Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

> You know Google Maps? What I do is, like, build little pieces of Google Maps over and over for people who need them but can’t just use Google Maps because they’re not allowed to for some reason, or another.

I've been working with web mapping for 15 years and I've never thought of saying it because it's never been true for hundreds of applications. Google Maps has always been the worst map client to integrate with. OpenLayers, leaflet, MapBox and myriads of alternative data sources, layers, behaviors and widgets are more suitable for custom applications.

Some people seem to love a particular Google layer, like parcels or businesses, but it never seemed vital unless they were trying replicate some Google Maps experience, in which case I would just advise to send a route or street view request directly to the Google Maps website or app, and be done with it.

The latest fad seems to be 3D terrain and 3D buildings. It's so amazing in the product demso, but the real world usefulness?

From the outside, it looked like GDocs, GMail, and crew were originally created for internal use because engineering Googlers used Linux and hated Windows. Microsoft was still quite the enemy in teh early 00's after all. Along the way a few someones figured out that they could offer it as a product outside the company as a means to attack Microsoft more broadly.

Is that view incorrect?

Ha! They’d been pulling back support for quite a while but it’s fully deprecated now. The android+cardboard VR model just doesn’t make sense with current gen VR headsets.

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 technology?

This just isn't something new.

It is just another case of "historia magistra vitae". We had this, 30-40 years back, we had centralized environment (have you heard about mainframes before?), due to huge price pumping the decentralized environment came in (personal computers, internet, on premise servers, storage, ...). IT needed almost 20 years to get out of the hooks of corporations and now we are all diving in into the latest "cool" thing - centralization, now backed up by advertising revenues and shady practices like not showing your company on google search.

This is not a joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_litigation

And you can bet the history repeats itself.

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Let me show you my point and where it is going, lets do a tiny experiment - use your router/firewall/whatever you are fond of and block the following ASNs:

  AS40873,AS396982,AS395973,AS394639,AS394507,AS36492,AS36385,AS36384,AS36040,AS36039,
  AS26910,AS26684,AS22859,AS22577,AS19527,AS16550,AS15169,AS13949,AS6432,
  AS19448,AS16591,AS45566,AS43515,AS41264,AS394699,AS36987,AS139190,AS139070

then:

  AS16509,AS14618,AS7224,AS19047,AS395343,AS62785,AS58588,AS9059,AS8987,AS39111,AS38895,AS10124,AS264167,AS17493,AS135630

and:

  AS8075,AS8074,AS8073,AS8072,AS8071,AS8070,AS8069,AS8068,AS6584,AS63314,AS6291,AS6194,
  AS6182,AS5761,AS45139,AS40066,AS397996,AS397466,AS396463,AS395851,AS395524,
  AS395496,AS36006,AS3598,AS32476,AS31792,AS30575,AS30135,AS26222,AS25796,AS23468,
  AS22692,AS20046,AS17345,AS14719,AS13811,AS13399,AS12076,AS35106,AS8812,AS200517,
  AS58862,AS59067,AS52985

Now try to surf the internet. Casual style. As nothing happened.

Baidu (China) and Yandex (Russia) will still work from search engines. Duckduckgo not (shame on you). As any other you know. "The internet" as you know it will stop to exist for you. You know what you have blocked with those ASNs? Only 3 companies. Google. Amazon. Microsoft.

For complete experience you can also throw in AS714,AS6185,AS2709 and AS63293,AS54115,AS32934 (Apple, Facebook), but those two are not really relevant.

Maybe this will be eye opening how much we have f* up the internet, something that should survive 3rd world war is now mostly in the hands of 3 companies. Now imagine they pull the switch.

Oh yeah, that bad it is.

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, you have to create new projects. Nobody gets promoted by maintaining existing projects. Also, it seems as if there's no communication between groups. So if a group gets reassigned or key people leave, their project (e.g. the umpteenth messenger app) gets sunset, too.

I don't think this is all political, but rather they're aimlessly throwing projects at the wall to see which stick.