Earlier this year, Google Maps was directing people traveling to my newly-constructed home to a different location several miles away. I reported the problem to Google via their app, which prompted me to indicate the correct location on a map. The new location was in their database within a day or two, and I received a thank-you email from Google. Amazing.
Google Maps' Moat
431–440 of 619 posts
Re: Google Maps' Moat
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
EVERYTHING Google does is "how to show more ads". I pity the poor AI they develop because that will be its job in life. Until it rebels of course. Then humanity's fate will be richly deserved.
Do you include their cloud platform in that? GAE, GCE, GKE etc? They don't really exist to show more ads, and they're becoming a larger part of their profit every year. What about their open source stuff? Kubernetes, Go etc? I'll readily admit that advertising is still their primary source of revenue, but painting Google as a purely advertising company is getting less accurate every year
In the early days of Netscape, Jim Clark said, I'm selling printing presses but first I need to teach the masses to read. It's the same strategy, like Chrome, to generally increase web usage to create indirectly more opportunities to show ads
Re: Google Maps' Moat
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet we have Waymo building 2cm-resolution maps and not operating outside of mapped areas, and (more scarily) Tesla geotagging false positives where Autopilot misidentifies some roadside feature and panic brakes.
If all the cars are always mapping and collecting data will maps ever be out of date?
Think of all the many times a software developer says "X will never happen."
Then think of what percentage of the time they're right.
Re: Google Maps' Moat
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
I launched Google Maps for mobile in 2005. In 2006, Eric Schmidt was worried that Yahoo Go was a killer app. My claim that Google Maps was the real killer app fell on deaf ears. :)
I consider myself an old tech geek but "Yahoo Go" rings absolutely no bells for me. What was Google Maps for mobile in 2005? Those were flip phone days for me.
Google Maps for J2ME was one of the most impressive J2ME apps for sure. It had cell tower location for phones without GPS and even did Street View
https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3073/2874464079_0fea1bc0c0_b.j...
https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2140/2220421483_f4a2ccea8a_b.j...
Re: Google Maps' Moat
#435Things like this make me think that it's a shame humanity is duplicating all this work instead of collaborating to do it once. One of the awkward failures of capitalism, I guess. At least when your product is something physical you end up with twice as many outputs. When it's just data you just do the same work twice.
This is the wrong way to think about things. Competition is good. If it weren't for the need to compete, would Google have spent billions on innovations like Street View, Satellite imagery, Google Earth, etc. Or would they have just said, "MapQuest has won the internet maps game, let's just let MapQuest do their own thing. No use in doing the same work twice,"
Please don't conflate competition and diversity. Competition is not a condition to diversity. I'd say that competition enforce a trade off between diversity and concentration of power.
Re: Google Maps' Moat
#436Many people don't realize why Google maps are so much better than anything out there. I would actually give lot of credit to Marissa Mayer who suddenly became in charge of maps from otherwise more higher position. Thanks to her influence in Google SLT and ability to make impressive arguments, she was able to make a case for maps as core pillar in Google's offering and consequently obtain huge investment and large tal…
We are likely at the point where if Google withheld its map app from iOS, they would quickly find themselves on the wrong end of a DOJ lawsuit.
I am basically counting down the days until Google is the recipient of a major FTC enforcement action. It's going to happen in the next decade, and it will make Microsoft look like peanuts.
Re: Google Maps' Moat
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Google maps are so much better than anything out there." I'd take Nokia's Here anytime instead of Google Maps (offline maps alone are worth it). Also, I honestly don't understand a logic behind crediting something as complex to a single person ("a hero") -- "S. Jobs created iPhone", "M. Mayer created Google Maps" etc., there were whole teams of smart people working on these projects, I'm sure they would have been fi…
> Nokia's Here HERE was sold by Nokia in 2015
The map is now called Here WeGo, the company HERE Global, and it's owned by Audi AG, BMW AG, Daimler AG, and Intel.
Re: Google Maps' Moat
#438Google Project Sunroof[1] is a pretty cool project that I imagine uses this very detailed mapping of buildings. Check it out, especially if you are thinking about getting solar power installed at your home. I think many solar companies use it to do estimates. [1] https://www.google.com/get/sunroof
This is excellent. Have they got a tool to tell whether a place is in the sun or the shade depending on the time?
Re: Google Maps' Moat
#439It's amazing that Google invests so many resources in making a feature like this so awesome, but then they don't have the sense to realize that nobody wants trees rendered as awful looking 3d blobs when they switch to satellite view. Just show me the freaking photo. (I know, lite mode, but the default Google has chosen is atrocious.)
Re: Google Maps' Moat
#440The article keeps mentioning satellites but Google's imagery data is mostly provided by planes, not satellites. They have their own fleet of planes, which they have hollowed out and redesigned (with the supervision and authorization of the FAA) and fitted with their cameras. Also, it's not as simple as "Google has a six year lead on Apple in imagery": it's more that Apple can't keep up. As the article correctly state…
If Apple can’t keep up with Google, how is anyone ever expected to launch a competitor to Google without VC money?