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Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

joemorrison.substack.com

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Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#371

Post by mrjin »

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…

That's exactly what you should expect when anything comes into monopoly. When you have no alternatives, any price could be the best offer for you. For the same reason, when I have to use cloud, I would try to avoid anything that deeply binding to a particular vendor by using IaaS or PaaS so that we can bail out when something went sour.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#372

Post by huntedsnark »

Missing the issue by a mile: It's the place data not the maps, and you're required in the ToS to use Google's maps if you want to display their data geospatially. When Factual/Foursquare/Facebook/Apple (who all use a blend of each other's place data) overtake Google's data quality there then we can talk about the decline of maps.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#373

Post by thrashh »

julianlam wrote: post #223
oconnor663 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For whatever reason I can never see the street name I want to see anymore. It's been this way for years, and it's my #1 gripe with Maps. It's particularly bad in a dense grid like NYC, where some streets only appear for a block or two. If Maps doesn't decide to print the name on that block...I guess I'm not allowed to know what street that is?

Yes, you're right, it's been aggravating me for years. I vaguely recall reading about this on HN when it happened, and the consensus was that the logic for determining whether to print the street label had been changed for aesthetic reasons. Peak form over function. Anecdotally, I don't see any rhyme nor reason for whether it decides to show the street name or not. Oftentimes, it will value a side-street over the mai…

I don’t think I’ve seen any mapping program show dense streets that well, from MapQuest to Microsoft Streets to maps.me to Google Maps.

I’ve worked on similar problems and it’s not the easiest to solve. And I’ve never solved it because it was never that important of problem to solve and we just moved on to the next issue.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#375

Post by MichaelZuo »

MereInterest wrote: post #272
MichaelZuo wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps one day they, or a competitor, will do a ‘Maps Premium’ that simply charges the user inserted of all the ads, targeting, etc. And maybe a ‘Maps Premium+’ that allows for customization and going back to the peak usability design of Maps.

The problem is the higher-level decision makers having fully internalized "never leave money on the table". If there is a premium paid product, it will later have advertising added to it, and results prioritized, because that is an additional source of revenue. Never mind that it defeats the entire purpose of using the premium in the first place. The second level is that customers know that this will happen, and don'…

Your right in that there are people who have near sighted foolish thoughts like that. The truly impressive folks, if they’re around, will see past that kind of nonsense. Someone who doesn’t subscribe to another’s dogma in Steve Job’s words.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#376

Post by geoduck14 »

glenngillen wrote: post #354
eggsome wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true per "equivalent" unit of generic computing, but some older instance types have gone up in price (presumably to encourage people to migrate their stuff onto newer hardware). This is completely reasonable - but a pain when you have a box that works perfectly and you have to upgrade the software to cope with a new hypervisor driver/layer.

Not just compute. Storage and data transfer have also trended lower in my experience.

Well sure, but when S3 costs $22 per Terabyte per month, it is easy to reduce the price

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#377

Post by jrnichols »

nikodunk wrote: post #131
larrymyers wrote: post #90

I really want to use Apple Maps full time on my iPhone, just because of how much clutter Google Maps has accumulated on the screen. If anything tells me Google is losing the ability to innovate it's the newly added pill buttons for pre-set searches and branded POIs on the map. I remember when this was added to MapQuest circa 2010, and was the transition from trying to have an excellent mapping experience to just addi…

Since they added biking directions in the city I live, I've managed to switch to Apple Maps full-time! Just recently completed a cross country drive with only Apple maps - works really well. Of course now I've locked myself even further into the Apple's ecosystem, but at least my maps are smooth and minimal for now...

Apple Maps has been reliable enough where I worked that it was the default mapping app in our ambulance CAD (computer aided dispatch) system called Geosafe. We literally drove every road in the county and Apple Maps was completely spot on.

I love it.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#378

Post by nikau »

simonw wrote: post #278
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 one choice by the maps team likely cost Google significantly in the medium to long term" Reminiscent of the Google Reader thing. Google Reader was used by, in global terms, a tiny number of people. But today those same people get to make purchasing decisions at a large array of well funded companies, and they're still bitter about Reader shutting down.

I'm still dirty on goggle for announcing retirement of cloud print a few weeks after I got it all set up.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#379

Post by entee »

stiray wrote: post #288
entee wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a risk here but I'm not sure it goes as far as you suggest. There are still plenty of entities, particularly larger ones, that buy their own metal because at some scales it becomes far cheaper to run in a COLO (at least acc to near monthly articles posted on HN). I'd therefore put the risk that only big vendors will be able to buy hardware as low. That said, as ARM or custom chips gain market share wi…

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…

Admittedly I know few, but not zero. That said they’re all relatively older and have been in the business for a while. I used to manage a team with 4 racks, ~40 machines at a COLO. When we hired for new people, it was usually older folks who had the experience necessary. Maybe you’re right and I agree the concentration is disturbing.

My only response is that when I look at bigger orgs and places like Fortune 500 cos I still see/hear about home built server farms, so those people must be out there. I think maybe we get blinded in startup/SV land and only see people using cloud infrastructure but miss a huge, silent mass of people.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#380

Post by kaba0 »

on_and_off wrote: post #363
kaba0 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small creators who need income will get barely anything, while the ones the youtube algorithm prefers will get all. So yeah support them directly if you want but not google so I think vanced and the like is perfectly fine solution.

meh, still feel very hypocritical. You have found a way not to pay for something, good for you, but brandishing it as some kind of "perfectly fine solution" is just laughable.

Youtube exploits creators’ work to make viewers at a cost of hosting said videos. It would be a pretty symbiotic thing but with the recent direction Google took I would rather not partake. Also, I barely use youtube. And I used to pay for for example google play music but as usual, google killed it.
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