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Anyone who had to take an Uber after they switched away from Google Maps and onto their in-house half-baked mapping/navigation solution knows this is a huge pro
by pj_mukh 8y ago
Anyone who had to take an Uber after they switched away from Google Maps and onto their in-house half-baked mapping/navigation solution knows this is a huge problem.
I'm assuming like all mapping solutions it'll get better but for now, it's just full of bad routes, over-optimizing turns, out-of-date detours (for MONTHS!) and non-sensical U-turns
- 0xDEFC0DE 8y agoNot to defend Uber/NIH syndrome, but if Google wanted to specifically charge Uber more for maps because of usage, could they legally do that? Maybe the rewrites are risk management?
- giancarlostoro 8y agoGoogle increased maps cost for everybody though, not just Uber. https://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/features/google-maps-apis-new-pricing-impact-1907242 https://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/features/google-maps-apis-new-...
- 0xDEFC0DE 8y agoI'm asking whether only Uber could be charged more.
- anitil 8y agoYou've hit the nail on the head. Uber can't risk being one management decision from Google away from shutting down.
- Nextgrid 8y agoThey could just use a third-party (and at their scale, they can definitely negotiate a custom deal where they feed back usage data to improve the third-party’s service) or even use open source solutions like OpenStreetMaps. Even the latter (with the overhead of hosting it themselves) makes total sense at their scale.
- 0xDEFC0DE 8y agoThat'd be in a contract though, so what if Google decided to not renew and only let Uber know like a month before the contract ended? If these questions seem dumb it's because I know pretty little about legal battles in software.
- tomnipotent 8y agoI'd wager this contract has a 90+ day termination notification requirement at a minimum.