141–150 of 269 posts
Damn. And instead of reinvesting and furthering R&D, product lines, and more - they're just chopping 10% (or 450 people). That's a hell of a lot of institutional knowledge just gone. It also goes to show that when I automate, I should keep it hidden. That's because I do not receive the gains of automation. Instead, I receive more work or get laid off.
yup. This is why I never tell anyone that I use Copilot.
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Something that most commenters are missing is that TomTom's most revenue comes from B2B deals, which are mostly deals with automotive companies for car screens experience and also providing maps data for products like Bing Maps.
And most consumers would much rather have either CarPlay or Android Auto than the crappy software that is made my the manufacturers.
First because it uses the whole screen and heads up display and CarPlay doesn’t. But this is probably something that could be done with better integration.
Second because CarPlay takes over the phone and I want nav to keep running while I use the phone for other things. I know that I shouldn’t, but at stop lights I’ll read texts, HN, etc. with an active nav, I have to switch away from it while I use the phone. With the car running the nav, I can use my phone for whatever I like.
All I use Apple Maps for is to send directions to my car.
It’s kind of nice to just have a dedicated nav in my car.
I used to work for TomTom maybe 10 years ago. I was there when Google started offering turn by turn navigation for free. Other issue was live traffic information. As you might imagine all this caused some concern among employees because that was, I think, the main source of revenue for the company. They were already doing some other stuff like fitness wearables but they didn't seem to be leaning into it. Main idea fo…
Interesting that going deeper integrated into cars was their game plan. I've never used our in-car GPS (other than playing with it once). If it was any good it has a ton of advantages over using Google, including display on the "speedometer" screen. Sadly, it's pants. It comically announces caution stationary traffic on the M25, generally after we've been stationary for 5 minutes. The navigation directions aren't as…
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Google bought their other Gold. Youtube, Android, Google Search on iOS, ChromeOS. All of it is a moat to protect the first.
YouTube doesn't make a lot of money. Android might if you include the Play store.
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They pretty much lost because free (subsidized) alternatives like Google Maps became available, pretty much the same story as Netscape. It probably didn't help that their maps were also incredibly expensive, €100-200 for western Europe in 2005 money.
Free mapping existed before Google Maps. Mapping isn't the hard part or the expensive part, the hardware is. Smartphones have GPS and when people started getting smartphones, the value of having a separate navigation devices went to zero-ish unless it's built in to your car or maybe some low power thing for wilderness exploration (or having a boat or a plane or that kind of thing)
Search existed before Google as well. Free maps were very inferior to Google maps and also were a loss leader for other service that’s MapQuest was trying to sell into enterprise and stuff.
Google maps was just another ad stream for Google and so was much easier to link to, embed everywhere. And had an innovative UI.
Before Google cranked up their prices Google maps got embedded everywhere. This was novel and not something that Mapquest and other existing maps promoted.
This reads weird to me (non-native English speaker). How can you regrettably reach your intended impact? Is that some kind of an idiom?
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Small Nit - Netscape was broken up into pieces and sold to Sun Microsystems and AOL in 1999 for $10B. Thank Mike Homer for the great timing and resolve to get out while the getting was still good.
Selling Netscape's server group to AOL was just sadistic punishment.
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YouTube doesn't make a lot of money. Android might if you include the Play store.
> YouTube doesn't make a lot of money. Citation needed... Is $7B/quarter not a lot of money?
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If ISPs actually tried to do this en-masse, Google would move all ad serving to google.com
This is basically what youtube is doing. PiHole does not work on Youtube, but uBlock origin does (so does NewPipe, FreeTube and a bunch of software). This would solve Google's immediate problem, but it's such a huge escalation that I expect lots of unintended effects not to Google's benefit. There is a reason they haven't done this, despite widespread adblocking use.
Right now, with normal web advertising, the publisher (person with a website who wants to sell ads) tells your browser to go get an ad from the advertiser (the person paying for the ads), and that means that the advertiser gets a web request every time their ad is sold. This means that they can implement their own analytics and do not have to trust the publisher's, because the publisher merely kicks off the ad delivery process.
However, this requires separate domains or IP addresses, which can be blocked even at the network level[0] with a Pi-Hole. The alternative would be to serve ads straight off the publisher's site, which is how most social networks do it. Except... now you've just cut off every advertiser's data spigot[1]. If you do that, web advertising stops working - not because it's harder to target users, but because it's impossible to verify that you are paying for legitimate traffic to your website.
This is not a hypothetical. Social media companies already implement publisher delivery, and there have been multiple times in which they[2] themselves have admitted that their analytics and attribution were just plain wrong. That meant that advertisers were paying for traffic they never actually got. Publishers have an inherent incentive to inflate their traffic; the ad networks call this "click fraud" and it's when you run a bunch of bots to click on ads so you make more money[3].
The end of separate-domain advertising takes us right back to the days of television, where advertisers were buying specific time slots ("inventory") from specific publishers they trusted. The way that said inventory was priced was through random sampling of television watchers; but that relied on asking people to accurately record their TV watching habits. Good luck doing that when ads are served on a request-by-request basis.
Yes, you could randomly sample web users by having them install an extension that scans all their traffic and generates an equivalent log, but that almost certainly violates every extension repository's rules. Remember how Facebook was caught using their In-House signing cert to ship an iPhone VPN that did just that? That's the sort of sketchy shit we're talking about here. And any rules for detecting and reporting which ads were viewed could also be extracted and used to generate a tool for blocking said ads, which would be counter-productive.
So, basically, the reason why we don't just have publishers delivering ads is because it shuts out smaller publishers from selling them and puts advertisers solely at the mercy of Google and Facebook to verify that they actually got what they paid for. It would be a monopolistic power play few would tolerate.
[0] DoH and encrypted SNI complicates things, since it was also intended to be censorship-resistant - and we're trying to censor advertisements. However, you cannot encrypt IP addresses without taking on all of the inefficiencies of Tor onion routing. And you can also configure your web browser to just use the Pi-Hole's DNS instead of a public DoH server.
[1] Yes, there is an argument that telling the user's browser to make a request to another server is not "sending data"; this argument is stupid.
[2] Minimally, Facebook and Twitter; though other socials probably have the same problem.
[3] This is also why Google's antispam teams are secret police
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Interesting that going deeper integrated into cars was their game plan. I've never used our in-car GPS (other than playing with it once). If it was any good it has a ton of advantages over using Google, including display on the "speedometer" screen. Sadly, it's pants. It comically announces caution stationary traffic on the M25, generally after we've been stationary for 5 minutes. The navigation directions aren't as…
I have no experience with tom tom but I was a garmin user, and I got the sense that tom toms were pretty much identical. IMO an integrated tom tom into the car, if it performs as well as the external unit, would be amazingly better than your cell phone. The biggest advantage imo is satellite coverage is much better than quality data network coverage. I'm not even talking about in the boonies. Plenty of times in the m…
First, the car doesn't download map data. I'm stuck with what was on the car when I bought it unless I want to pay an unreasonable amount to update it.
Second, it does download traffic data, but it's so slow that it's useless. I took its advice once and it cost me over an hour, because the alternate route had already filled up and had the disadvantage of not being a freeway.
Third, it can't navigate a path without connecting to the satellite (seemingly for traffic data, but possibly it isn't even calculating the path locally). So when I visit downtown SF, don't have up-to-date maps, and I'm inevitably behind some building blocking my southern view, it just abandons me.