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Many 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 i

Many 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 talent pool to work on it. Creating these level of details world wide requires dazzling amount of investment that even some small governments can't afford. In most companies, you will not get green lighted for this because there is no real revenue coming in and its basically social charity in form of a free app. Now the reality is that you can't do self-driving cars without great maps and the day Google pulls its map app from iOS you can bet Apple is going to have a giant hole in their balance sheet.

puzzle 9y ago
The more pedestrian reason for Google's investment for its own maps was that the licensing costs for data to use in turn-by-turn navigation, which is many times as expensive compared to simpler uses, were going to skyrocket once mobile adoption took off as projected. You could give millions or billions to TomTom, which is what Apple has been doing, or you could pour the same amounts into creating your own datasets, allowing you to do a lot more than navigation, i.e. anything.
- zaptheimpaler 9y ago
  Agree, Google has fundamentally understood the power of information/data since the very beginning - its part of their DNA.
  - Splines 9y ago
    I think they understood the economics of depending on an external source for a core part of their business. Much like Netflix, they understood that the way forward was to generate their own content.
    - tatersolid 9y ago
      Then why is Netflix depending on AWS for the core of their business (their delivery platform)? Prime video is their main competitor. It’s like UPS renting its trucks from fedEx.
      - bfred_it 9y ago
        Probably because AWS is still more efficient/reliable than building/maintaining your own. What you say already happens for MVNOs and it works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operato...
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - adjkant 9y ago
        Generating their own content and being fully self-sufficient are two different things. It's not like Amazon can claim all of the Netflix Original Series as theirs. I think you're trying to die on a technical hill in opposition to a non-tech point. That's not the point the post is making.
      - ggg9990 9y ago
        Netflix's AWS purchases are commodity -- their customers would not suffer if they migrated away from AWS, either in product quality or price. Not so for Apple Maps and TomTom.
      - saagarjha 9y ago
        > Prime video is their main competitor. They have a gentleman's agreement with Amazon–like Apple does with Samsung. It's mutually beneficial for both parties so there's no point antagonizing each other.
      - clairity 9y ago
        netflix realized that content delivery is no longer a core part of the business when they stopped sending out DVDs in the mail. instead, they've spent all their energies since on amassing the most lucrative content they can. this is why they started making their own original series and why disney has (implicitly) made the argument that they should be allowed to buy fox. same as in the UPS & fedex example. the trucks are not core to the business. efficient logistics is.
  - reacweb 9y ago
    I think Google is not seeking power for power or money for money. Google's focus is AI. Google needs the full view of people behaviour in order to build AI. Traveling is a good domain to study human behaviour and traffic optimisation. What motivate the choice of an itinerary ? Why someone choose to not follow waze advices ? What would be the best strategy ?
    - gaius 9y ago
      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.
      - reacweb 9y ago
        Richly ? Like in terminator or like in Asimov's foundation ?
        TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Like in Paperclip Maximizer, except instead of paperclips, the universe will be tiled with humans forever clicking on ads.
        sillysaurus3 9y ago
        Like Cookie Clicker, but clicking ads instead of cookies.
        freeflight 9y ago
        It would probably be way more absurd like an infomercial version of The Matrix; Whole generations of humans born for the sole purpose of watching ads, all organized and kept in check by a "benevolent" AI which constantly creates new ads, for no particular purpose.
        jon-wood 9y ago
- aorav 9y ago
  > You could give millions or billions to TomTom, which is what Apple has been doing, or you could pour the same amounts into creating your own datasets, allowing you to do a lot more than navigation, i.e. anything. It is rumored that TomTom and Apple have a data deal. Apple gets maps from TomTom (for free, or a strongly reduced price), TomTom gets Apple maps user location data which they use for their traffic service. How the deal works exactly isn't known (financial details are not public). But it's quite clear Apple doesn't pay a lot to make use of or improve TomTom maps.
- rmc 9y ago
  It's kind of a shame that Google doesn't release all this data they have collected/created as open data.
  - slackoverflower 9y ago
    That's like McDonalds giving away food. Or Ford giving away cars. Google's business quite literally is data.
    - rmc 9y ago
      Sure, but Google does claim to be an open company, and giving things back.
      - puzzle 9y ago
        Among other things, they open sourced the Ceres library, which the imaging pipeline relies on.
    - gspetr 9y ago
      > McDonalds giving away food. Not the best example. McDonalds is so much more than food: http://blog.wallstreetsurvivor.com/2015/10/08/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burger/ http://blog.wallstreetsurvivor.com/2015/10/08/mcdonalds-beyo...
sidcool 9y ago
That's a very good point. Many a times engineers have an excellent use case/rationale for investing in a piece of technology, but they are unable to convert it into the language that business would understand. Marissa and many others have mastered that art.
snarf 9y ago
Google has plenty of low revenue, unprofitable products, some of which are social charities like Google Scholar. I don't think Mayer deserves as much credit as a visionary as you are suggesting. It was more about empire building after a sudden demotion and not paying increasing licensing costs to a third party vendor for turn-by-turn data. But I agree that the end result is a mapping platform that is far ahead of anyone else thanks to Google's significant investment and resources. I don't expect Google to pull its map app from iOS because it is a very valuable demographic to collect data from and target. Also, Apple already has a large hole on its balance sheet trying to catch up to Google in mapping. It started around the time they very publicly fired Forstall for the whole iOS 6 maps fiasco.
- cheeze 9y ago
  I agree with you but don't think that Google Scholar and Maps are even close to the same magnitude of product.
  - snarf 9y ago
    True, one of the X projects like Glass would be a better direct comparison in terms of resources and headcount. Google Scholar was just the first thing that popped into my mind when thinking of a Google product that is a social charity. Which, of course, is not the right way to think about Maps since the location data they collect is probably some of the most valuable data for their ad targeting.
    - gmueckl 9y ago
      Let me try to describe Scholar from a different angle: Google relies on a lot of experts in their respective fields in order to be successful. And they need to stay close to the state of the art and current research. Google scholar is just the kind of database that helps with that. It makes sense to build it for internal use. And given that Google is also good at data analysis, it makes sense to open it up to the public and learn from the usage data. For example: What are hot topics? Which papers are read often in the community? This data can give an extra level of insight into what is going on in the research communities.
shubhamjain 9y ago
It's interesting how Google's projects don't spell financial returns immediately but a few years hence, they are the dominant player in that field. Management deserves credit for nurturing these project but it has always been characteristic of Google to support ambitious ideas. Google Maps was more ready than anyone else to ride the smartphone explosion. I guess they will also be more ready than everyone to cash on self-driving cars, Advanced AI, VR, and maybe youth-enhancing drugs too.
- gaius 9y ago
  It's interesting how Google's projects don't spell financial returns immediately but a few years hence, they are the dominant player in that field Hmmm, wasn't this Microsoft's business strategy too, until the regulators got involved?
  - chairmanwow 9y ago
    Wait. What are you talking about? This seems like a noteworthy story.
    - gmueckl 9y ago
      Not sure if there is. Google and MS have tons of cash to burn during the early life cycle of a new product. Thus they can iterate long and fast to get something the market wants. However, Microsoft got bashed for abusing one successful product (Windows) to eliminate competition for another (Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player). Google comes close to this with the behaviour of thier search engine which has been judged to give unfair boosts to other Google products. This kind of anticompetitive behaviour would be news. A big bank account all by itself is not.
  - toyg 9y ago
    The difference is that Google usually spearheads a field, whereas Microsoft does that when they are catching up with existing leaders. One technique advances state of the art, the other leverages a monopoly to gain commercial advantages. "Regulators" only got involved with browsers, once. You can't use that as an excuse for all the subsequent blunders by MS management. Their big tech bet was tablets and PDAs and they still got pipped by Apple and Google, without any involvement by lawyers.
NegativeLatency 9y ago
I prefer apple maps to google maps for most use cases.
- gaius 9y ago
  Nokia's Here Maps is likewise superior.
  - dx034 9y ago
    I often heard that but always found Google's navigation better. Esp in European cities, where Google Maps will show street names in the map and Here won't (as of 6 months ago). I really wanted to get away from Google maps (to not use Google for everything) but found it to be clearly superior.
    - dahauns 9y ago
      In my experience, it's actually (continental) Europe (A, D, HU, SI, CZ) that makes weaning off GM for PTP navigation rather easy...
- adjkant 9y ago
  Why?
  - stephen_g 9y ago
    Depends where you are. I’ve heard there are certain countries where Google Maps’ data isn’t actually very good. For street data and navigation. Apple Maps in Australia is pretty much the same as Google Maps, so I mainly just use Apple Maps because I can command it via Siri while driving. Google Maps has better search though if you don’t know the address, and the building outlines and street view are nice.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
dnautics 9y ago
>you can bet Apple is going to have a giant hole in their balance sheet. I wouldn't be so dramatic. My roommate uses mostly Google products but she gets by with apple maps because her car only speaks that over Bluetooth. It's not the worst experience in the world.
kbart 9y ago
"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 fine with any other reasonable leader and enough resources. The key point of technological success is the right time and place, so Google Maps were successful mostly because there was a huge need for them during smartphone and cheap cellular data surge, M. Mayer just happened to be a leader then and did her job (just as probably hundreds of engineers and lower ranking managers). EDIT: Seems like my knowledge on Google Maps is a bit dated as I stated Here's offline map capabilities as an advantage. Still, the point stands and I still use Here as my go-to maps.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  > "S. Jobs created iPhone", "M. Mayer created Google Maps" etc., there were whole teams of smart people working on these projects Of course there were smart people working on it. But someone has to have long term and execution vision to make these happen Today it's obvious that was the path, at the time, not so much
  - gaius 9y ago
    I credit Jobs with obsessive attention to detail. Legend tells that when engineers brought him the iPod prototype and swore it couldn't be made any smaller he didn't even switch it on, he just dropped it in his fish tank and saw bubbles of air come out, then told the engineers there was still scope to make it smaller. Whereas Tim Cook is only fixated on whether it can show an animated poop icon.
  - kbart 9y ago
    Smartphones were obvious decades before iPhone (see Sci-Fi and PDA's), it's just that technology wasn't mature enough before. The rest is just a speculation -- I might say that S. Jobs could had been replaced by Joe and iPhone would have been a success anyway, you may might disagree and there's no way to prove one point or another.
rplnt 9y ago
> Many people don't realize why Google maps are so much better than anything out there. Absolutely not true. I don't use Google Maps in Czech Republic at all as there is a solid local map provider[1] - (they offer whole world through OSM, so I use that on phone as well[2], but it's not that great). They lost some edge with Google going full-textured 3D few years back (actually the Czech map had it sooner, just not as useful). But other than that much cleaner rendering, equally good aerial or street view, better routing, POIs, richer layers ... (edit: and two huge UX advantages over GM: no stupid random rotation - North is UP, and a very quick and precise zoom by holding control) Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if there were similar stories in other countries. 1. https://en.mapy.cz/ https://en.mapy.cz/ 2. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.mapy https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.mapy or recently released as https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.windymaps https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.wind... (haven't tried it)
- tigershark 9y ago
  To me it seems to have a much less detailed view compared to google maps in all the places that I quickly tried. How can you proclaim that google maps is not much better than everything out there bringing this low detailed map as an example?
  - rplnt 9y ago
    What do you mean less detailed? Any examples?
    - tigershark 9y ago
      I checked both London and a small city in Italy and there is simply no comparison looking at the building details.
      - rplnt 9y ago
        I explicitly said it's for one specific country...
Grue3 9y ago
In Russia, Yandex Maps [1] and 2GIS [2] are superior to Google Maps. Particularly the latter, since they actually employ humans to collect information about businesses so they always have accurate business hours and locations (it only works in select cities though). [1] http://maps.yandex.ru http://maps.yandex.ru [2] https://2gis.ru/moscow https://2gis.ru/moscow
aluhut 9y ago
No love for OpenStreetMaps here? In Germany it is often superior to everything out there. Especially due to the mappers/updaters motivation and nice gamification tools like StreetComplete or more professional tools like Vespucci. https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vespucci http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vespucci
- tigershark 9y ago
  Last time that I checked google maps was vastly superior in all the aspects.
  - aluhut 9y ago
    I use it frequently. It's not. Especially regarding updating businesses, small roads (and road quality), paths, opening hours, closed roads&paths/construction sites, bike maps, everything regarding detailed information basically. I have been adding bus stop markers for blind people or types of pedestrian crossings, recycling containers, street light, to OSM with StreetComplete. There is so much more there. Next time, please elaborate on such blunt statements since I believe it may be worse somewhere but it's not generally.
    - Freak_NL 9y ago
      Or, if OpenStreetMap is lacking in your local area, help out! OpenStreetMap thrives when local mappers are involved. Compare this section of a Dutch city: Google: https://www.google.nl/maps/@53.1983621,5.767509,16z?hl=nl https://www.google.nl/maps/@53.1983621,5.767509,16z?hl=nl OpenStreetMap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/53.1986/5.7679 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/53.1986/5.7679 Apple: (I guess Apple maps can't be linked to on the web?) It also helps a lot if your government can be persuaded to open up their geographical data. All the building outlines are right there on the map in the Netherlands, up to date to within weeks, because the Dutch OpenStreetMap volunteers work with government data that is permissively licensed and cleared for use with OpenStreetMap. In fact, mistakes in that data set are also picked up by the local OpenStreetMap mappers, and reported back to the government cadastral map. Everyone benefits.
gaius 9y ago
I would actually give lot of credit to Marissa Mayer Would you also credit her for the rise in Yahoo!'s share price, or did she merely happen to be there when the earlier investment in Alibaba started to pay off?
lucideer 9y ago
> Many people don't realize why Google maps are so much better than anything out there. Really have to chime in here to echo other comments - this statement is astounding. Given the resources that have been available to them, and the time they've spent on developing their platform and data, it's amazing how bad Google maps is compared to everything else. Google Street View has unparalleled photographic data, and their very cool 3d extrusion of satellite data are nice features that still give them a competitive edge, but otherwise, on a purely cartographic level, Google Maps is really bad. Aside from Nokia and Apple, OSM's data through well-made interfaces by Maps.ME, Mapbox, Mapzen, etc. (intermediates necessitated by OSM's lack of financial resources for maintaining hosted tileservers) are all far better than Google's.
- joshvm 9y ago
  3D extrusion of satellite data is nice in some cases - have a look at some of the more interesting remote islands. In most cases though it's significantly degraded the quality of the photo maps because the imagery is warped and has artifacts all over it, even in 2D. If you want a real map, then Bing is the best solution in the UK because they partnered with the Ordnance Survey. OS maps are the civilian gold standard.
  - lucideer 9y ago
    Are Bing partnered with OS or are they just using their data because it's open[0]? [0] https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/products/opendata.html https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/pro...
    - joshvm 9y ago
      The free map is 1:250k, but Bing Maps uses the 1:50k I think (it could be the 1:25k though, it's very detailed and has stuff like footpaths). It certainly looks better than the 1:250k. Have a look at https://binged.it/2BFM0UA https://binged.it/2BFM0UA And compare to the OS 1:25k example image: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/products/25k-raster.html https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/pro...
retSava 9y ago
I did a small comparison of a few web services: https://imgur.com/a/4WEJ4 https://imgur.com/a/4WEJ4 I grew annoyed at Google maps. It didn't show street names and numbers, and overall little detail, meaning that even if I (with GPS) easily found my location, it was hard to orient myself, and discover things around me. Things like "I know ABC is close to XYZ, I just need to find it by looking around XYZ" is really hard. edit: and by small, I mean small. Nothing like the TFA, but grounded in a Swedish suburb (50k inhabitants), which is more meaningful to me. Also, I didn't have an apple-device at the time so no Apple maps included.
notrly 9y ago
What I don't realize is how Waze, owned by Google, has more roads (like 50% more, easily) and has house numbers compared to google maps, which has no house numbers and barely any roads, here in Lithuania.
- uptown 9y ago
  This is their answer to how, though it doesn't answer the "why" question: "The maps are completely separated. Waze and Google do share traffic info and reports. Waze uses Google maps database for search (besides our own db ofcourse). Sometimes Google maps data is imported into Waze. Streets, streetnames, parking lots.." https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=221104 https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=221104
biztos 9y ago
I was just on a road trip through Spain, France, Italy and Slovenia. Google Maps was good enough for road navigation but not perfect, and some things I really would have expected to work did not: location of service stations on the highway comes to mind. When searching for places in European cities large and small, Google is missing a ton of information and much of what it has is wrong. Opening times, for instance, or which thing is a bar or a restaurant or a bakery or a shop. And we found the main party bar in three different (smallish) cities, totally unknown to Google. Thank God we're still social enough to ask the locals. :-) My sense is that the map data that can be acquired programmatically is very good on Google, and anything requiring human input or verification is relatively weak, especially outside the USA. This is presumably a big opportunity, long-term, since it's getting easier to have robots acquire data but anything high-touch seems uninteresting to AlphaGoo.
- falcolas 9y ago
  > data that can be acquired programmatically is very good on Google, and anything requiring human input or verification is relatively weak I think you've described Google as a whole with this one sentence. YouTube content classification. Web site content identification. Account abuse. Their porn filters. There are as many examples as there are Google data products.
- jon-wood 9y ago
  > My sense is that the map data that can be acquired programmatically is very good on Google, and anything requiring human input or verification is relatively weak, especially outside the USA. Their Local Guides program in Maps is clearly a direct reaction to this, they even explicitly ask you to sign up with a message saying "we need help from a human". Once you're signed up you'll occasionally be asked a series of yes or no style questions about places you've visited, ranging from "Does this place have disabled access" to "Would you consider this a classy place". They also encourage you to do things like adding the opening hours of places they don't know about, or confirming that places are still in business.
dhekir 9y ago
Google Maps tends to thrive where there are lots of people, at least in my region. I live in a medium-sized town with lots of new buildings under construction, and Google Maps seems frozen in time. I even registered as Local Guide and tried adding a new restaurant in May. Still waiting. There are inexistent shops, duplicated restaurants (when they changed name, the old remains but a new one has been added next to it), and mislabeled buildings. I quit trying to work for free for Google, they take too long to accept my changes.
bedhead 9y ago
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.
BubuIIC 9y ago
Except from searching for addresses I find that OpenStreetMap offers a vastly better data source, nicer rendering and far superior routing capabilities. This come from an admittedly from the PoV of not using a smartphone with google service, so it's either fully offline maps or online vector maps in the open source, well supported OsmAnd app or using the sluggish google maps website. Also I'm in Germany which has by far the best OSM map quality I have seen so far. And I almost exclusively cycle everywhere and every time I tried using google maps It sent me through some 2km cobblestone road 5 min after starting. But I still find the Mapnik default rendering style very pleasant to look at. As an additional benefit I can just fix OSM error on the fly, on my Phone, whether I'm online or offline and queue the update for later. There is really no competition here... Edit: I forgot one of my main criticism of google maps. I mainly stopped using it in the webbrowser because it was getting sooooo slow. openstreetmap.org loads almost instantly.
wott 9y ago
I find Google Maps a PITA to use since the last big revamp of its interface a couple of years ago. It became slow, unreliable (tiles never loading, UI element never loading, freezes) and unpractical (moving routes points became horrible, I started failing half of the time to drag the route, removing points also often causes extra points of interest or route points to be added: a nightmare). It used to be very good with the previous user interface. Now I use my national map provider (when I do not need Streetview) or Openstreetmap (when I do not need aerial pictures or Streetview). And for routing, I may use some cycling map, or Google maps when I hope I won't have to move any point (starting and ending point specified by address, and no change of route).
- abruzzi 9y ago
  The biggest loss with the Google maps redesign is that I am limited to 10 via points. If I am creating a route I frequently use far more than that to ensure that the route goes where I want it to go. The only thing that keeps me using Google maps is street view, which to me is 1000x more useful than building shapes (most of the roads I ride were last street viewed in 2008, so I wish more resources would be put into updating the images.)
ViktorMihov 9y ago
Google is better in some areas and is very good at sourcing, that's for sure. For those interested, the recent report[1] by Strategy Analytics might be relevant. It compares the strengths and weaknesses of Apple, Google, HERE and TomTom. And no, Google is not “much better than anything out there“ [1] https://www.strategyanalytics.com/strategy-analytics/news/strategy-analytics-press-releases/strategy-analytics-press-release/2017/12/04/strategy-analytics-here-extends-leadership-in-mobile-location-platforms#.WjqFSxM-cUE https://www.strategyanalytics.com/strategy-analytics/news/st...
DonaldFisk 9y ago
Bing maps use Ordnance Survey for the UK, which is far better than Google maps. OpenStreetMap also has better maps than Google. However, Google has comprehensive streetview and more up-to-date aerial photography.
userium 9y ago
True. Also, Google has a great Places Search API. You can build so many more things with the Google maps libraries, unlike with other maps. For example just built https://stayintech.com/ https://stayintech.com/ with Google Maps API, after considering all the available options.
binarycrusader 9y ago
It's not always better than everything out there; where I live in the greater Seattle area (in particular my current home), Google Maps doesn't have an accurate location-to-address mapping (it's not an apartment either) and the map visualization is not quite right either. However, Bing and Apple maps get the correct location and have the right visualizations for the same area.
redwood 9y ago
This is not accurate. MM was a late entrant and didn't like being there, had minimal impact.
tripzilch 9y ago
> its basically social charity in form of a free app. Sorry but that's almost comically out-of-touch with today's reality. If you've been paying any attention you know exactly what Google takes from its users in return for this "social charity". Honestly, even calling it a "social charity" is kind of offensive to actual social charities. They're not giving away this data, or opening it up, it's entirely Google's property and they're actively putting up multiple barriers to discourage people from using the service without giving up their privacy, location data and everything. Imagine a corporation using a "social charity" as a lure like that. If that's a "social charity" then so is Facebook's thing with the "free internet" in India.

puzzle 9y ago

The more pedestrian reason for Google's investment for its own maps was that the licensing costs for data to use in turn-by-turn navigation, which is many times as expensive compared to simpler uses, were going to skyrocket once mobile adoption took off as projected. You could give millions or billions to TomTom, which is what Apple has been doing, or you could pour the same amounts into creating your own datasets, allowing you to do a lot more than navigation, i.e. anything.

zaptheimpaler 9y ago
Agree, Google has fundamentally understood the power of information/data since the very beginning - its part of their DNA.
- Splines 9y ago
  I think they understood the economics of depending on an external source for a core part of their business. Much like Netflix, they understood that the way forward was to generate their own content.
  - tatersolid 9y ago
    Then why is Netflix depending on AWS for the core of their business (their delivery platform)? Prime video is their main competitor. It’s like UPS renting its trucks from fedEx.
    - bfred_it 9y ago
      Probably because AWS is still more efficient/reliable than building/maintaining your own. What you say already happens for MVNOs and it works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operato...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - adjkant 9y ago
      Generating their own content and being fully self-sufficient are two different things. It's not like Amazon can claim all of the Netflix Original Series as theirs. I think you're trying to die on a technical hill in opposition to a non-tech point. That's not the point the post is making.
    - ggg9990 9y ago
      Netflix's AWS purchases are commodity -- their customers would not suffer if they migrated away from AWS, either in product quality or price. Not so for Apple Maps and TomTom.
    - saagarjha 9y ago
      > Prime video is their main competitor. They have a gentleman's agreement with Amazon–like Apple does with Samsung. It's mutually beneficial for both parties so there's no point antagonizing each other.
    - clairity 9y ago
      netflix realized that content delivery is no longer a core part of the business when they stopped sending out DVDs in the mail. instead, they've spent all their energies since on amassing the most lucrative content they can. this is why they started making their own original series and why disney has (implicitly) made the argument that they should be allowed to buy fox. same as in the UPS & fedex example. the trucks are not core to the business. efficient logistics is.
- reacweb 9y ago
  I think Google is not seeking power for power or money for money. Google's focus is AI. Google needs the full view of people behaviour in order to build AI. Traveling is a good domain to study human behaviour and traffic optimisation. What motivate the choice of an itinerary ? Why someone choose to not follow waze advices ? What would be the best strategy ?
  - gaius 9y ago
    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.
    - reacweb 9y ago
      Richly ? Like in terminator or like in Asimov's foundation ?
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Like in Paperclip Maximizer, except instead of paperclips, the universe will be tiled with humans forever clicking on ads.
        sillysaurus3 9y ago
        Like Cookie Clicker, but clicking ads instead of cookies.
      - freeflight 9y ago
        It would probably be way more absurd like an infomercial version of The Matrix; Whole generations of humans born for the sole purpose of watching ads, all organized and kept in check by a "benevolent" AI which constantly creates new ads, for no particular purpose.
        jon-wood 9y ago
aorav 9y ago
> You could give millions or billions to TomTom, which is what Apple has been doing, or you could pour the same amounts into creating your own datasets, allowing you to do a lot more than navigation, i.e. anything. It is rumored that TomTom and Apple have a data deal. Apple gets maps from TomTom (for free, or a strongly reduced price), TomTom gets Apple maps user location data which they use for their traffic service. How the deal works exactly isn't known (financial details are not public). But it's quite clear Apple doesn't pay a lot to make use of or improve TomTom maps.
rmc 9y ago
It's kind of a shame that Google doesn't release all this data they have collected/created as open data.
- slackoverflower 9y ago
  That's like McDonalds giving away food. Or Ford giving away cars. Google's business quite literally is data.
  - rmc 9y ago
    Sure, but Google does claim to be an open company, and giving things back.
    - puzzle 9y ago
      Among other things, they open sourced the Ceres library, which the imaging pipeline relies on.
  - gspetr 9y ago
    > McDonalds giving away food. Not the best example. McDonalds is so much more than food: http://blog.wallstreetsurvivor.com/2015/10/08/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burger/ http://blog.wallstreetsurvivor.com/2015/10/08/mcdonalds-beyo...

sidcool 9y ago

That's a very good point. Many a times engineers have an excellent use case/rationale for investing in a piece of technology, but they are unable to convert it into the language that business would understand. Marissa and many others have mastered that art.

snarf 9y ago

Google has plenty of low revenue, unprofitable products, some of which are social charities like Google Scholar. I don't think Mayer deserves as much credit as a visionary as you are suggesting. It was more about empire building after a sudden demotion and not paying increasing licensing costs to a third party vendor for turn-by-turn data. But I agree that the end result is a mapping platform that is far ahead of anyone else thanks to Google's significant investment and resources. I don't expect Google to pull its map app from iOS because it is a very valuable demographic to collect data from and target. Also, Apple already has a large hole on its balance sheet trying to catch up to Google in mapping. It started around the time they very publicly fired Forstall for the whole iOS 6 maps fiasco.

cheeze 9y ago
I agree with you but don't think that Google Scholar and Maps are even close to the same magnitude of product.
- snarf 9y ago
  True, one of the X projects like Glass would be a better direct comparison in terms of resources and headcount. Google Scholar was just the first thing that popped into my mind when thinking of a Google product that is a social charity. Which, of course, is not the right way to think about Maps since the location data they collect is probably some of the most valuable data for their ad targeting.
  - gmueckl 9y ago
    Let me try to describe Scholar from a different angle: Google relies on a lot of experts in their respective fields in order to be successful. And they need to stay close to the state of the art and current research. Google scholar is just the kind of database that helps with that. It makes sense to build it for internal use. And given that Google is also good at data analysis, it makes sense to open it up to the public and learn from the usage data. For example: What are hot topics? Which papers are read often in the community? This data can give an extra level of insight into what is going on in the research communities.

shubhamjain 9y ago

It's interesting how Google's projects don't spell financial returns immediately but a few years hence, they are the dominant player in that field. Management deserves credit for nurturing these project but it has always been characteristic of Google to support ambitious ideas. Google Maps was more ready than anyone else to ride the smartphone explosion. I guess they will also be more ready than everyone to cash on self-driving cars, Advanced AI, VR, and maybe youth-enhancing drugs too.

gaius 9y ago
It's interesting how Google's projects don't spell financial returns immediately but a few years hence, they are the dominant player in that field Hmmm, wasn't this Microsoft's business strategy too, until the regulators got involved?
- chairmanwow 9y ago
  Wait. What are you talking about? This seems like a noteworthy story.
  - gmueckl 9y ago
    Not sure if there is. Google and MS have tons of cash to burn during the early life cycle of a new product. Thus they can iterate long and fast to get something the market wants. However, Microsoft got bashed for abusing one successful product (Windows) to eliminate competition for another (Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player). Google comes close to this with the behaviour of thier search engine which has been judged to give unfair boosts to other Google products. This kind of anticompetitive behaviour would be news. A big bank account all by itself is not.
- toyg 9y ago
  The difference is that Google usually spearheads a field, whereas Microsoft does that when they are catching up with existing leaders. One technique advances state of the art, the other leverages a monopoly to gain commercial advantages. "Regulators" only got involved with browsers, once. You can't use that as an excuse for all the subsequent blunders by MS management. Their big tech bet was tablets and PDAs and they still got pipped by Apple and Google, without any involvement by lawyers.

NegativeLatency 9y ago

I prefer apple maps to google maps for most use cases.

gaius 9y ago
Nokia's Here Maps is likewise superior.
- dx034 9y ago
  I often heard that but always found Google's navigation better. Esp in European cities, where Google Maps will show street names in the map and Here won't (as of 6 months ago). I really wanted to get away from Google maps (to not use Google for everything) but found it to be clearly superior.
  - dahauns 9y ago
    In my experience, it's actually (continental) Europe (A, D, HU, SI, CZ) that makes weaning off GM for PTP navigation rather easy...
adjkant 9y ago
Why?
- stephen_g 9y ago
  Depends where you are. I’ve heard there are certain countries where Google Maps’ data isn’t actually very good. For street data and navigation. Apple Maps in Australia is pretty much the same as Google Maps, so I mainly just use Apple Maps because I can command it via Siri while driving. Google Maps has better search though if you don’t know the address, and the building outlines and street view are nice.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

dnautics 9y ago

>you can bet Apple is going to have a giant hole in their balance sheet. I wouldn't be so dramatic. My roommate uses mostly Google products but she gets by with apple maps because her car only speaks that over Bluetooth. It's not the worst experience in the world.

kbart 9y ago

"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 fine with any other reasonable leader and enough resources. The key point of technological success is the right time and place, so Google Maps were successful mostly because there was a huge need for them during smartphone and cheap cellular data surge, M. Mayer just happened to be a leader then and did her job (just as probably hundreds of engineers and lower ranking managers). EDIT: Seems like my knowledge on Google Maps is a bit dated as I stated Here's offline map capabilities as an advantage. Still, the point stands and I still use Here as my go-to maps.

raverbashing 9y ago
> "S. Jobs created iPhone", "M. Mayer created Google Maps" etc., there were whole teams of smart people working on these projects Of course there were smart people working on it. But someone has to have long term and execution vision to make these happen Today it's obvious that was the path, at the time, not so much
- gaius 9y ago
  I credit Jobs with obsessive attention to detail. Legend tells that when engineers brought him the iPod prototype and swore it couldn't be made any smaller he didn't even switch it on, he just dropped it in his fish tank and saw bubbles of air come out, then told the engineers there was still scope to make it smaller. Whereas Tim Cook is only fixated on whether it can show an animated poop icon.
- kbart 9y ago
  Smartphones were obvious decades before iPhone (see Sci-Fi and PDA's), it's just that technology wasn't mature enough before. The rest is just a speculation -- I might say that S. Jobs could had been replaced by Joe and iPhone would have been a success anyway, you may might disagree and there's no way to prove one point or another.

rplnt 9y ago

> Many people don't realize why Google maps are so much better than anything out there. Absolutely not true. I don't use Google Maps in Czech Republic at all as there is a solid local map provider[1] - (they offer whole world through OSM, so I use that on phone as well[2], but it's not that great). They lost some edge with Google going full-textured 3D few years back (actually the Czech map had it sooner, just not as useful). But other than that much cleaner rendering, equally good aerial or street view, better routing, POIs, richer layers ... (edit: and two huge UX advantages over GM: no stupid random rotation - North is UP, and a very quick and precise zoom by holding control) Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if there were similar stories in other countries. 1. https://en.mapy.cz/ https://en.mapy.cz/ 2. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.mapy https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.mapy or recently released as https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.windymaps https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.wind... (haven't tried it)

tigershark 9y ago
To me it seems to have a much less detailed view compared to google maps in all the places that I quickly tried. How can you proclaim that google maps is not much better than everything out there bringing this low detailed map as an example?
- rplnt 9y ago
  What do you mean less detailed? Any examples?
  - tigershark 9y ago
    I checked both London and a small city in Italy and there is simply no comparison looking at the building details.
    - rplnt 9y ago
      I explicitly said it's for one specific country...

Grue3 9y ago

In Russia, Yandex Maps [1] and 2GIS [2] are superior to Google Maps. Particularly the latter, since they actually employ humans to collect information about businesses so they always have accurate business hours and locations (it only works in select cities though). [1] http://maps.yandex.ru http://maps.yandex.ru [2] https://2gis.ru/moscow https://2gis.ru/moscow

aluhut 9y ago

No love for OpenStreetMaps here? In Germany it is often superior to everything out there. Especially due to the mappers/updaters motivation and nice gamification tools like StreetComplete or more professional tools like Vespucci. https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vespucci http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vespucci

tigershark 9y ago
Last time that I checked google maps was vastly superior in all the aspects.
- aluhut 9y ago
  I use it frequently. It's not. Especially regarding updating businesses, small roads (and road quality), paths, opening hours, closed roads&paths/construction sites, bike maps, everything regarding detailed information basically. I have been adding bus stop markers for blind people or types of pedestrian crossings, recycling containers, street light, to OSM with StreetComplete. There is so much more there. Next time, please elaborate on such blunt statements since I believe it may be worse somewhere but it's not generally.
  - Freak_NL 9y ago
    Or, if OpenStreetMap is lacking in your local area, help out! OpenStreetMap thrives when local mappers are involved. Compare this section of a Dutch city: Google: https://www.google.nl/maps/@53.1983621,5.767509,16z?hl=nl https://www.google.nl/maps/@53.1983621,5.767509,16z?hl=nl OpenStreetMap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/53.1986/5.7679 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/53.1986/5.7679 Apple: (I guess Apple maps can't be linked to on the web?) It also helps a lot if your government can be persuaded to open up their geographical data. All the building outlines are right there on the map in the Netherlands, up to date to within weeks, because the Dutch OpenStreetMap volunteers work with government data that is permissively licensed and cleared for use with OpenStreetMap. In fact, mistakes in that data set are also picked up by the local OpenStreetMap mappers, and reported back to the government cadastral map. Everyone benefits.

gaius 9y ago

I would actually give lot of credit to Marissa Mayer Would you also credit her for the rise in Yahoo!'s share price, or did she merely happen to be there when the earlier investment in Alibaba started to pay off?

lucideer 9y ago

> Many people don't realize why Google maps are so much better than anything out there. Really have to chime in here to echo other comments - this statement is astounding. Given the resources that have been available to them, and the time they've spent on developing their platform and data, it's amazing how bad Google maps is compared to everything else. Google Street View has unparalleled photographic data, and their very cool 3d extrusion of satellite data are nice features that still give them a competitive edge, but otherwise, on a purely cartographic level, Google Maps is really bad. Aside from Nokia and Apple, OSM's data through well-made interfaces by Maps.ME, Mapbox, Mapzen, etc. (intermediates necessitated by OSM's lack of financial resources for maintaining hosted tileservers) are all far better than Google's.

joshvm 9y ago
3D extrusion of satellite data is nice in some cases - have a look at some of the more interesting remote islands. In most cases though it's significantly degraded the quality of the photo maps because the imagery is warped and has artifacts all over it, even in 2D. If you want a real map, then Bing is the best solution in the UK because they partnered with the Ordnance Survey. OS maps are the civilian gold standard.
- lucideer 9y ago
  Are Bing partnered with OS or are they just using their data because it's open[0]? [0] https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/products/opendata.html https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/pro...
  - joshvm 9y ago
    The free map is 1:250k, but Bing Maps uses the 1:50k I think (it could be the 1:25k though, it's very detailed and has stuff like footpaths). It certainly looks better than the 1:250k. Have a look at https://binged.it/2BFM0UA https://binged.it/2BFM0UA And compare to the OS 1:25k example image: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/products/25k-raster.html https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/pro...

retSava 9y ago

I did a small comparison of a few web services: https://imgur.com/a/4WEJ4 https://imgur.com/a/4WEJ4 I grew annoyed at Google maps. It didn't show street names and numbers, and overall little detail, meaning that even if I (with GPS) easily found my location, it was hard to orient myself, and discover things around me. Things like "I know ABC is close to XYZ, I just need to find it by looking around XYZ" is really hard. edit: and by small, I mean small. Nothing like the TFA, but grounded in a Swedish suburb (50k inhabitants), which is more meaningful to me. Also, I didn't have an apple-device at the time so no Apple maps included.

notrly 9y ago

What I don't realize is how Waze, owned by Google, has more roads (like 50% more, easily) and has house numbers compared to google maps, which has no house numbers and barely any roads, here in Lithuania.

uptown 9y ago
This is their answer to how, though it doesn't answer the "why" question: "The maps are completely separated. Waze and Google do share traffic info and reports. Waze uses Google maps database for search (besides our own db ofcourse). Sometimes Google maps data is imported into Waze. Streets, streetnames, parking lots.." https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=221104 https://www.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=221104

biztos 9y ago

I was just on a road trip through Spain, France, Italy and Slovenia. Google Maps was good enough for road navigation but not perfect, and some things I really would have expected to work did not: location of service stations on the highway comes to mind. When searching for places in European cities large and small, Google is missing a ton of information and much of what it has is wrong. Opening times, for instance, or which thing is a bar or a restaurant or a bakery or a shop. And we found the main party bar in three different (smallish) cities, totally unknown to Google. Thank God we're still social enough to ask the locals. :-) My sense is that the map data that can be acquired programmatically is very good on Google, and anything requiring human input or verification is relatively weak, especially outside the USA. This is presumably a big opportunity, long-term, since it's getting easier to have robots acquire data but anything high-touch seems uninteresting to AlphaGoo.

falcolas 9y ago
> data that can be acquired programmatically is very good on Google, and anything requiring human input or verification is relatively weak I think you've described Google as a whole with this one sentence. YouTube content classification. Web site content identification. Account abuse. Their porn filters. There are as many examples as there are Google data products.
jon-wood 9y ago
> My sense is that the map data that can be acquired programmatically is very good on Google, and anything requiring human input or verification is relatively weak, especially outside the USA. Their Local Guides program in Maps is clearly a direct reaction to this, they even explicitly ask you to sign up with a message saying "we need help from a human". Once you're signed up you'll occasionally be asked a series of yes or no style questions about places you've visited, ranging from "Does this place have disabled access" to "Would you consider this a classy place". They also encourage you to do things like adding the opening hours of places they don't know about, or confirming that places are still in business.

dhekir 9y ago

Google Maps tends to thrive where there are lots of people, at least in my region. I live in a medium-sized town with lots of new buildings under construction, and Google Maps seems frozen in time. I even registered as Local Guide and tried adding a new restaurant in May. Still waiting. There are inexistent shops, duplicated restaurants (when they changed name, the old remains but a new one has been added next to it), and mislabeled buildings. I quit trying to work for free for Google, they take too long to accept my changes.

bedhead 9y ago

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.

BubuIIC 9y ago

Except from searching for addresses I find that OpenStreetMap offers a vastly better data source, nicer rendering and far superior routing capabilities. This come from an admittedly from the PoV of not using a smartphone with google service, so it's either fully offline maps or online vector maps in the open source, well supported OsmAnd app or using the sluggish google maps website. Also I'm in Germany which has by far the best OSM map quality I have seen so far. And I almost exclusively cycle everywhere and every time I tried using google maps It sent me through some 2km cobblestone road 5 min after starting. But I still find the Mapnik default rendering style very pleasant to look at. As an additional benefit I can just fix OSM error on the fly, on my Phone, whether I'm online or offline and queue the update for later. There is really no competition here... Edit: I forgot one of my main criticism of google maps. I mainly stopped using it in the webbrowser because it was getting sooooo slow. openstreetmap.org loads almost instantly.

wott 9y ago

I find Google Maps a PITA to use since the last big revamp of its interface a couple of years ago. It became slow, unreliable (tiles never loading, UI element never loading, freezes) and unpractical (moving routes points became horrible, I started failing half of the time to drag the route, removing points also often causes extra points of interest or route points to be added: a nightmare). It used to be very good with the previous user interface. Now I use my national map provider (when I do not need Streetview) or Openstreetmap (when I do not need aerial pictures or Streetview). And for routing, I may use some cycling map, or Google maps when I hope I won't have to move any point (starting and ending point specified by address, and no change of route).

abruzzi 9y ago
The biggest loss with the Google maps redesign is that I am limited to 10 via points. If I am creating a route I frequently use far more than that to ensure that the route goes where I want it to go. The only thing that keeps me using Google maps is street view, which to me is 1000x more useful than building shapes (most of the roads I ride were last street viewed in 2008, so I wish more resources would be put into updating the images.)

ViktorMihov 9y ago

Google is better in some areas and is very good at sourcing, that's for sure. For those interested, the recent report[1] by Strategy Analytics might be relevant. It compares the strengths and weaknesses of Apple, Google, HERE and TomTom. And no, Google is not “much better than anything out there“ [1] https://www.strategyanalytics.com/strategy-analytics/news/strategy-analytics-press-releases/strategy-analytics-press-release/2017/12/04/strategy-analytics-here-extends-leadership-in-mobile-location-platforms#.WjqFSxM-cUE https://www.strategyanalytics.com/strategy-analytics/news/st...

DonaldFisk 9y ago

Bing maps use Ordnance Survey for the UK, which is far better than Google maps. OpenStreetMap also has better maps than Google. However, Google has comprehensive streetview and more up-to-date aerial photography.

userium 9y ago

True. Also, Google has a great Places Search API. You can build so many more things with the Google maps libraries, unlike with other maps. For example just built https://stayintech.com/ https://stayintech.com/ with Google Maps API, after considering all the available options.

binarycrusader 9y ago

It's not always better than everything out there; where I live in the greater Seattle area (in particular my current home), Google Maps doesn't have an accurate location-to-address mapping (it's not an apartment either) and the map visualization is not quite right either. However, Bing and Apple maps get the correct location and have the right visualizations for the same area.

redwood 9y ago

This is not accurate. MM was a late entrant and didn't like being there, had minimal impact.

tripzilch 9y ago

> its basically social charity in form of a free app. Sorry but that's almost comically out-of-touch with today's reality. If you've been paying any attention you know exactly what Google takes from its users in return for this "social charity". Honestly, even calling it a "social charity" is kind of offensive to actual social charities. They're not giving away this data, or opening it up, it's entirely Google's property and they're actively putting up multiple barriers to discourage people from using the service without giving up their privacy, location data and everything. Imagine a corporation using a "social charity" as a lure like that. If that's a "social charity" then so is Facebook's thing with the "free internet" in India.