321–330 of 442 posts
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I’d use Apple Maps if they got rid of Yelp.
This is from the summer, but at least we know they are working on native ratings. https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/26/apple-maps-new-ratings-...
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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.
I don't think that there is an English word for someone who likes maps. The best thing to say is what you already said: that they are "passionate about maps".
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It's not reliable if you're cross referencing constantly. I live outside of the USA, and Apple maps consistently screwed up to the point that I've deleted it.
Also living outside the USA, and Apple maps is more accurate in some places than Google maps (the Netherlands). For instance a very big business lot was completely grey on Google maps, but completely mapped out on Apple maps. I don't even have Google maps downloaded on my new iPhone. So, one anecdote for, one against, it evens out for now.
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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…
> 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.
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It costs time?
Not the person to whom you were responding, but does it really cost that much time? If I need to be sure of where something is, like for a job interview or a time-critical meeting, I'll check as many sources as I can. Disclaimer: I'm from New Zealand. Map data is constantly out of date here, no matter which vendor you deal with. Google, Apple, Bing, OSM, whatever. For me, double checking is no problem.
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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.
Any store that uses a rewards, loyalty card or phone number when you checkout does the same. I'm not sure why Amazon is the bad guy when grocery stores have been distributing private brands of mainstream products and shopper loyalty has been used to optimize revenue streams. Amazon does it on a bigger scale, not sure the scale makes it right or wrong though.
Even if that's true, which I'm not persuaded of, Amazon's enormous market power makes a big difference. As a consumer, I don't want Amazon to "optimize revenue streams" when that reduces the reward to market participants to be innovative and deliver high quality.
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Curious to know if AWS has ever hiked the price of any of its services.
In 11 years of using it, I've never seen AWS increase the price for a service whose cost inputs they controlled entirely. It can happen, though. They increased AWS Pinpoint costs because their cost to send SMSes in India increased by 25% due to a regulatory action that increased the price for all SMS traffic in India. Often, AWS's prices are _really_ high for new services. I think this is useful for two reasons: it e…
I've thought about this concept a few times lately.
Like, I get the impression that a savvy business, when starting a new product with very little competition, should start with prices as bad and guarantees as low as they can get away with, because they can always improve their offer later, whereas going the other way runs into loss aversion and consumer alienation.
Eg it's better to start at 40$/month and lower to 30$/month after a year than to start at 20$/month and get a lot of angry users when you realize you need 30 to break even.
I wonder if there's a name for that concept.
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It’s incredibly clear from the outside that Google is an organizational mess that struggles to make product decisions and keep them. From the surprisingly bad UX of a lot of their services, to the random creation and destruction of services and apps. It all reeks of bad political infighting.
A few weeks ago someone here (or was it on Reddit?) explained this: Since Google found advertising to be a huge hose where money pours out like crazy, they're trying to find another such hose. I think that explains a lot of their behaviour and why they're even shutting down seemingly successful (from a user's view) services - because they don't earn enough money. Another big point is that to be successful at Google,…
Other than advertising, which scales like crazy and has negligible unit costs, there isn't much that would meaningfully move the needle at Google scale. Cloud computing would work there, but it's definitely a lower margin business than selling ads online, since there are actual costs for hardware and ongoing software maintenance.
> I don't think this is all political, but rather they're aimlessly throwing projects at the wall to see which stick.
Which is kind of funny, because a decade or so ago, Larry Page said that they'd put "more wood behind fewer arrows." [0] That article even mentions Google+:
> Can Google still push the creative envelope without a testing facility? That’s yet to be proven. Although last month’s successful launch of Google+ could be taken as an early indication that Google’s knack for inventiveness will live on outside of the lab.
In retrospect, that didn't age too well.
[0] https://news.yahoo.com/more-wood-behind-fewer-arrows-google-...
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…
The cost we were actually paying on the Google Maps API was hidden. The cost was mostly paid using user data and advertising. As a matter of fact, the API is still free on smartphone ;). They just realized that it wasn't worth it to get that data on the web and thus increased the cost to the true price. The fact that there was already some competition to Google Maps which was much more expensive tells a lot.
That's not something that's going to happen on the cloud though. You pay the real cost, they aren't monetizing it from a side channel (though they may profit a tiny bit on the side by lowering their infrastructure cost, it's not the goal and I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't used their own cloud offering that much). The profit come from the price, not the user data.
It wouldn't be a good idea for them to increased theses prices, as competition exist/can exist, and they would just hurt themselves on the long term.