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Why should they offer a free maps service? They are a business with shareholder responsibilities, not a charity, and maps must cost them a ton of money to opera
by technotony 7y ago
Why should they offer a free maps service? They are a business with shareholder responsibilities, not a charity, and maps must cost them a ton of money to operate.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sametmax 7y agoThey already make money with it by the data it collect and the users it retains.
- Svip 7y agoOP is not saying they cannot monetise their product as they see fit (it's their product). No one is saying that. But when you have been offering something for free for years, people get used to that being the way of things, users are not going to respond well to the increase in advertisement. Had Google done this from the beginning, people would have been more accepting of it. Generally speaking, if you change a service for the worse, people are generally going to view it less favourably than had it started out how it will now become.
- stunt 7y agoI think that period was part of their investment and also helped them to improve the product. And like any other investment, they need to make money as well. I can imagine Maps is an expensive product to operate. I also hate ads and I hope they find a different way to make it reasonably profitable.
- gowld 7y agoThere is a fine line between "investment to build a product" and "dumping below cost to win consumers over via low prices, then raising prices"
- newsoul2019 7y agoJust charge me already, Google! Present me with a screen that says "Would you like Google Maps ad-free for XX.99 per year?" Sure, of course. GIVE ME THE OPTION!!
- reciprocity 7y agoGoogle already makes money hand over fist. I am not sure if what you posit holds water.
- Tsubasachan 7y agoThere aren't a lot of good alternatives to Maps though. I do find that the service is becoming more and more unusable with all the shitty product placements.
- frosted-flakes 7y agoDepends what you use it for. For driving directions, there are plenty of alternatives. An excellent one is a standalone GPS device like a Garmin nüvi or a TomTom, which works entirely offline (except traffic reports, which are received over FM radio or Bluetooth). The only time I actually use Google Maps is when I'm at my PC, and Bing maps works just as well.
- jedberg 7y agoI think if you tried using gmaps for navigation you’d find it to be a far superior to those devices. Does your TomTom tell you “turn into the driveway after the Vitamin Shop”? Because gmaps does.
- JohnFen 7y agoHonestly, I don't think I'd call that ability "far superior". If it came without cost, it would have some value, but it's not a game-changer or anything.
- jedberg 7y agoIt was a game changer for me. I would have completely missed the driveway if not for it telling me to look past the Vitamin Shop. Would have taken me five minutes to circle back around again. That seems like a big deal to me.
- JohnFen 7y agoFair enough. Different people have different needs.
- 7y ago
- robocat 7y agoYouTube adverts: I have been very impressed with Google's slow frog-cooking growth of ads on YouTube. I was also impressed with the decades long growth of advertising on TV.
- taurath 7y agoWhat changed over the last 10 years, and why wasn’t it monetized earlier? Maybe because then they wanted to make a useful service and get some data for their search ads, and now they just want more money.
- bhhaskin 7y agoThey ran all of their competition out of business.
- mythz 7y agoGoogle Maps was a revolutionary product that popularized the category, they had no competition when it was released, at least now there's Apple Maps, Open Street Map, Bing Maps, Tencent Maps. I was developing with ESRI ArcGIS at the time, ESRI was a multi-billion dollar GEO company who had no product that even came close to the instant utility Google Maps launched with. The only other product that had a similar "Wow" factor around the same time was Keyhole which we were using before Google acquired them and used it to launch "Google Earth". If anything Google Maps spawned competition in the last decade, the existing competitors like ESRI are still developing their GEO products for Internal/Enterprise use, but now there are a number of competing consumer mapping services that provide the same utility and functionality of Google Maps from large technology companies that didn't have GEO as part of their competency like: Apple Maps, Bing Maps and Tencent Maps.
- cpeterso 7y agoI just finished reading "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality" (https://amzn.com/0062673041 https://amzn.com/0062673041) about the evolution of Google Earth, Maps, and Street View. Written by one of the founders of Keyhole (the company that built what became Google Earth), the book is mostly about the founding of Keyhole and its mapping technology, but it has some insider info about the political maneuverings between Google's Search and Geo teams over owning the map ads because everyone knew it would be a big deal. The book is pretty interesting, but light on the technical details.
- johnchristopher 7y agoIt's not free and installed by default on every android devices ? You mean, I can buy a subscription and not rent the service with my search history ? Where's the sign-up button ?
- hedora 7y agoThere are tons of viable competitors to google maps, even on Android, last time I checked. They all have different monetization strategies, and all provide good enough turn by turn directions. I regularly use Here WeGo for its offline support. Sygic is probably still fine. I think Sygic moved to a freemium model, and I get the impression Here is subsidized by luxury car manufacturers. Yelp crushes google maps on search. I really don’t understand why google maps is so popular. Like search, maps is a capital intensive, commodity product with near-zero switching cost. I guess the same can be said of Coke and Pepsi, and they’re chugging along just fine. It’s a good thing I don’t work in brand management!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- johnchristopher 7y agoI don't see the differences between google maps and the alternative you suggest regarding their price or their money making strategies. > I really don’t understand why google maps is so popular. Because it's bundled on billions of devices ? And it's a product that was/is working really well for the vast majority ?
- brlewis 7y agoWhat competitor would you recommend for public transit directions?
- notyourday 7y ago> Yelp crushes google maps on search. Not even in the same ball park. Yelp's search for example does not understand that there's a RIVER between Brooklyn and Manhattan. So when I'm in Greenpoint it says there's something right there, in Manhattan when I want something local.
- Gene_Parmesan 7y agoIt isn't free. They're already monetizing your location data.
- ddalex 7y agoThey have altered the monetization. Pray they don't alter it further.
- m-p-3 7y agoThey are responsible, but I don't see how shoving ads into their end-users face is going to be seen positively. There are other ways to monetize a product, for example B2B.
- JohnFen 7y agoI don't think the issue is monetization. I think the issue is the method of monetization. Doing something like offering paid enhancements, or even an option to pay in exchange for being omitted from the ad network, would be more acceptable.
- manigandham 7y agoHave you tried Google Contributor: https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta
- JohnFen 7y agoIt's hard to tell for certain from that site, but it looks like that doesn't do what I want. What I want is to stop the data collection that is used for advertising. Does Contributer do that? Also, this looks like it's about web sites that carry Google ads (and only those sites that have decided to participate -- none of which look to be sites I use anyway), not Google's own services.
- coldtea 7y ago>Why should they offer a free maps service? The shouldn't. They should be forced to close, and Maps and Search should be provided by a non-profit, internationally controlled (UN etc), organization, not a for-profit company. That's my opinion of what would be best. Some services (like "indexing the world's knowledge") are too important to be left to private interests and be monetized via ads...
- greiskul 7y agoSome services like "indexing the world's knowledge" are too important to have a government (UN?) enforced monopoly on. Doing this would be one of the best way of killing any innovation in the area.
- rayiner 7y agoSome things are too important to be left to completely ineffective quasi-governmental organizations.
- coldtea 7y agoWell, they only took us to the moon, deliver our mail, handle invasions, wars, and other emergency situations, and so on. Oh, and they also gave us this internet thing. In fact, before the web era, they also made the best maps (e.g. the British military maps).
- manigandham 7y agoAnd today we have the ISS supplied by private space companies, UPS and Fedex and Amazon handling logistics around the world, and most aerospace and defense innovation and manufacturing handled by private contractors. Government vs private is not mutually exclusive. Like another commenter said, the US Geological Survey already has mapping data available. Adding in traffic from local agencies and weather from the National Weather Service is relatively simple so we can definitely have a neutral public maps service. None of that requires forcing Google Maps to close though.
- ddingus 7y ago
- twothamendment 7y agoYou are correct. The reverse is true too, why should contribute data to their maps service for free? I've done lot of work to add and correct roads, update business info and addresses in my area. If they want to fill the map with ads they have that right - but when they drive me (and people like me) away, their product will suffer.
- openbasic 7y agoWhy didn't you contribute to OpenStreetMap?
- twothamendment 7y agoIt has been years since I gave them a try. Their interface was horrible, but this is a good reason to try them again.
- openbasic 7y agoAlmost all free and open-source alternative have terrible UIs and crappy UX. And some have shitty content too. However, that content is done by volunteers just like you, and if you refuse to contribute because something puts you off, then the project dies. Imagine people with the same mindset as you: Oh, I don't bother contributing my design skills because the content sucks. And you don't contribute because design sucks. In the end, no one contributes and the project, as a whole, suffers. But if the project suffers, you and everyone else, lose to corporate offerings like Google. And that is fine, if you like that. But don't expect them to respect you. I hate to say this, but change has to come from within, not from laws, market forces or anything else. So, if you want LIBRE maps, and you really care about that, just go on and do it. Gather people, make noise and work hard. There's thousands of highly successful projects to get inspired by.
- Vinnl 7y agoRegardless of what the sibling comment says, the editing UX is really good now. Their editor has a beautiful walkthrough and easy-to-use tools, at least on desktop: https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit
- dontbenebby 7y ago>Why should they offer a free maps service? Have you heard of a "loss leader"[1]? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader Users are unlikely to use Google for maps and say, Bing for their searches. Maps drives traffic to search. Conversely, making maps overly commercial will drive traffic away from search.
- jjeaff 7y ago>Users are unlikely to use Google for maps and say, Bing for their searches. I don't know, I see very little tying the two together. I currently use DDG exclusively for search except for localized searching and maps, for which I use Google. There isn't really much friction to switch between the two. Especially since most of my map usage is on mobile, where it is a separate app.
- thfuran 7y ago>I currently use DDG exclusively for search except for localized searching and maps So you're way out in the long tail.
- marssaxman 7y agoI started using Bing maps for its own sake, after Google redesigned their maps site a few years back and made it far less useful; I've never bothered to use Bing search. The two functions have not been related in my experience.
- false-mirror 7y agoTrue, but that highlights the very reason monopolies must be broken up. They will only do what is profitable, not what is best for the users.
- moosey 7y agoI would say because it will backfire. Huge swaths of humanity using google maps to track their daily lives is beyond valuable. I would argue that maps is probably already monetized, as it probably improves ad targeting in all of their other apps.
- agumonkey 7y agoIt's a surprisingly sizeable mistake to think this way. Google was loved because they gave things that were better than the era state of the art. Hotmail users moved away to gmail because it was dead obvious. Maps used to cost a lot and were clumsy.. now you can fly over them in a browser. Google's business was to answer query. The rest was philanthropy. If they start to operate like any other crap stock they'll go the way of the loo.
- uvesten 7y agoIt was never free. Every time you use it, you offer up your current location and/or place(s) you’re interested in visiting, all of which is very valuable for targeted advertising.
- rjf72 7y agoInterestingly enough, Google like an increasing number of companies is a "public" company. Brin and Page own the majority of the voting power meaning Google, is for all intents and purposes, their company. The same is true of Facebook and Zuckerberg which makes all the calls to try to replace him rather bemusing. Literally every person who owns Facebook stock could vote to replace him and it'd be irrelevant since he has the majority of voting power. The point of this is that the direction Google has been taking lately has been very much the arbitrary choice and direction chosen by Larry and Sergey, and consequently highly reflective of their own personal ideologies and worldviews.
- return0 7y agoIf you go down that road, why offer our content for free to google to index? Maps and other google services help the web grow, which helps them sell more ads. It 's a synergy until it is no longer one. I suppose they will not be dumb enough to monetize recaptcha next.
- pfortuny 7y agoOK. Why should they start offering it?
- eridius 7y agoOperating Maps gives Google a ton of information about where people go, where they work, live, what businesses they patronize, etc. Data they can turn around and use for advertising purposes. It's not like they've been running Maps out of the goodness of their hearts.