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I think street view was one of the most audacious features I remember ever seeing in a product. I wish I knew the strategic and business analysis that was behi
by wodenokoto 4y ago
I think street view was one of the most audacious features I remember ever seeing in a product.
I wish I knew the strategic and business analysis that was behind thinking up the feature, green lighting and funding it.
I definitely did not have the foresight to see how street view could ever be worth the investment 15 years ago.
Today I am more inclined to see the tremendous value of google maps as a whole.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nerdponx 4y agoIt's astounding that surveillance advertising is so profitable that it can fund enterprises like this.
- astrange 4y ago“Surveillance” isn’t very profitable; Google ad targeting isn’t even good and when it is good it doesn’t need your data. (For instance, if you search for “buy ps5” they don’t need a secret profile to show you ads for a PS5.) The reason their ads make infinite money is they’re the best at serving them, they’re vertically integrated, and their ad auction systems are set up to cheat in their favor.
- nerdponx 4y agoIf that were true then they wouldn't collect it. It doesn't mean it's effective, but it's still clearly profitable.
- astrange 4y agoI said “very profitable”. “Surveillance capitalism” earns nothing compared to how much cash Apple makes, but there isn’t a field of studying “cell phone capitalism”.
- llamaimperative 4y agoThere’s plenty of study of the practice of one entity selling a good or service to another entity. You might call it “economics” or “business.” “Surveillance capitalism” is interesting/unique because not all of the relevant parties in the exchange (users, platforms, advertisers) actually understand their role in the exchange.
- mkr-hn 4y agoGoogle started out collecting it with no idea what to do with it. User data was a waste product like gasoline was before someone invented a mass market car. Google figured out they could buy the then-leader in targeted advertising and apply their data to it when the tech market turned and investors suddenly started asking about business models.
- transcriptase 4y agoThen why do I have to sign off on 65 pages of “we collect every scrap of info about you short of sequencing your genome, and we would do that too if it weren’t a logistical nightmare” every time I install a piece of software or buy a device with wifi capability? Someone ought to relay this insight to tech companies - it would save them a fortune.
- astrange 4y agoBecause their having your data is a liability for them, not an asset, which is why they want to offload some liability on you.
- pixl97 4y agoIf it's a liability, where are the company ending fines and lawsuits?
- colejohnson66 4y agoThere aren’t any because you signed the TOS. Many people have tried class actions about these things, but they never get anywhere meaningful. Europe is trying with GDPR to tip the balance back to the users, but the countries are stuck with massive backlogs that prevent progress.
- selectodude 4y agoI just cashed a $400 check from Facebook for illegally using my data. I imagine they'll be more careful next time.
- Scoundreller 4y ago> For instance, if you search for “buy ps5” they don’t need a secret profile to show you ads for a PS5. Sorta. The real money is from competitors. How much would Microsoft spend to convince someone interested in a ps5 to to spend $500 on an xbox instead? Sony wouldn’t spend as much as Microsoft here except to outbid them out of that ad. And you’ve just shown your hand at having $500 to dispose, maybe a local casino ad would fit well here? While the geographies of gaming consoles overlaps well, it doesn’t for automobiles, restaurants, service providers (mechanics or dentists or whatever).
- phkahler 4y ago>> The real money is from competitors. Yep: https://www.google.com/search?q=free+cad+software https://www.google.com/search?q=free+cad+software https://www.google.com/search?q=free+office+suite https://www.google.com/search?q=free+office+suite Asking for open source or GPL will usually get rid of the ads at the top. Companies can clearly pay to get results at the top that don't even fit your search terms.
- bseidensticker 4y agoAds must be relevant to be shown. The casino ad would probably not be shown at all, but even if it were they would have to pay more than Sony.
- sib 4y ago>> For instance, if you search for “buy ps5” they don’t need a secret profile to show you ads for a PS5. >Sorta. The real money is from competitors. How much would Microsoft spend to convince someone interested in a ps5 to to spend $500 on an xbox instead? Sony wouldn’t spend as much as Microsoft here except to outbid them out of that ad. But they still don't need a secret profile to show you ads for an Xbox when you search for PS5...
- Scoundreller 4y agoThat’s why it’s not a great example. But if I’m searching for a fiat, it wouldn’t make sense to target a Renault ad against me because they don’t sell those here.
- est31 4y agoTargeting is only one of the reasons for the large amount of tracking that Google does. The second reason is conversion tracking, and that one's way more important to Google's customers. They do want to know that if you see a specific ad for a specific thing, whether you now buy it or not.
- pixl97 4y agoAn attempt to answer the statement "I waste half my money advertising, problem is I don't know which half"
- tshaddox 4y agoIs that still the case? Do we know how much of Google's ad revenue is directly from their own search product? Obviously the genius of putting ads on a search engine is that it's a perfect fit: the users are literally typing in what they're interested in. But surely Google is also making big bucks now from ad products where this isn't the case (or is less so the case), like third-party web ads (AdSense) and mobile app ads (AdMob), as well as embedded ads in other Google products (like Gmail), and presumably those do rely heavily on tracking user behavior.
- philliphaydon 4y agoStreet view has saved me quite a few times. Searching for a shop or office and being able to see what the front looks like when there’s no signage.
- Seanambers 4y agoStreet view is an amazing product on its own. I've seen it used in all manner of instances from facility managers counting windows in order to write bids to sightseeing by people going on vacation to people checking where they need to go. Come to think of it, i've seen more professionals use it than anything else. The ability to go somewhere, without actually going there and actually see it is truly a asset.
- ethanbond 4y agoGiven that one of the early team members was a world-famous wardriving expert and that the cars were initially “accidentally” scraping all open data transmissions they could find, the initial strategic/business analysis probably was some form of: what if we drove cars around that just physically scraped data from unsuspecting neighborhoods Wi-Fi networks for our advertising algorithms, and in exchange we’ll make photos of those neighborhoods publicly available. Note that when the FCC investigated this practice they found that the data collection was definitely a deliberate design decision, which obviously makes sense given they moved Milner (creator of Netstumblr) over from YouTube to work on it. So yeah, it’s just a fancy hacking project on wheels against unencrypted networks and with a corporate wrap on the car to support the ad network.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- phphphphp 4y agoI’ve heard this theory a few times but it doesn’t sound very plausible: could you speak more to why you think the goal was always to mine wifi network information? We know that Google was doing that, but I thought it was an after thought associated with street view, not the motivation for street view.
- nerdponx 4y agoBecause why else would you do it?
- mccorrinall 4y agoI don’t think they cared about unencrypted networks, but more about the ssid and macs of devices. Today they use Wi-Fi networks near you to determine your position when GPS is not available.
- ethanbond 4y ago1) What would be the rationale for such a project otherwise, per GP? 2) What especially would be the rationale to put a wardriving expert on the project? “Data-hungry advertising network grows sensor array with cars” is far more believable to me than “data-hungry advertising network maps the world for free.” Getting email address, CC info, passwords, names, Wi-Fi SSIDs, MAC addresses, etc all lined up with precise physical locations? That’s of value to the company. Having pictures of houses? Not sure what value that has to the company, and if it had any it’ll be similarly just an input into the same advertising algos.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pigtailgirl 4y ago"Our company mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. " -- seems very in line with mission of google -- take photos of everything so you could later run some (at the time OCR, now "ML") analysis over it & presents the information usefully --
- HALtheWise 4y agoStreet view may be tricky to justify from a financial perspective, but it's pretty easy to justify from a mission perspective, which for Google is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". The mark of a good mission statement is that many seemingly unprofitable things that you do to pursue the mission end up paying dividends in the long term. I'm also not sure how expensive early street view actually was, does anyone know how many cars/drivers it takes?
- SuperQue 4y agoWe had 2 initial prototypes to index the bay area. I think there were maybe 10s of cars in the first big sweep over the US. I have no idea how many cars they're running these days.
- burntoutfire 4y ago> which for Google is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" Those missions statements always make me laugh. What if someone at Google found a great and cheap way to do that (organize the world's information blah blah blah) in a way that's unfortunately completely unmonetizable? Of course, Google would not implement it - and would patent the idea if possible, so that no one else can. The only true mission is to make as much money as possible.
- khazhoux 4y agoBut Street View itself is not monetized (not directly, and Maps itself is barely monetized). Street View proves your thesis wrong.
- sargun 4y agoMaps is very well monetized. They make money from maps ads, as well as maps API[1]. Their minimum $ for maps was very expensive last I checked too. [1]: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/061115/how-does-google-maps-makes-money.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/061115/how-d...
- SuperQue 4y agoStreet views was actually started as a Stanford project called CityBlock. LOLOL, business analysis? The idea was entirely an engineering nerd project. We wanted to index the physical world, just like the book scanning project and a bunch of similar ideas. Source: I helped build one of the original street views vans as my 20% project.
- tucosan 4y agoPrototyping and building this must have been a fun experience. It must be amazing to see a moonshot like this to become a real product that is used millions of people every day. I find street view to be tremendously helpful in many situations. It's a shame that my fellow German citizens are so scared of new tech, that Google had to stop indexing German streets.
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoI was always surprised how they were afraid of credit cards tracking everything they do. OTOH in France we have people afraid of (someone, not sure whom) tracking their life through the computerized power meters...
- xargon7 4y agoIt was an interesting mix of "let's do a cool thing" and "imagine what can be done with this data!" Early on someone mentioned that NYC doesn't actually know for sure where all of the fire hydrants are _actually_ placed, and it may be possible to automatically extract the locations from the collected data. More obviously, looking for the address signs of addresses that are expected along a street can dramatically improve driving directions. Of course, the biggest business value was being able to generate the actual, underlying street maps without having to purchase that from companies that had already digitized and driven the streets.
- mistrial9 4y agowho was the berkeley guy at the corner of Kittredge with all the SSDs then?
- 4y ago
- NewEntryHN 4y agoGreat projects that work come from tinkering, not strategic or business analysis. With business analysis you get stuff like Meta.
- khazhoux 4y agoI doubt one would say Facebook or Oculus came out of "business analysis", right?
- kingcharles 4y agoIt's surprising it took Google so long. I remember "street view" projects like this when the Web was in its infancy back in 1994. You couldn't spin freely around, but you could go forwards, back, turn left/right etc. I was planning one with my home town, but it burns up a lot of 35mm film and you had to then find a good color scanner (usually handheld then) or use Kodak Photo CD to get the images into the computer. Google were standing on the shoulders of hundreds of prior projects. They just did it on a scale no-one else could muster.