Get a sneak peek at whats next for Permanent Hazards on our April 7th Office Hours!
Post by zappee
jeffcarp wrote:If the resulting service in the end has all of the great aspects of the service that was bought, what difference does it make what the service is called?
Difference is that Google will prioritize Android with Google Maps and not iOS/WP.
davipt wrote:
sketch wrote:
zappee wrote:Well, that's because they didn't have any service like YT before. Waze is a direct competitor to Google Maps.
They did and do. It's called Google Video, now Google Videos.

Google Video is not the same kind of "platform" that YouTube is, rather functioning principally as a search engine for videos hosted elsewhere, but the same could be said of Google Maps. Google Maps uses mostly third-party map data and functions as an agent which can search and give directions using that map data. Waze, like YouTube, is its own platform, with its own content. Google Maps has its own routing engine, yeah, but Google Video has its own video player, too.
Am I getting old enough to forget stuff already? As I recall, Google Videos was exactly the same as YouTube - a platform for people to upload their own videos. If that platform provided additional searching capabilities into other systems, I don't recall it. It was a direct match with YouTube, with the difference that everybody used YouTube and almost none used Google Videos. It was a kind of Facebook vs. Google Plus - they are the same at the core, but people only care about one of them.

Google Maps is a broad name for a lot of stuff. There are the satellite images (3rd party), the street view (google), the maps road tiles (owned already by google? or still a big merge between all the providers, as we can see e.g. on Google Earth's footer?), the google *maps* client (the original iPhone client or the mobile web version), which just shows the maps, the google navigation (the new iPhone client, and the mobile web if clicked properly), where the navigation competes with waze, but also provides bus and pedestrian routing, plus all the variations of 3d via earth or the new maps, and on top of that there are the POI information, from google and 3rd parties, where gearth client can clearly show all the data feeds available and from whom.

So I see two things in direct competition - the road tiles and the car navigation client. Maybe plus the traffic information that I'm not sure where google is getting from, themselves or just 3rd parties.

Back to YouTube, it was clear that YouTube would remain as is and Google Videos would die. The amount of traffic and users was abysmal. We can't say the same about Waze and Google Navigation, hence the big question of what will happen this time.
So you think Google will close down Maps navigation and keep Waze?
That's not really realistic.
zappee
Posts: 40
Has thanked: 2 times
Been thanked: 4 times
Send a message