4 ms·

Your analogies make no sense. We’re talking of Google Maps the platform and its B2B offering whereas Netflix, cable and phone companies are services for consum

Your analogies make no sense. We’re talking of Google Maps the platform and its B2B offering whereas Netflix, cable and phone companies are services for consumers with fixed and reasonable consumer-level monthly subscriptions. If you haven’t built an app on top of Google Maps, then you pretty much have no idea how much it costs and have zero valuable input you can give. Also, this isn’t the first time Google is doing this bait and switch. They did it before with App Engine as well, first fooling early adopters in order to gather popularity and then raising prices enough that it made plenty of startups to move off the platform. Along with other blunders in their products, it makes one wonder how anyone can trust any of their offerings long term. Too bad the US has lost its anti-trust teeth btw, because what Google is doing is to subsidize its offerings until they get popular, effectively using their monopoly to gain popularity in other markets, thus hurting their competition unfairly.

ryanmercer 8y ago
>Also, this isn’t the first time Google is doing this bait and switch. It isn't a bait and switch. It's introductory pricing. They attracted developers and businesses to a product people essentially weren't using, they let people work with it at or near a loss and now that they have a customer base they are trying to make it profitable. Yes, they'll lose some of their users that want a free ride. They'll also retain many users that will happily pay under the new pricing scheme because they recognize the value add and find it to be a worthy business expense. It's no different than companies like MailChimp offering free-for-so-many-subscriber pricing and then requiring you to pay once you reach a threshold they've determined makes you a billable customer. Or a company like Evernote allowing you to save so much data (what a map tile is) and use so many devices a month for free before requiring you to subscribe at one of the paid tiers. Or a company like Pushbullet allowing you to mirror so many SMS messages a month before charging. If you can't easily handle the pricing change, then you are probably wasting your time using it in the first place and need to discontinue using maps anyway or reassess your own business model.
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  You seem to have read an entirely different story. The customer Google is losing here is clearly willing to pay, not expecting a free ride. And there is absolutely no similarity between your MailChimp example and what Google has done in this case. The customer didn't complain about costs rising as the number of users starts to exceed an existing threshold. That said, I wouldn't be so quick to call for the regulator. All businesses have a responsibility to select suppliers carefully and manage their dependency on any one of them. It appears to me that the value of contracts has been forgotten.
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    >You seem to have read an entirely different story. The customer Google is losing here is clearly willing to pay, not expecting a free ride. Yet they spend the entire post whining about it.
    - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
      The post that I have read complains about an extreme and sudden change in Google's pricing structure and then goes on to compare alternatives for most of post, all of which are non-free. They also say "Of course, we always knew that as we grew larger, there would be cost to using Google Maps."

ryanmercer 8y ago

>Also, this isn’t the first time Google is doing this bait and switch. It isn't a bait and switch. It's introductory pricing. They attracted developers and businesses to a product people essentially weren't using, they let people work with it at or near a loss and now that they have a customer base they are trying to make it profitable. Yes, they'll lose some of their users that want a free ride. They'll also retain many users that will happily pay under the new pricing scheme because they recognize the value add and find it to be a worthy business expense. It's no different than companies like MailChimp offering free-for-so-many-subscriber pricing and then requiring you to pay once you reach a threshold they've determined makes you a billable customer. Or a company like Evernote allowing you to save so much data (what a map tile is) and use so many devices a month for free before requiring you to subscribe at one of the paid tiers. Or a company like Pushbullet allowing you to mirror so many SMS messages a month before charging. If you can't easily handle the pricing change, then you are probably wasting your time using it in the first place and need to discontinue using maps anyway or reassess your own business model.

fauigerzigerk 8y ago
You seem to have read an entirely different story. The customer Google is losing here is clearly willing to pay, not expecting a free ride. And there is absolutely no similarity between your MailChimp example and what Google has done in this case. The customer didn't complain about costs rising as the number of users starts to exceed an existing threshold. That said, I wouldn't be so quick to call for the regulator. All businesses have a responsibility to select suppliers carefully and manage their dependency on any one of them. It appears to me that the value of contracts has been forgotten.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  >You seem to have read an entirely different story. The customer Google is losing here is clearly willing to pay, not expecting a free ride. Yet they spend the entire post whining about it.
  - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
    The post that I have read complains about an extreme and sudden change in Google's pricing structure and then goes on to compare alternatives for most of post, all of which are non-free. They also say "Of course, we always knew that as we grew larger, there would be cost to using Google Maps."