
Why are companies defecting from Google Maps? - bdking
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/why-are-companies-defecting-from-google-maps/
======
ChrisLTD
Simple answer: Google Maps suddenly costs a lot of dough.

More complex answer: Companies that _need_ mapping services don't want to rely
on Google if they are a competitor.

Say you're Foursquare. Would you rather rely on Google, a company that's
investing heavily in social networking, or someone like Navteq or
OpenStreetMap, organizations with a laser sharp focus on mapping services?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Foursquare went with OpenStreetMap though, and claim "while the new Google
Maps API pricing was the reason we initially started looking into other
solutions, we ultimately ended up switching because, after all our research
and testing, OpenStreetMap and MapBox was simply the best fit for us."

[http://blog.foursquare.com/2012/02/29/foursquare-is-
joining-...](http://blog.foursquare.com/2012/02/29/foursquare-is-joining-the-
openstreetmap-movement-say-hi-to-pretty-new-maps/)

They could be lying to cover a penny-pinching move, but I think they're
telling the truth simply because Foursquare doesn't need particularly good
geodata. It only needs for locations you visit to be fairly recognizable and
locatable, it doesn't need to know that you can't do a u-turn or go that way
up a one-way street or the exact location of a point to less than 1m accuracy.
The only businesses it cares about it wants in its own dataset, not the map
providers. Same story for Apple and its photo display or (going way back now)
Yahoo/Flickr using OSM for geolocating photos in Iraq and China, Afghanistan
etc. despite Yahoo having their own map team:

[http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/02/13/changelog-yahoo-
updat...](http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/02/13/changelog-yahoo-updated-map-
tiles-and-some-osm-ones/)

This process has been going on for a while now, it's the traditional story of
the open alternative eating the market from the bottom-upwards and
accelerating as it gets wider use and improves in quality in a virtuous
circle.

~~~
ChrisLTD
Quite right. I knew Foursquare went with OSM, I was just putting a
hypothetical out there as a thought exercise. But I did change my post to be a
bit more accurate.

Also, you make a great point about the lower level of fidelity Foursquare,
iPhoto and Flickr need. Higher map accuracy wouldn't be worth the cost in
those use cases.

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freyfogle
Anyone who is considering making the switch should take a look at
<http://switch2osm.org>

Also, if you want to use Google (or any other provider) but not get locked in
I can recommend writing your code using Mapstraction - as the name tries to
suggest it's a mapping provider abstraction layer <http://mapstraction.com/>

~~~
powerslave12r
Ah, but what happens when mapstraction development slows down to a halt and
you can't afford to keep updating it yourself?

~~~
freyfogle
Is this really an issue for you? Assuming it is, simplest solution I see
(besides the obvious appealing to good will of others to make the updates you
need) is you pay someone to do the update you need and then submit it to the
project. That person could be in a lower cost location than you are, thus much
cheaper than you doing it yourself. A much better problem to have than vendor
lock in.

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jkaljundi
The design you can achieve on top of OSM is beautiful. Map design can and
should be part of your service's brand image, if it forms a big part of your
service. Not everyone wants to look like Google Maps. The new 4sq maps go
nicely together with their branding now.

And although Google now offers map styling, it is still pretty limited and
brings your free quota down to 2,5k requests if I remember correctly.

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compay
Sebastian Delmont from StreetEasy posted a great writeup on this issue a few
months back:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3453095>

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icebraining
_Of course, this also means some of the content may be…questionable._

This makes it sound like there are pictures of dicks in the maps. "Of poorer
quality" would be better.

~~~
buro9
This is true, but other parts of the map data may well be of higher quality
too.

I find OSM data in and around London to be more complete than Google Maps, or
rather the speed of updates is faster making it more accurate and I also find
data that is more granular (such as where in a fence a gate may be).

Also, OSM maps for specific purposes work really well. Nearly all of the
cyclists I know who have Garmin units have replaced the maps with OSM ones
just to get contours and other cartographic features that assist riding in the
countryside (where fields or woods dominate most maps and more detail is
needed).

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aaronlidman
How much would Google have to drop the price to reverse the trend?

The plain old JS API would come to about $1000 a month for a site with 1
million map views. Mapbox (<http://mapbox.com/plans/>) meters by bandwidth but
by my estimate (4gb map, low for a global map I know, and 1,000,000 views)
it's still about $600.

Then again tilemill, tilestache, and leaflet are all free and work great once
you get it going.

------
7952
Google Maps does have a quality problem. Within the UK the search results are
appalling. More often than not you get an odd town in the USA, or something
completely irrelevant to your actual query.

The quality of the data simply isn't good enough to give good results. Being
Google they try and fix this with a clever algorithm. When people are
searching a map they are usually after one correct answer, rather than
hundreds of possibly right answers.

Google Maps is a generic product that is highly funded and good in the USA.
Everywhere else it is seriously lacking.

~~~
DanBC
How do I replicate your results? I'm in the UK and get great results from
Google Maps.

Opening a new incognito window and entering google maps $TOWN brings up UK
towns for me.

~~~
darklajid
Note: Not sure if the app or the service is to blame. But - disappointing:

From this afternoon. Wife and me are sitting in the sun at the Kikar
Rabin/Rabin Square in (more or less) center Tel Aviv. She decides she'd like
to have sushi. I pull up the Google Maps app, type sushi <enter>

Map zooms to the US and gives me recommendations in god-knows-where. I laugh
it off, go back, search 'sushi bars'. Guess what it does? Riiight.

So this company _constantly_ throws Hebrew at me. After updating maps it
showed the TOS in HEBREW (I .. cannot read that) on first launch. It certainly
knows (and abuses. Certainly abuses. Abuses all the time..) geolocation. I
have Latitude enabled the last weeks. GPS and Wifi were turned on and the map
showed my current location quite accurate.

Why in the world would I want to know about Sushi places in the US?

That's certainly fixable (I could get somewhat better results with 'Sushi, Tel
Aviv') but I think the gp hit similar idiotic behavior.

Unfortunately that just shows flaws in the Maps search algorithm and is
unrelated to Google Maps vs. OSM for example.

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kevin_jacobs
Other than more street view locations on Google Maps, Bing Maps is far, far
superior (mostly in terms of speed, but after using Bing it's painful to go
back to Google).

------
dasil003
Pretty poor analysis to mention Apple switching, but not mention the fact that
Android is the primary competitor to Apple's biggest platform, and that maps
are one area where Android has been consistently ahead of iOS.

Apple could afford to pay a lot for its maps, but with Google there's a direct
conflict of interest, and Google will always drag their feet in helping Apple
create a great maps experience.

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eblackburn
Why? Because Google maps is no longer in a position of inertia. Now if you
require mapping functionality you'll perform some kind of due diligence based
on requirements and constraints.

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ChristianMarks
Also there are open source alternatives such as cartodb. In scientific GIS
applications, open source that can be essential.

------
jemeshsu
I'm not surprised Apple is switching. They bought Poly9 and C3 and down the
road we will see a brand new Map app in iOS.

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donrhummy
Anyone know if you can get transit directions with OpenStreetMaps?

~~~
jarek
I don't think you can get even simple street directions from OSM. There
probably are or will be third-party services that enable doing this using OSM
data. Encourage your transit agency to make its GTFS feeds public if they
aren't already.

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unicron
Two reasons:

1\. It's bloody slow. Well it is here in the UK. Even Bing is orders of
magnitude faster.

2\. It's now expensive.

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kamjam
tl;dr. Directly answering the title, simple: money.

Google started charging and companies do not want to pay! It helps that
OpenMaps now has a decent amount of data!

~~~
RowanH
Data's only half the equation, building up a _service_ with all of the
features to what you need costs $. From the Switch to OSM site "Serving your
own maps is a fairly intensive task. Depending on the size of the area you’re
interested in serving and the traffic you expect the system requirements will
vary. In general, requirements will range from 10-20GB of storage, 4GB of
memory, and a modern dual-core processor for a city-sized region to 300GB+ of
fast storage, 24GB of memory, and a quad-core processor for the entire
planet."

Don't get me wrong OSM is a fantastic initiative. It will be very interesting
to see if a slew of competitive services spring up in the map 'service' arena,
using OSM data.

~~~
Drbble
The hardware requirements you just described are flea market level, less
expensive than the time spent thinking about how expensive they are.

