4 ms·

I remember in the 90s when we lambasted Microsoft for cornering markets with free products (IE) so they could drive out the competition (Netscape) and eventuall

I remember in the 90s when we lambasted Microsoft for cornering markets with free products (IE) so they could drive out the competition (Netscape) and eventually start charging for them when we had no other choice. Luckily that never really happened, Microsoft never started charging for IE. While Google isn't exactly doing that here, it's coming awfully close.

acavailhez 15y ago
I agree with that, it is quite similar to what they did with youtube and the unbearing amount of ad that one has to endure before watching a video now, after 5 years+ of making it available free of annoyance.
- abraham 15y ago
  Uploaders of videos can enable/disable the inStream ads. They are not required by Google. http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=188038 http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=1...
- palish 15y ago
  I don't have to bear one second of Youtube ads. (Thank you AdBlock!) The "Shark Week" ad that literally screamed at me at 11PM was the straw that broke my mental back. I immediately installed AdBlock.
  - cpeterso 15y ago
    Some video ads (on YouTube and elsewhere) can detect AdBlock and refuse to play the video.
alphamale3000 15y ago
When you can't innovate anymore, you increase your prices. After a few years, the company becomes a dinosaur loaded with cash... like Microsoft.
- chc 15y ago
  In what kind of bizarro business model are price increases and innovation interchangeable?
rmc 15y ago
Thankfully there is an alternative now (that wasn't nearly as good 5 years ago): OpenStreetMap. Their main *.openstreetmap.org has Tile Usage Policies, but there are other companies that provide free serives, and you can also host it yourself, render your own map, and pay your own bills. The data & tool chain is entirely Open, so you are not at the mercy of anyone.
- bad_user 15y ago
  Unfortunately OpenStreetMap doesn't really cut it. I'm using the GMaps API for geocoding addresses and in that regard it's the best one available, especially since it has a pretty high tolerance for spellings and non-standard address formats.
  - stereo 15y ago
    The quality of OpenStreetMap data really varies a lot. It is often better than Google in european cities.
pamelafox 15y ago
Though that's how it may look, I don't think that was the strategy from the beginning. I worked as the support engineer for the Google Maps API starting in 2007, in the early days of the API. We didn't think about monetization then. But then the GFC happened, and all over Google, there was a bigger emphasis on monetization -- basically every product had to eventually monetize. We experimented with different types of ads, but as it turns out, map-based advertising is difficult -- it's hard to know why a user is looking at a particular map, it's hard to get advertisers to geo-locate their ads accurately, it's hard to squish ads on a map without adding clutter, etc. While we continued to experiment with ads, we started talking about "ala carte" pricing, letting developers pay-per-view, per-geocode, etc, as a form of monetization. That was about the time I left Google, when the monetization strategy was still unclear. It looks like they managed to implement ala carte from the technical perspective and decided to introduce it. Though it is a harsh reality check for developers who are already using the Maps API on popular free websites, I think its probably for the best. If I was given the choice between no Maps API at all, a Maps API with (not-so-relevant) ads, and a Maps API with incremental pricing, I'd personally opt for the latter. And who knows, maybe map-based ads will become an option in the future for those who prefer that option. And if the pricing doesn't work for your site, there are multiple open-source mapping libraries that could use some love to bring them up to par with the Google Maps API (both from the developer & user usability perspective). I mentioned some in this talk: http://www.slideshare.net/wuzziwug/open-maps-or-close-enough-presentation http://www.slideshare.net/wuzziwug/open-maps-or-close-enough... ...but there have been a few new entries in the space since then. (Note: As I no longer work for them, nothing I say should be taken as official word from Google.)
- mnutt 15y ago
  Two interesting things in the open mapping space since the talk was published are TileMill: http://mapbox.com/tilemill/ http://mapbox.com/tilemill/ And Justin O'Bierne had some great blog posts on why Google Maps work so well from a usability perspective: http://web.archive.org/web/20110130154705/http://www.41latitude.com/post/2072504768/google-maps-label-readability http://web.archive.org/web/20110130154705/http://www.41latit... Sadly, he's taken down all of his posts.
qq66 15y ago
What do you mean "cornering the market"? You can always use Mapquest/Yahoo Maps/Bing Maps on your site.

acavailhez 15y ago

I agree with that, it is quite similar to what they did with youtube and the unbearing amount of ad that one has to endure before watching a video now, after 5 years+ of making it available free of annoyance.

abraham 15y ago
Uploaders of videos can enable/disable the inStream ads. They are not required by Google. http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=188038 http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=1...
palish 15y ago
I don't have to bear one second of Youtube ads. (Thank you AdBlock!) The "Shark Week" ad that literally screamed at me at 11PM was the straw that broke my mental back. I immediately installed AdBlock.
- cpeterso 15y ago
  Some video ads (on YouTube and elsewhere) can detect AdBlock and refuse to play the video.

alphamale3000 15y ago

When you can't innovate anymore, you increase your prices. After a few years, the company becomes a dinosaur loaded with cash... like Microsoft.

chc 15y ago
In what kind of bizarro business model are price increases and innovation interchangeable?

rmc 15y ago

Thankfully there is an alternative now (that wasn't nearly as good 5 years ago): OpenStreetMap. Their main *.openstreetmap.org has Tile Usage Policies, but there are other companies that provide free serives, and you can also host it yourself, render your own map, and pay your own bills. The data & tool chain is entirely Open, so you are not at the mercy of anyone.

bad_user 15y ago
Unfortunately OpenStreetMap doesn't really cut it. I'm using the GMaps API for geocoding addresses and in that regard it's the best one available, especially since it has a pretty high tolerance for spellings and non-standard address formats.
- stereo 15y ago
  The quality of OpenStreetMap data really varies a lot. It is often better than Google in european cities.

pamelafox 15y ago

Though that's how it may look, I don't think that was the strategy from the beginning. I worked as the support engineer for the Google Maps API starting in 2007, in the early days of the API. We didn't think about monetization then. But then the GFC happened, and all over Google, there was a bigger emphasis on monetization -- basically every product had to eventually monetize. We experimented with different types of ads, but as it turns out, map-based advertising is difficult -- it's hard to know why a user is looking at a particular map, it's hard to get advertisers to geo-locate their ads accurately, it's hard to squish ads on a map without adding clutter, etc. While we continued to experiment with ads, we started talking about "ala carte" pricing, letting developers pay-per-view, per-geocode, etc, as a form of monetization. That was about the time I left Google, when the monetization strategy was still unclear. It looks like they managed to implement ala carte from the technical perspective and decided to introduce it. Though it is a harsh reality check for developers who are already using the Maps API on popular free websites, I think its probably for the best. If I was given the choice between no Maps API at all, a Maps API with (not-so-relevant) ads, and a Maps API with incremental pricing, I'd personally opt for the latter. And who knows, maybe map-based ads will become an option in the future for those who prefer that option. And if the pricing doesn't work for your site, there are multiple open-source mapping libraries that could use some love to bring them up to par with the Google Maps API (both from the developer & user usability perspective). I mentioned some in this talk: http://www.slideshare.net/wuzziwug/open-maps-or-close-enough-presentation http://www.slideshare.net/wuzziwug/open-maps-or-close-enough... ...but there have been a few new entries in the space since then. (Note: As I no longer work for them, nothing I say should be taken as official word from Google.)

mnutt 15y ago
Two interesting things in the open mapping space since the talk was published are TileMill: http://mapbox.com/tilemill/ http://mapbox.com/tilemill/ And Justin O'Bierne had some great blog posts on why Google Maps work so well from a usability perspective: http://web.archive.org/web/20110130154705/http://www.41latitude.com/post/2072504768/google-maps-label-readability http://web.archive.org/web/20110130154705/http://www.41latit... Sadly, he's taken down all of his posts.

qq66 15y ago

What do you mean "cornering the market"? You can always use Mapquest/Yahoo Maps/Bing Maps on your site.