By keeping its competitors utterly uncompetitive. There remains no good alternative to Google's maps for consumers. Waze would have jumpstarted a competitor's mapping efforts.
For stupid acquisitions, look no further than everything Andy Rubin bought, from Motorola to robotics companies.
Big companies are like the Star Trek Borg they acquire companies to meld whatever tech they can use. I also suspect that getting rid of a competitor and acquiring its user base is always a plus for the acquirer.
Generally speaking, that's how they work so the demise of Waze is not a surprise. Google Maps will always be their primary product.
I think this guy missed the memo that Google bought Waze to put them out to pasture. They were the only real competition to Google Maps and were acquired to ensure Google Maps monopoly. Waze shipping features and winning in the marketplace would be a bad thing. I think a lot of his post stems from missing this.
I'm surprised that you find Google Maps superior after the Waze acquisition; you'd think both products would be approaching a feature-equilibrium by now.
I hate to be a cold hard capitalist. But how has improving Google Maps helped its profitability? Would a competitor have taken market share away from Google Maps if they hadn’t acquired Waze? But more importantly, would it have decreased as revenue?
Well that, AND prioritizing their Maps product above better offerings in the marketplace in search results early on in its lifecycle, when it was trying to get scale and data to improve while hurting competitors.
To be fair..lets be honest with ourselves:
Google bought Waze for exactly one brutally obvious reason: To prevent competition for Google Maps.
Google has sat on it since, eventually they will port features to Maps and kill it when it is convenient. As for installing...uh..Google Maps? It's Google's Android, Google could do whatever they want. That was the whole point of the 'Free' OS Phone post yesterday.
That's how it seems to me as well. Maps had a smoother, more responsive UI and more developed map/routing data, but Waze had crowdsourced updates for more accurate reporting of accidents and delays.
As a user of both (and investor in neither) it always seemed to me that Waze did the crowdsourcing thing pretty well but their map editing tools were really clunky, UI was much less responsive, and they just didn't have any good way to fund the service (as indicated by the fact that all I ever saw in terms of advertising were little Taco Bell icons any time I was near a Taco Bell).
Google has the backend, the framework for making money from the service, and established routing and mapping systems whereas Waze's more granular and up-to-date info on traffic conditions offered something Maps didn't have.
Basically, the reasons people used Waze over Maps also made good additions to Maps. Would've been fine the other way around too but the reality was that Google was the larger, more established company so in typical fashion, they bought the smaller one to gain their features.
Google Maps has lots of competition. Bing, OSM, Apple, CityMapper, HERE, Yahoo Japan, TomTom, Garmin, Waze even though they own it… I could keep going.
I agree Google Maps has improved, but I’m not convinced it was directly because of acquiring Waze. Waze UX has dropped so much since acquisition that its almost to the painful point. I also find it’s “user submitted” data (cops, construction, pot holes) has dropped a lot so I feel a lot of folks who were submitting quality data have either left or just stopped submitting as the UX has gotten so bad.
Keyhole is another acquisition in the mapping space that I feel has degraded since being acquired by Google. I was a paying customer of Keyhole and loved it, since becoming free under Google, it’s basically stagnated and some of the features I used are now gone.
Nokia maps was pretty decent. They had acquired Navteq, which had been in the business of mapping for decades. When Google maps just used to have a list of driving instructions, Nokia maps had full turn by turn voice navigation. Of course in this case Google maps didn't drive Nokia out of business, that was totally their own doing and maps was just one collateral damage.
The competition which couldn't improve their products as fast or as well because they did not get free money from their ad business and now had to compete with gratis good quality maps to boot.
For a long time after Google Maps entered the market there were better products available from various providers.
Google maps, google docs and a few others were also bought, but have been integrated and are not considered trash by the majority of people - quite the opposite.
Not only maps.. look up when Google introduced a working product for the last time. After around 2009 they haven’t actually done anything except launch failing products, or make their already existing products shittier.
For stupid acquisitions, look no further than everything Andy Rubin bought, from Motorola to robotics companies.
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