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Google Decides to Monetize Maps

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Re: Google Decides to Monetize Maps

#321

Post by soulofmischief »

manigandham wrote: post #242
soulofmischief wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a government or government-sanctioned non-profit receives enough tax credits and funding to create a viable alternative to Google Maps which puts the service out of business, it's still just market competition. We do this all of the time with banks, large American industries, oil companies, etc. You can't have one and turn away the other. > Great. Are you working on a mapping service? That's fallacious. I don't ha…

Again, that's not what the other poster meant by "forced to close". They specifically said maps shouldn't be provided by a for-profit company. That's the opposite of competition. I'm not sure who you're arguing with because we all want more options, and we already have several from Apple, Microsoft and others. I definitely don't want my taxes being spent on another poorly executed govt project though. >> I don't have…

Google Maps exists because someone at Google had a very noble idea and since then Google has decided it likes service lock-in. It's not a bad product in any form.

But I don't want ads in my map software any more than I want ads in my travel atlases.

Re: Google Decides to Monetize Maps

#322

Post by bgilly »

PerfectElement wrote: post #265
blueski wrote: post #222

Our Google Maps bill went from ~$100k per year to $380k per year as a result of these changes. Needless to say, we're moving over to Mapbox. What Google seems to miss is how this will affect customers' receptiveness to other Google products in the long-term. Having pulled the rug from under us once, there's no way we could consider e.g. a migration to Cloud in case the same happened again (where moving to a different…

I'm using their search with autocomplete as a convenience feature in our app. My bill will go from $0 to $3,000 per month. I'd be happy to pay them a reasonable price, but this costs more than our whole infrastructure, so we are moving to a vendor who offers a more realistic pricing for us.

Same thing here - have been using Google's autocomplete for 5 years and now it has become our biggest monthly expense for a niche consumer app. It cut our net profits in half.

Trouble is that there is no other service available with as comprehensive of coverage across the globe and so many languages as Google's, so we're just dealing with the hit.

Re: Google Decides to Monetize Maps

#323

Post by maxerickson »

mythz wrote: post #140
bhhaskin wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They ran all of their competition out of business.

Google Maps was a revolutionary product that popularized the category, they had no competition when it was released, at least now there's Apple Maps, Open Street Map, Bing Maps, Tencent Maps. I was developing with ESRI ArcGIS at the time, ESRI was a multi-billion dollar GEO company who had no product that even came close to the instant utility Google Maps launched with. The only other product that had a similar "Wow"…

OpenStreetMap was started before Google Maps was launched and has never really tried to compete in the sense of providing a user portal.

And then the data wasn't there for years and years also. And Google has lots more POI data in much of the world.

(I say this as a contributor to OSM...)

Re: Google Decides to Monetize Maps

#324

Post by hnick »

joshfraser wrote: post #107

Google tracks your exact location every few seconds. They know which stores you visit, which restaurants you frequent, which friends you spend the most time with, how often you go to the gym, who you're sleeping with and much more. The targeted advertising and surveillance capabilities that are possible as a result of this level of data collection are absolutely terrifying.

And it's still not enough.

Re: Google Decides to Monetize Maps

#325

Post by hnick »

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #46
nullc wrote: post #29

Maps has been awful and getting worse for a long time. If it's not routing me 25+ miles further to save "1 minute" (really a multi-minute slowdown in the 90th percentile) then its failing to give comprehensible directions in order to interpose business names. Maybe the monetization is finally makes competing with it attractive enough.

And the app has become absolutely atrocious performance-wise. It used to load nearly immediately, but starting ~1.5 years ago I began noticing extreme slowdowns. Now it's barely functional for me. Every part of the UI is appallingly unresponsive -- taps that take 5 seconds to register, hitches in animation, etc. From tapping on the icon to being able to get underway (including typing in an address) used to be about f…

I've noticed this too. I think it applies to most of their apps. I've had an issue since early April where a certain gmail account crashes the mail app (one account out of four only - it's not just me with this issue https://support.google.com/mail/thread/3994942).

The only fix is to remove all updates and revert to the original version of the app, and the UI experience is so much better. I'd forgotten how fast it was. I might just keep it like this.

Re: Google Decides to Monetize Maps

#326

Post by nopzor »

hunter23 wrote: post #316
CamperBob2 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sure works well with YouTube.

Do you have evidence that Youtube Premium is giving a good ROI to Google? I always thought of it as one of their experiments that they will kill off in the not so distant future.

I very much agree. I think they’ll kill yt premium. Even if google charges you what an average user is “worth” to them it’s a huge net negative to their business model. The users who will pay are worth a hell of a lot more to advertisers than the “average user”.

Re: Google Decides to Monetize Maps

#327

Post by Aeolun »

rkagerer wrote: post #137
dininski wrote: post #4

I can't stress enough how much of a bad idea this is. I was stunned when a few days ago I was looking up something on Google Maps and started seeing advertised locations/suggestions. Even though I love the product and have been a fan of Google products for the longest time, their current strategy of monetizing everything they can is very off putting. The direction Chrome is taking is also concerning. Don't know what…

Well said. Thanks Google for cluttering my life with more unwanted spam. I used to think of the Google brand very highly. Lately my subconscious associates it with the expectation of a sub-par user experience and some slightly creepy tendencies.

It’s interesting how this changes.

I recently found my phone from 5 years ago and realized that at that time I implicitly trusted Google with everything.

It’s such a different perspective from today that it came as a bit of a shock.

Re: Google Decides to Monetize Maps

#328

Post by frosted-flakes »

notyourday wrote: post #312
frosted-flakes wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used google Maps for navigation. It's not all that much better than my Garmin, at least not in my area. Even in downtown Manhattan the Garmin worked flawlessly. And Garmin units have had natural directions like that for four or five years. But I find it more of a hindrance than anything. I would rather hear "Turn right onto Wellington St" than "Turn right at the Starbucks", especially because the Starbucks is…

> I have used google Maps for navigation. It's not all that much better than my Garmin, at least not in my area. Even in downtown Manhattan the Garmin worked flawlessly. If flawlessly defined sending one to the closed street and putting one into a two hour long traffic jam because it has no real time data feed, then sure maybe it is flawless. But this is 2019 and not 2009.

But it did not do that to me. And this was in 2016, not 2019.

Furthermore, it does have a data feed for traffic, through FM radio (using the power cable as an antenna) and/or a Bluetooth connection to a phone. It's not as good as google Maps' traffic updates and it's only for major roads, but it works pretty well.

Re: Google Decides to Monetize Maps

#329

Post by lucb1e »

mailslot wrote: post #214
alasdair_ wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d strongly recommended putting future efforts into Open Streetmap instead - they have a fantastic set of data and tools and are usually (in my experience) more accurate and updated more quickly than Google.

Open Streetmap doesn’t build laser scanning drones, or fleets of connected 360 camera vehicles, or the tech and infrastructure to do the mapping. SOMEONE has to build all of that. It can’t be free. If it’s govt funded, then there WILL be corruption, scams, and it’ll be run as well as the DMV.

Osm is donation funded. For all your scepticism you could have found that in seconds. People contribute for fun, not because they boss told them to fly this later drone around so their expensive software can process it. That saves a lot of cost. The hardware is nearly free, look at Wikipedia: they beg for your money every few months but of the millions collected, a fraction actually goes to the hosting they imply it's for.

Osm also takes data from governments and other organisations that publish it, but only if it's already available under a compatible free license. Not sure where you see that tie in with corruption (which additionally is much more frequent in the private sector but maybe that depends on your country, but since there are no big bucks flowing in and all financial records are public and are plausible for what they do (I looked through it), the point is moot anyway).

Re: Google Decides to Monetize Maps

#330

Post by lucb1e »

vibrolax wrote: post #307
darkpuma wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "For much of the world, OpenStreetMap data is considerably more complete than Google Maps." This is particularly true for many not-so-obscure niches, like hiking trails in and around major US cities. Once you stray from roads and business locations, Google Maps gets shockingly sparse. Compare coverage for this park in Seattle: Open Street Map: https://0x0.st/zqAH.png Google Maps: https://0x0.st/zqAo.png Google Maps…

Agree. I rely on OSM for exactly this sort of detail for all kinds of outdoor recreation activities. I contribute missing features when I can.

Bus lines in Germany too, to take perhaps an unexpected area.

The official and unofficial transport apps don't tell you the bus will be at platform 16 on a completely different street. Made me miss the bus more than once, the second time I planned time for it but it took me 20 minutes to find the stop. I assumed it was one of the first fourteen stop positions and I just overlooked it, went around again (inside, on the street, other side of the street...), still didn't find it, until I checked OpenStreetMap which just shows it on a map and gives the exact stop position instead of only the stop name.

The latest version of OsmAnd can even do public transport routing. It won't give you timetables that are subject to too frequent changes, but it's still impressive.

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