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>Google Maps basically showed the GIS crowd how their work oughta have been done all this time. With a corporate sponsor willing to sink billions of dollars in

• dx034 6y ago
  That's how any company should act. If you stop spending money with the risk of no upside, you'll be dead in a decade or two.
  • addHocker 6y ago
    Once the economists rule, the company is dieing.
• sah2ed 6y ago
  > With a corporate sponsor willing to sink billions of dollars into a project with potentially no upside? I wouldn’t frame it as having potentially no upside. In public talks after Google found success as a public company, Larry Page has never hidden his desire to leverage Google’s strengths to improve the transportation industry, so the desire to invest in a venture that has nothing to do with Google’s vision of “organizing the world’s information” was always there. It turns out that transportation and search have a lot in common but it wasn’t immediately obvious back in 2009 how transportation could benefit from investments by an Internet search engine. I remember attending a Google sponsored event where Google Street View—along with crowd-sourced data added by human users—was marketed as data that would lay the foundation for a self-driving car project. They would later screen a video of the panda-like prototype from the Google Self-Driving Car project, and how the SDC could use Street View data to safely drive people around town, to which there was a lot of applause by the audience.