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Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

joemorrison.substack.com

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Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#391

Post by robertlagrant »

jfim wrote: post #289
franklampard wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this analogy. I think a good idea is to sign a long term (1 year to multiple years) contract with cloud providers.

A long term contract pretty much guarantees that the company will lose the institutional knowledge to run things on premises. Think about it, if the company has sysadmins that have been with the company for some years, have racked and are running most of their infrastructure, and all of a sudden they sign a long term contract with a cloud provider, why would they stay?

This is a danger, although the cloud is still just VMs and networks that still need configuring and patching. Agreed people who would run physical hardware would be gone.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#392

Post by canofbars »

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…

What issues do you have with Apple maps? I started using it a few months ago and haven't even bothered to install google maps. The only things I have seen lacking is traffic data which I don't really care about and street view which I just use the web version for.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#393

Post by canofbars »

mlazos wrote: post #248
antipaul wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also _want_ to like Apple Maps. But I always need to double check business hours using Google.

I actually don’t really trust business hours on google anymore, I have to go to the restaurant directly or just call since I’ve been burned so many times looking forward to dumplings/teriyaki/pizza and then having the restaurant be closed.

Its a pretty hard problem. Businesses typically only list their opening hours on the door and then those are prone to change without notice. Planned to go somewhere for lunch and needed to check in to a train station in an hour, turns out the lunch place decided today they open half an hour late so I had to quickly rush somewhere else.

If google could deploy that tech demo that calls a business on public holidays to check if they are open, that would be amazing.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#394

Post by canofbars »

porknubbins wrote: post #359
reaperducer wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an iPhone user living in Tokyo and Apple maps was like “what are trains? Apple Maps has had Tokyo transit data since 2016. Tokyo got transit data years before many other cities.

The Apple maps debut in 2012 was when Google maps was removed from the Apple store. Maybe there was a way for Apple maps to do train/subway directions then but the UI was ridiculously bad- giant stations equivalent to Grand Central were hardly visible and highway names were highlighted.

>Google maps was removed from the Apple store

They actually removed it entirely? You couldn't install google maps in any way?

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#396

Post by Proven »

geoduck14 wrote: post #376
glenngillen wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

O'rly? How much do you charge?

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#397

Post by cacarr »

jeffbee wrote: post #216
tinus_hn wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google indexes every invoice you get. If you use gmail they know exactly what you order at which store.

That feature did not exist until Inbox, years later.

I still feel like I've been kicked in the groin every time I open Gmail and it isn't Inbox.

Bastards!

I suppose I'm probably a fool to continue expecting that they'll eventually get around to bringing Inbox's bundles over to Gmail, like they said they were going to.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#398

Post by mjgs »

stiray wrote: post #187
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…

> 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 realization that we needed to remove our reliance on Google's entire stack, and quickly, or we'd be in a terrible bargaining position later. Yes. You are right. The whole cloud deal is a try to rule out on premise infrastructure an…

I wonder whether there will emerge some design patterns in apps to enable easy switching between on-premises and cloud infra.

Thinking about it logically, the safest approach is always going to be build for on-premises infra first (or standard VPSs), then modify the code to support cloud services in addition, to get the added benefits of scaling at cheaper costs.

That way you can always switch back to on-premises if the cloud provider starts behaving terribly. Perhaps there is a performance hit, but at least you have an option.

Worth mentioning that there are some use cases that are only possible using cloud infra due to scaling constraints.

This is the approach I took building my SaaS. It’s more difficult initially, but I had an infra that could easily be moved. I was using my own version of backend queues etc, so modifying the code to switch to Amazon SQS would theoretically have been possible:

https://blog.markjgsmith.com/2020/11/26/looking-back-at-link...

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#399

Post by ayewo »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #327
cldellow wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Often, AWS's prices are _really_ high for new services. I think this is useful for two reasons: it ensures your early adopters are those who get the most value, and it gives you a big buffer when discovering how much it actually costs to operate. 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 star…

The name of the concept is price skimming. The rationale mentioned by the parent is also stated in its Wikipedia entry [1].

Many may not know that behind the scenes, Amazon hires economists just like their big tech peers MS, Google.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_skimming#Reasons_for_pri...

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