Google charging heavily for maps is a good thing, in a way - more alternatives will come up, which are (hopefully) cheaper, and not locked to one company's whims
I like free services as well as the rest of us. But Google is making money indirectly off all/most of its free services. They certainly aren't creating great products for us out of kindness. There isn't an easy answer here. The free services are great, I wouldn't want to see them go away. But they are a component of anticompetitive measures into the market.
Saying adapt or die simply isn't an acceptable answer here. If you have a great map product but do not own an ecosystem of other products, such as Google has, you are on the short end of things and the market becomes smaller and less competitive.
I've degoogled quite well, the only real google services I continue to voluntarily use are YouTube and Maps. Although I don't use YouTube itself, I mostly interact with it through third party apps (i.e SmartTube or Invidious) and with Maps... well... nothing comes close. I wish there was a decent competitor to Google Maps but there isn't. I tried using Apple Maps but it lacks all of the crowdsourced information that Google has access to.
Honestly, I'd be happy to pay for Google Maps if it meant my recommendations would be free of sponsorship bias. Google Maps is hands-down my favorite app.
But, I'd feel pretty bad if everybody had to pay for Google Maps, since so many people rely on it.
Look at what happened with Google Maps recently. Was pretty cheap to use, people flocked to it. Then they changed prices. We went from never worrying about paying since we have a relatively small amount of traffic, to scrambling to reduce our usage. Now it is their product, they can do what they want with it, but how many sites are pretty locked into Google Maps?
This seems to be what Google does. They either kill off a free service that people relied on or begin charging lots of money.
I can see a big migration away from Google Maps with Google's new pricing. Google's pricing can potentially get prohibitively expensive quickly. 25000 map views per day and $4/1000 map views that exceed the free 25000 map views. I am starting a new project that is focused around mapping. There is no way Google Maps will work for me with their pricing model. Open Street Maps is great.
It's imposed on every commercial user of their API which is why a lot of companies are also leaving Google Maps. I talked about this in another post, but Apple[1], Tesla[2], and Uber[3] are all getting off of Google Maps. It seems that Google raised prices to the point where it's actually cheaper to just go and build your own maps or find a lower cost alternative.
It is not about free. It is about being more expensive than before. We live in the economy, where small companies operate at such a thin margin (even if they're profitable), that such an increase in cost often kills any hope for profitability, especially with the economies of scale. Would you prefer to fire one developer from the team, or stop using Google Maps?
I am not saying that mapping should be free, but such price bumps should be communicated better to allow paying customers prepare for changes and alternative scenarios.
And again, just another reminder, that whenever choosing a provider for anything related to your core business - think of an exit plan!
The non-optional-ness of Google Now if you expect Maps to actually function properly is the single most irritating thing Google have ever done. They're basically saying you have to consent to us slurping all of your info in order to use any of our services. The net result is I'm now always looking for alternatives.
If I was a Shuttleworth type character I would throw my money into creating a Google-free Android with full on replacements for Maps, Gmail, Calendar and the Play Store. Frankly, Microsoft should probably do this - throw away Windows Phone and produce a bundle of Android apps that give you top class maps and Exchange server integration.
The only redeeming quality of Google Maps is that it is incredibly good product.
But at the same time it’s extremely anti-competitive: essentially very few companies can invest many billions of dollars it took Google to collect the data for a product which is still very poorly monetized. Instead Google chooses to offer it for free to moat Search/Ads.
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.
I am with you on not being willing to pay anything for the service.
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