so much magnitude. Google's choice to bump these prices made me realize that they could do the same thing with their compute cloud pricing or other APIs, again with little notice. That, in turn, led to the reali…
Mapbox responded to Google raising prices by raising their prices. Is it likely that Azure and Amazon would do similar if they raised prices on GCP?
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The software supports the use cases but the data isn't there. Certainly for where I'm living. Most of the information is missing -- eg apparently there are no pediatricians in my city, many opening times are missing, in my area there are no photos, no reviews; other stuff is wrong. It's more comprehensive in Prague, though from a brief look Google still has more of everything. I'm not saying that OSM (and other proje…
Does OSM support address-based resolution of places? AFAIK, Google is getting things like store hours when it crawls websites. Which, of course, it's doing anyway for indexing. As long as it can figure out the address and the store hours from the website, it can put them on the map. In the meantime, OSM generally doesn't even have place addresses in my experience. If I could resolve addresses to places in OSM, then I…
See https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/50.07298/19.93528 where it is mapped at least in a small part.
> then I could easily write some scrappers to help out with filling in other data.
Note that it may not possible due to copyright issues