One of the criticisms of when Google Maps API was basically a free for all was that it was suppressing the ability of startups to exist by devaluing products; it seems like with these pricing changes Google is giving the competition an opportunity to swoop in.
A business model based on data hoarding will never last long-term. As soon as one open source player steps up that's 60% as good, it's over. Like Encarta or Britannica vs. Wikipedia.
Lasting value comes from the software in between the database and the view. In the case of encyclopedias or maps, the software is the most trivial part.
I really think Google Maps will die. It's just unlikely that for the rest of history, no one will improve OpenStreetMaps to the point that it is competitive.
You need a massive amount of capital to create a redundant data set that has a death clock, doing nothing good for the world but extracting some small rent created by antitrust laws. No thanks.
Traditional encyclopedias didn't lose because of their intellectual property model, they lost because they were trying to charge money for their product, so a free as in beer competitor was able to take all their market share.
A maps data set will require constant updating and the quality of the data set will be determined by the amount of work put into it on an ongoing basis. The question is which number is bigger: the monetary value of the time people are willing to donate making contributions to openstreetmap, or the amount of money that Google makes on map ads and can therefore spend improving the data quality.
There are parts of the world that have much better OSM coverage than Google maps, e.g eastern Indonesia. I don't think OSM is ever going to beat Google in for instance New York City but it absolutely can and does beat Google in parts of the world that are not profitable for Google to map. That's the problem with a for-profit map: consistency.
The exact same problem exists with volunteer-maintained maps. In fact it's even worse there because at least with a commercial map, quality is basically correlated with where the users are. With a volunteer-maintained map, quality is correlated with where the volunteers are, which is not necessarily going to be where the users are.
Every local municipality already maintains GIS data, I imagine that some day these systems will automatically integrate into a public, open database like OSM.
Sidenote, the FOAM project is doing some interesting work into geospacial data on-the-blockchain.
At a regular (bi)monthly/quarterly OSM meetup we were joined by representatives from 2 or 3 local municipalities. It seems they might be interested in unification to reduce costs, but I didn't ask for details.
> I really think Google Maps will die. It's just unlikely that for the rest of history, no one will improve OpenStreetMaps to the point that it is competitive.
From reading the analyses at https://www.justinobeirne.com/, plus just generally following the tech industry, I'm convinced Google Maps will never die, at least not in any timeframe relevant to this discussion.
Between autonomous vehicles at Waymo and Google's desire to provide intelligent suggestions to their Android and web users, they need to have as comprehensive a data set as algorithmically possible.
I suppose it's possible that OSM could become good enough that Google would only need to supply a proprietary layer on top of it for their own needs, but given that they can collect better intelligence about roads and buildings than anyone else through their unwitting spies, I doubt they'd want to give up control over the full stack.
Linux only lags behind in desktop/laptop use. (Dominates servers and smartphones.)
Yes, absolutely, in the case of desktops, it is <60% as good as Windows or macOS. I say this as a nearly lifelong desktop Linux user. The userspace desktop software gets almost no attention compared to the kernel/systemd which actually matters for business. The major DEs like KDE and Gnome3 are full of exploits and memory leaks. The alternative to using a DE is to use a tiling window manager and spend hours a day re-implementing what would have been one-click operations on Windows/macOS. This is not to mention the lack of non-development-related software targeting desktop Linux.
Will this change in the future? I think it is very likely, but the time horizon is key. There are thousands of possible realities where Microsoft or Apple fails--political problems, economic events, bad management, some black swan startup out of nowhere. All it takes is for one of these to trigger for mindshare to shift to Linux (or BSD or Fuchsia--any free one for that matter) and bring it over the threshold.
(But this is kind of irrelevant to the point about data hoarding business models, since Windows/macOS is pure software.)
As someone who dual-boots, I would say Linux is a better OS, today, than Windows or Mac. Sure, there are areas where it sucks more than the others, but the same can be said of either of the other ones for different areas.
As someone who also dual-boots. I would say that Windows is definitely the better of the OSes. I've tried, so hard, to make it work. It's been almost a decade now since I switched to Linux OSes. But, software/package management is absolutely horrible in the OSS world these days. It's so bad that actually downloading + installing MSI/zip files from the software provider is a better experience and more reliable. Linux has lost almost all the benefits from having a package ecosystem.
These days, everything on linux is either random potentially insecure PPA repos, shell scripts loaded from a server via curl and piped to sh with sudo access, or "snaps" (whatever the fuck they are). That all ontop of wildly outdated packages in the supported repos. No wonder everyone rants and raves about "docker", now we know why things moved into that space.
I know, this is my opinion and it's biased. Yes I may not have done things properly, or there are other ways of doing things, etc etc.
I really can understand how you have gotten to such a bad place with packaging. What are you doing that needs lots of PPAs?!
Snaps are actually a great security and packaging advance that decouples package dependencies from a common library set, while maintaining a mechanism to patch and upgrade otherwise dangling library deps. It also starts down the long road to confining software, because what you run shouldn't automatically assume all your privs. Basically iOS style apps for Linux.
People who pipe web content to a privileged shell are on their own at present. Arguably they should be warned, but that assumes taint tracking at every level of the operating system, and no production OS has that. If the software is a dependency shit show then putting it in docker (and then into a VM) is a better compromise.
Windows is already deprecating the installer model for the app store and cloud concept, they just didn't make it stick the first time round.
Snaps have been the single provider of crash, breaking the machine or killing ny battery i have ever seen on linux. It is to the point that if all i can find is a snap, i prefer to boot windows to deal with it.
Snaps are a good idea in theory but do not work in practice.
Well, I'm surprised. Snaps have really simplified things from my perspective. Any you'd like to call out? Particularly they shouldn't be able to 'break the machine'.
Ubuntu needs to more clearly explain whether the app is confined, and force apps to use an API to change the system environment to allow rollback, multiple packages of the same function etc.
For the use case of running whatever win32 executable is promoted on zdnet.com (or pcworld.com or whatever is out there that appeals to computer users that aren't developers) any given day? Yes.
Do they actually promote non-game win32 executables these days? I thought current fashion is mostly services with mobile and web apps, and sometimes Electron ones?
Windows is not over? I see Microsoft as similar to IBM now. They will make a lot of money from their Rolodex, possibly more than they ever made before, but they no longer own a relevant platform someone would write new software for.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, when a platform is dying its owner:
1. Tries to capture all profit from the edges.
2. Extracts value "unreasonably" both to grab what they still can and to create an explanation for the death. This could be high fees, ads, or extraction of market intelligence.
3. Begins embracing the new platform with compatibility layers.
4. Starts making 2 offers on everything. One with their legacy and one with the rising platforms.
5. Treats their nonfounding CEO as significant and someone to listen to.
Plenty of companies make this transition successfully (I chose IBM as the example) and make huge profits from not having to charge uniform prices across the entire market. But the discussion was the windows platform being replaced by Linux, not Microsoft profits.
Are you aware of IBM in the enterprise software industry? They manage to do almost all of that with their own software and open source rebundled.. No OS/2, almost no 3rd party programmers who are interested in their platform.
That is the future of Microsoft and the non-future of Windows.
This thread seems to be forgetting that Google Maps didn't just replace the atlas (for looking up names of things) and the dedicated GPS (for routing / directions), they also replaced the radar detector (OK that's Waze, but same people and same data), and the phone book.
I don't know about you, but I haven't bothered to look at any of the various "yellow pages" sites (to find a phone number or address), nor at Yelp (to find business reviews) in many years. And to make matters worse, I'm actually one of the volunteers feeding free labor / data to Maps, because I post reviews and make edits to business information. What can I say? They're really good at what they do.
Apple Maps is way more than 60% there in terms of quality but I still don’t find it very compelling for the same reason I won’t switch to DuckDuckGo - a palpable difference in quality gets me paranoid and makes me double check a lot of stuff.
That instinct to double check makes me go “Oh well let’s just use Google.”
It has already passed that point for me, given that Google is a) subject to censorship, on a per-country basis b) likes to return search results that don't have much to do with your query, apparently because that's what "most people" want c) records every query you make from your IP address, with no way to turn it off if you aren't logged in to a Google account d) the results I get from DDG are generally what I need.
It’s pretty much just Bing. Saw posted a bit ago that if you DDG “what is my user agent”, the website preview text will show that it’s Bing. Which means DDG is just whitelabling Bing’s index.
I use bing exclusively. Sometimes I don’t find what I want, and switching to google is as simple as swapping out the authority. The query syntax is the same.
Apple maps has gotten a lot better than release but it still has a long way to go imo. It's probably fine in the bay area at this point, but boy does it do some dumb shit in LA. It's worse than waze, and waze is worthless (an unprotected left across a six lane boulevard is just not happening, among other similar boneheaded moves).
Google also spoils me with multi modal options, although the transit estimates seem to be a complete stab in the dark and there are quirks like invisible buses. The bike timing is also useful, but the routing is usually junk and profoundly unsafe.
Living here has taught me that all these apps generally suck, just google maps seems to suck slightly less.
Last time I was in SF (last August) Apple Maps couldn’t even correctly locate the Walgreens stores downtown. I so much want it to be good, but Apple refuses to take it seriously even in their own back yard.
If you use Brave, you can easily choose your search engine with `:g` for google. You can also set your own shortcuts for any search box on any website.
Google Maps has a multi-layered business moat that makes competition really difficult
* Massive staff and fleet of vehicles on the ground with multiple sensors mapping the entire planet. Capital costs here are enormous
* Massive network and bandwidth with caches in just about every major IX to deliver ultra high performance maps
* Major established contracts with satellite mapping vendors to get the best data as early as possible
* Major brand recognition with many users using the app and knowing it to be the best of the best
I would never want to compete here, but a major institutional player could
You're talking about competing as a consumer map/gps, which is not what the blog post is talking about (or the parent comment, I assume).
Rather, GMaps used to be the default choice if you wanted to build an app on top of a map (in this case, looking at the effects of nuclear bomb detonations). The blog post explains why GMaps is no longer a reasonable choice, which (as the parent notes) opens up room for competitors.
> ”Google Maps has a multi-layered business moat that makes competition really difficult”
OpenStreetMap is going from strength to strength. Maps startups no longer need to duplicate Google's on-the-ground mapping efforts. Now, they can make use of open data.
When Pokemon Go switched from Gmaps to OSM, the quality drop was dramatic and noticeable. I want OSM to be a real competitor, but I think it represents a perfect example of how difficult it is to compete with Google Maps.
It counts as "Good Enough", but man, it's disappointing to see how inferior Pokemon Go maps are these days. Roads that don't exist, buildings in random places with roads going through them, and map data that seems manipulated for game advantage (by players contributing to OSM for gameplay reasons, not for accuracy reason) ... and this is in the midtown area of a top 10 US city.
> "Roads that don't exist, buildings in random places with roads going through them"
This is unfortunate and surprising. In my experience (mostly UK/Europe) the quality of street data in OSM matches, and in some cases exceeds that of Google Maps. (Points-of-interest data does not, however).
If you do notice errors and omissions, fixes can be made in seconds by getting an OSM account and clicking the "edit" button on OpenStreetMap.org. In recent years the development of the "ID" editor has significantly lowered the barriers to entry of editing OSM.
> "map data that seems manipulated for game advantage"
Perhaps OSM needs some sort of Wikipedia-style spam detection/prevention if this is happening on a wide scale.
If you do notice errors and omissions, fixes can be made in seconds by getting an OSM account and clicking the "edit" button on OpenStreetMap.org. In recent years the development of the "ID" editor has significantly lowered the barriers to entry of editing OSM.
This is the same argument that keeps every year from being the year of Linux on the desktop.
"My computer crashed!" "Oh, just become a Linux kernel developer and fix it yourself."
Most people who just want to eat an apple (even an apple a day) don't have bandwidth to pick them. Offer them the option of picking apples at an orchard for free vs. buying a bag of apples at a grocery, and most people will go buy the bag.
The same happens with an OS. Most people don't want a free labor-intensive solution. They want something that just works, runs their software and stays out of the way. People don't want to think about what OS they use.
Yes, typical users want a "just works" solution. But yc-news commenters aren't typical users. In the time it takes to post a comment on this forum, anyone here can just fix the problem themselves using OSM's very simple point-and-click editor.
Contrast to Google Maps, where the process of getting a change made can take weeks or months - if the fixes ever show up at all.
There really is a lot of power in having a map of the world that we can all "just edit".
IMO, HN readers can't be the target audience of a mapping product that's being used as a backbone of so many large projects. You have to make it painfully simple and give people a real incentive to do it.
The act of contributing an edit to OSM is vastly simpler than fixing a kernel bug. But OSM does still have the massive barrier to entry in that if you are using an application built on OSM data, it is usually not easy to realize this and understand that OSM is where you need to go to fix a map error, unless you are already familiar with OSM.
> it is usually not easy to realize this and understand that OSM is where you need to go to fix a map error
The OSM licence requires that people using OSM data attribute OSM, i.e. that their users are aware that the data comes from OSM. In theory this means that the final user should know that OSM is where they should go to fix data issues.
If you're not already familiar with what OSM is, the copyright notice is really not going to be enough to alert the user to the fact that OSM works differently from commercial map data suppliers and can easily accept user contributions.
So when my grand
mother has an issue with her app, she’s sure to notice that it says “open street maps” in the corner and go to the website, make an account, and contribute more accurate data? I don’t think so.
Really, it’s not even an age thing. I work in tech. I visit HN on the regular. OSM, Google, and Apple all have inaccurate data about my daily commute to work. They all say a path that exists doesn’t. Have I don’t anything about it? Absolutely not.
Imagine the average Pokémon Go user; if they even read the boilerplate that stood between them and playing the game, how many of them understood what role OSM data played in their experience, realized what the word “open” meant, and correctly concluded that they could do something to influence/correct the situation vs just thinking the game had a bug or glitch?
I'm far from a power Pokemon Go player, and I live in a city that's likely to have very good map coverage, but those caveats asides I didn't know that this even happened.
I agree that there are disadvantages in OpenStreetMap. In other parts of the world, Google maps is worse. However, for showing which parts of a city would be dead by a nuke, you don't need to have every road laid out accurately.
The moat's draining because more of this data is becoming commodity.
OpenStreetmap data is quite good. I can run a local instance with all the data and the tile server and a web server in a docker image in maybe ~10 min. Source: did this a few years ago during a particularly boring meeting.
The thing benchmarked in my other comment loads an OSM dump into PostGIS (in 1 particular format, translating the OSM data from an editing/versioning friendly format to something more useful for map making as it goes). The current full planet dump is 84 GB:
It’s kind of ironic that Google Maps is so bad at some things then. Walking & Cycling directions are especially bad - I get much better directions from OSM than I do from Google Maps.
For driving directions GMaps is much better. I presume that’s where the majority of their userbase is.
In my experience GMaps route optimizations don't account for elevation or road size in my country. When I drive outside city I strictly use OSMand for routing.
GMaps driving directions failed HARD for me last night.
I had to make a trip during rush hour. I was already going to be cutting it close on timing as this is a 12 minute drive that can take 15-20 minutes at rush hour. I plugged in my destination and GMaps routed me a way I would rarely take but didn't seem too odd. One block past my last alternate route, I saw the lights ahead. There was a 4 car crash with at least 5 emergency vehicles on scene about 1/2 mile ahead. GMaps had no clue and I had no choice but to inch through about 10 light cycles to reach the turn Gmaps wanted me to take.
The 15 minute trip took me 35 minutes. Thanks for nothing.
You mean, there was an edge case where Google didn't have real-life data for a specific accident available for you? This is an extreme case that we wouldn't even expect to exist a few years ago, (and then got annoyed by passive surveillance) but now gmaps is failing for missing it? Is this the new norm?
Did you mark the accident yourself when you saw it?
If it weren't already aware of the accident so it could warn you, you could have let Waze know about it and, at the least, helped out many others who were coming after you.
A few days ago I had a rideshare driver unable to find me because Google kept telling him to take a non-existent road through the middle of a building.
You wouldn't compete on the things that Google does well, but rather on the things they don't. Not saying it is easy. Price and user interaction is something I believe could be improved upon. Also maybe crowd sourcing info.
that's not true though. I know from doing HOTOSM that there are quite a lot places where there is only a road or two going through it only google maps but there is actually a city/town there. there are some counties where Google Street view cars have never even visited.
I think that's not a great argument… If the free Google Maps API put your company out of business, it didn't have a great product in the first place. If these companies did not provided added value, what was the justification for their existence in the first place?
Providing an embeddable map solution with developer friendly API used to be a great product. The fact Google disrupted the market with a free solution doesn't mean the product wasn't great up until that point, it just means someone also saw that product idea and undercut them on price.
Source: I was using mapping tools before Google Maps came to market.
If the store is able to continue to give away books for free, then obviously the first store that had to charge for the books isn't generating enough value.
Unless the end-game for the 2nd store is to price out every single book store, then obtain a monopoly. But then anti-monopoly laws should come into place.
But if the end-game for the 2nd store is to subsidize their cost via a different business - then it's the same as a newspaper using classifieds to subsidize their subscription business. You can't then argue that another newspaper that charge for subscriptions goes out of business is unfair.
Most people will take free and good enough over a superior product any day. Google basically killed the market for mapping products and now have started charging everyone for theirs when used commercially.
