>Is that an exorbitant amount of money for maintaining a (global?) digital map?
Absolutely - Google is just one player, Apple Maps, Bing Maps, OSM.
Charging consumers 300$/year for map updates would never work even if free offerings didn't exist - they are just targeting a small niche and optimizing (ie. even if they made the price 30$/year most people would still use phone maps so they might as well milk the market that wants to pay for their solution as high as they can). If there were no free competitors someone would drive the mass market price down way lower than 300$.
> And what happens when Google decides that it doesn’t much fancy providing a Mapping service for free at huge cost that it has no way of monetizing?
They charge phone companies billions of dollars for the use of Maps. That's why Apple made their own version. It's not exactly a cash cow, but they're not providing it for free either.
> Google wants as many people to use its maps as possible.
If that were true, they would offer the service for free. As it stands, for normal contracts, only the first 25,000 requests per day are free[1]. If we assume Google wasn't willing to give Apple a special pricing deal, with 300M+ iOS devices in the wild, Apple could easily be left shelling out a fortune each day to user their data.
> They pay to integrate with third party services via a bidding process.
It's an interesting idea; I don't think I've seen something like that floated before outside of the government space of fair bidding against contracts.
> added bonus, google gets to dominate mapping then jack up the cost 30x when they decide they want it to be a billion dollar business. LIke they did recently.
I hear OpenStreetMaps still exists, and has an API.
Users are unlikely to use Google for maps and say, Bing for their searches. Maps drives traffic to search. Conversely, making maps overly commercial will drive traffic away from search.
> Any competitor wanting to get its foot in the door would only need to pay Google enough money to get itself listed there (which is to say, Google can enter this market for free whenever it wants to). N
That assumes that the feature in Maps not only exists but is widely used by consumers in preference to individual service apps; my impression is that that is not really the case.
Maps suffered from a nice 100+ times price hike a few years ago and killed plenty of companies that relied on it. I'm currently using maps because it's the most reliable and the product can afford it, but I'll switch to something else as soon as possible. I'm working on getting the local government to sponsor an effort to improve Open Street Maps enough to be better than google.
> Expect this to increase as people become more used to hailing cars from inside of their maps applications which act as aggregators.
I feel like the prices I get from within Google Maps are both vague and higher than the prices I get from opening the actual apps, so I never actually use the Google Maps integration and just end up checking both apps, which is pretty annoying.
I think the Maps integration is basically a customer acquisition tactic, not something they expect most people to actually use.
Search existed before Google as well. Free maps were very inferior to Google maps and also were a loss leader for other service that’s MapQuest was trying to sell into enterprise and stuff.
Google maps was just another ad stream for Google and so was much easier to link to, embed everywhere. And had an innovative UI.
Before Google cranked up their prices Google maps got embedded everywhere. This was novel and not something that Mapquest and other existing maps promoted.
> I've been wondering for a long time when this would come- the processing (getting directions, geocoding, etc) and bandwidth (for map images) demands must be huge, with comparatively little payback.
I'm more thinking about the costs of developing the software and gathering the data. And also the perceived _value_ of the data, independent from its costs. Ever tried to buy the kind of data Google uses on their backend, with terms of use that would support the kind of services Google offers? Good luck--both with terms and then with pricing. Other companies have been charging a fortune for this data.
> It'll be interesting to see how many big operations pay up, and how many switch. To an extent switching might be futile- if Google can't afford to keep the maps offering free, do you really think Yahoo can?
Regardless of whether they can, with Google pulling back, don't you think Yahoo et al. will want to raise their prices?
I think lots of consumers would be willing to pay for Google Maps.
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