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Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

joemorrison.substack.com

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Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#311

Post by multjoy »

danielheath wrote: post #295
multjoy wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that nobody expected Google to just hike their price for mapping by 1400% overnight. If they can do it with one product, what’s stopping anyone else in a similar dominant market position doing the same?

Culture, and the reputation it earns. I’m no amazon apologist, but one thing I trust them to do is keep my things running as they are.

And what’s your contingency if they decide that they’re going to hike the price because Jeff’s underwater lair has sprung a leak?

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#312

Post by grishka »

zapzupnz wrote: post #300
grishka wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8 years later, Apple Maps still doesn't show buildings in Russia, even in largest cities. So it's essentially useless for actual navigation. It's okay-ish when all you want is to see a point on a map in a city you know, and that's about it. Out of other companies, Yandex and Google have by far more detailed maps. This leaves me with one question — why does Apple reinvent it anyway? Why can't they just use ridiculousl…

> why does Apple reinvent it anyway? Because Apple learnt a long time ago that something essential needs to be in their hands; third parties let Apple down. Google let Apple down by refusing to allow Apple to craft vector-based maps, only allowing Apple to download bitmaps. Thus Apple Maps. Intel let Apple down by failing to predict where the market was moving since about 2012 or so, with the Core processors not gain…

Good point, except OSM isn't dependent on any company or person in particular. It's a community effort. Apple could as well contribute whatever improvements it deems necessary to benefit themselves and everyone else. They could write their own renderers and whatnot, it's been done many times by different companies. It would've been a much better starting point, too, than whatever proprietary data they licensed to get started.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#313

Post by mcintyre1994 »

alasdair_ wrote: post #173

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…

This really does seem like a shortsighted move given they’re seemingly pretty serious about Google Cloud, and their Maps Platform is apparently part of that: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform

AFAIK AWS has never increased their prices for anything ever, Google Cloud once increased the price of a service by 1400%. That takes Google Cloud out of consideration for me for anything I don’t want to have to or can’t (because of vendor lock-in) move to another service with very little notice.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#314

Post by stiray »

pldr1234 wrote: post #305
stiray wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those entities would be any risk, they would already be bought. Or they will be long gone due to google/aws/microsoft price dumping. In meanwhile, the openly accessible technology / know-how will be gone or hired by them and there will be no one left. Just look around, how many people you know that are capable of handling on-premise server? What about farm of servers without using any of google/aws/microsoft techn…

HN is missing a `word-break: break-all` on their `default p` class. (Your reply with an unbroken word that spans larger than the page width forced my page to grow (horizontal scrollbar))

Sorry, I didn't notice it, thank you for reminder, I have added manual breaks.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#315

Post by harrisonjackson »

wpietri wrote: post #191
alasdair_ wrote: post #173

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…

Google's fundamental relationship with users is statistical, and I think it shows. They're very good at optimizing metrics; their search, for example has remained the leader 20+ years on. In that world, if you lose a few users or give a bad experience, well, there are plenty more where those came from, and the ones who leave will often come back. I think they mistakenly bring that attitude to their consumer businesse…

Every AWS product I've used has gotten cheeper over the years (excluding the free tier / beta free periods)

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#316

Post by partingshots »

applemapsanon wrote: post #104
partingshots wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend checking out Justin’s blog for more of his posts, the most recent being in December 2020. He’s a passionate cartographer, and has been posting about maps since 2010, 2017 being his rise to popularity not withstanding.

He’s actually not a "cartographer" and has no formal training in cartography. (This misconception comes from a 2017 Verge piece on "Google Maps' Moat" that misstated that he was.) Source/Disclosure: I'm a close friend.

What would be a better word to describe someone who is passionate about maps?

Perhaps I used the word “cartographer” incorrectly. I apologize, my native language is German so English is not always 100% forthcoming to me.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#317

Post by namdnay »

danielheath wrote: post #292
notyourwork wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon is even more rapacious, In what way? It seems a bit like stone throwing to immediately toss another company into the conversation without providing some anecdote.

I mean, at a minimum, their habit of using customer data from their platform businesses to inform development of their own competing products is pretty sketchy.

From their marketplace business, not their platform business

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#318

Post by MayeulC »

awinter-py wrote: post #106

I'll believe spatial computing is here when I can successfully search for an open restaurant with usable outdoor dining sorted by proximity to a point shocking that businesses who are investing $10k+ in greenhouses can't list that data on G maps for search general extension of G's failure to support faceted search of any kind

Well, you can get pretty close with overpass, but I don't think "outdoor dining" is a tag in OSM? I don't often edit restaurants.

https://overpass-turbo.eu/

OSM is primarily a database, it's a shame mostt frontends aren't extremely user-friendly, it could easily capture a lot of users. Brouter, OSMand, overpass are gems built on OSM data.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#319

Post by drawkbox »

alasdair_ wrote: post #173

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…

Still raw from a gaming platform we built for progress/matchup on App Engine (GAE) early on in 2011 for a popular racing matchup game. We chose App Engine due to flexibility, scaling and price.

One day Google increased prices and our costs went up x5-x10 on AppEngine [1][2]. We then had to move to AWS over the next few weeks early on in launch. It caused push back on other projects and was generally a bad time that wasn't necessary.

That isn't the way to build trust and we have used AWS and now Azure more than Google Cloud for this reason in the decade since.

Google has great tools, but you simply cannot do shock pricing on the cloud, it is the biggest fear of everyone that uses the cloud or has to recommend it. Google made us look bad by choosing them over AWS, later we also use Azure.

We like to build our systems for horizontal scaling, on cheaper machines, we weren't even doing much but it was suddenly out of budget and left everyone feeling burned by Google. I love Google and their tools, but they have to be careful with the rug pulling and knee capping people that choose large projects to develop on their products and platforms.

Don't make people look bad for choosing your product and especially don't surprise people with pricing or dropping products. If it was a better planned price increase we could have taken time to move off more slowly or even optimized to run on it, but since it was so sudden it was shocking. Since that moment they have lost lots of projects to Google Cloud that would have gone there.

We literally never expected it because AWS was a force, Azure was still new, and we thought Google would be price competitive to AWS and Azure while looking to gain customers trust as cloud products were something that didn't seem like you'd want to do any drastic changes to customers as they can be long term customers if things go well.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/02/google_app_engine_use...

[2] https://www.infoq.com/news/2011/09/app-engine-price-hike/

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#320

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

mmaurizi wrote: post #87
afavour wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Google Maps the consumer product is far ahead of any competitors, but the Maps API lacks many features available in Google Maps (vector maps, 3d acceleration, real-time styling). These feature disparities between the API & the consumer product were annoying at first, but now that the competitors to the Maps API all have had them for years they're simply baffling.

Vector maps are now available through the API, I believe.
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