When I created the NUKEMAP in 2012, the Google Maps API was amazing.1 It was the best thing in town for creating Javascript mapping mash-ups, cost literally nothing, had an active developer community that added new features on a regular basis, and actually seemed like it was interested in people using their product to develop cool, useful tools.
Today, pretty much all of that is now untrue. The API codebase has stagnated in terms of actually useful features being added (many neat features have been removed or quietly deprecated; the new features being added are generally incremental and lame), which is really quite remarkable given that the Google Maps stand-alone website (the one you visit when you go to Google Maps to look up a map or location) has had a lot of neat features added to it (like its 3-D mode) that have not been ported to the API code (which is why NUKEMAP3D is effectively dead — Google deprecated the Google Earth Plugin and has never replaced it, and no other code base has filled the gap).
Stories like this often confuse me. Google’s behaviour seems designed specifically to harm the people most enthusiastic and knowledgeable about their products, pushing them away to use competitors’ products or other alternatives. While that won’t harm Google’s bottom line in the short term – and, in fact, might even improve it – in the long term, it strengthens alternatives and teaches people to untangle themselves from Google’s web of products.
What’s in it for Google here? Is this just clueless bean counters lead by bottom line-obsessed executives? Or is there some grander plan behind pushing people away?
Yea google seems to have found a DIFFERENT but still dysfunctional culture then Microsoft or Oracle. I used to spend good money on android premium tablets, currently I use cheap Chinese ones that work great and would NEVER shell out $600-1000 to google or their OEMs. Every product with google is fly by night. Google does not support their products long term, and I have no faith that their services/devices will work consistently as it does today. They might just re-invent the wheel out of nowhere.
Several years back I actually made a “driving game” overlaying google earth. This was rudimentary and lacked polish, it was more a proof of concept than anything else. But the idea was that the user could eventually play the game in their own city. It worked for about a year or two but google broke the API that I was using and that was that. It hammers home why it’s a bad idea to depend on 3rd party services, not that I’d have any way to produce that data myself.
Open maps has come a long way and now there are some earth geoimaging alternatives that are fairly good.
http://www.webglearth.com
They even have publicly downloadable datasets, however unfortunately those are much lower res images than the ones they’re using on their own website.
https://openmaptiles.com/downloads/dataset/satellite/
I don’t know if anyone makes high quality images available publicly?
Thom, did you guys disable comment editing? I noticed that I can no longer edit comments and am wondering if there’s a reason for it?
Maintaining external APIs takes time and resources. So does adding new features to the main Google Maps site. Bringing the new features from the main Google Maps site to the external developer API and keeping those up to date takes even more effort. Seems like a classic case of prioritizing their own site over supporting external devs.
The open collaboration was a phase when people at Google were allowed to develop projects that were technical innovations but nearly impossible to.monetize at the time.
Nowadays Google has integrated their spyware and ads everywhere so all their time is spent on working with the business side of things. Any third party support is a liability with little to no potential for generating income.
sj87,
This pretty much sums of not only google, but every corporation that makes it to the top. They stop caring about about becoming better in order to be competitive and just focus on exploiting their market lead to generate more revenue.
They stopped caring about technical merits when the conten became more important than the application itself. I assume most people are using Google Maps for its huge database of local points of interest as well as ability to help us navigate through unknown places.
Then there’s the aspect of monetization. Actually I think that restricting the ability of third party apps has a lot to do with the “need” to keep users seeing all the obtrusive ads and notification that the current Android app is notorius for. If someone was able to make a “light” version of Maps, i.e. one without all the useless crap that keeps generating income for Google, people would switch over quick and Google would lose a few bucks.
It is also harder to spy on users if they aren’t on your software. Relying on what sort of API calls are made to load portions of maps is less accurate than actively tracking everything the user clicks on or appears to be looking at. (I read that e.g. Facebook detects when user stops scrolling the page and uses that as a metric for engagement.)
Google’s internal culture is supposedly 100% focused on new projects. Maintaining old projects doesn’t get you promotions or even good performance reviews, only creating new things.
This is probably why they release a new chat platform every couple of years/months.
As a developer, I won’t touch Google’s APIs or platforms (although we do have to support Android at work). As a user, I avoid using Google’s stuff. I’ve got an Android phone, but I don’t even use Gmail.
I think this corporate ADHD is really starting to affect Google’s reputation, even among consumers (see literally every thread about Stadia for example).
My thought process towards GMaps is this:
At thw inception, GMaps was in its innovation state. Thats when features were needed. Netween that , 3D, etc. Through time and much spying, Google has gained its userbase usecase for the most part, and as a publicly traded company, why put money and effort into projects, the general masses wont use? Yes there are still power users who are used to certain features, but if the masses arent using them, the power users are SOL since the power users are a minority. This is in no way a defense for Google as I abhor thwir anti privacy practices in most if not all of their public products. So here’s the question, In all realism, without fantasy or pipe dreams, what can we do to eliminate issues such as this from repeating itself?
spiderdroid,
The masses ARE using google’s 3rd party web APIs. google is undoubtedly the #1 provider of such APIs including google maps on millions of websites. The issue for google isn’t that they’re not being used, but that they’re not being monetized. Offering “free” services was a great way to expand quickly and get market buy-in, but now that google is a web monopoly they don’t care about buy in so much as cutting costs and focusing on profits.
IMHO market monopolies/oligopolies are one of the primary causes of decreased innovation and lack of interest to do better. It’s too easy for the top dogs to get by with exploiting their sheer size to stay ahead. The underdogs always have to work harder than the top dogs just to stay in the game. The solution is clearly to have more competition, but that would require politicians to kick out corporate lobbyists and recognize the value in not selling us out to big business interests. Good luck with that though, there’s just too much corruption and no accountability to constituents
@Alfman
Agreed on all your points as I see no realistic approach to the issue in today’s society.
Yeah, don’t write products based on Google APIs, full stop. Use vendors who specialize in a particular space, who’s main source of revenue is that product. Google’s product is ads, everything else is ancillary and totally expendable.
I don’t think it takes much imagination to conclude that the purpose of the feature richness of the initial stage is to attract and corral users into the big net, and after monopoly and dependency is established, to then slowly withdraw any ability to use the product apart from narrow use cases defined by the controllers. I think this is generally true for much technology, as decreased functionality can be observed over time with PCs and smartphones and also software and social media. As to what the grand plan is, if I can speak in a generality I assume it has to do with human control but this subject will take us right out of the domain of technology.