http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/06/22/ ... waze-deal/

I've put in a year's worth of map improvements over the past year. When can I expect my cheque?

McCracken808 wrote:I just heard a news report that the FTC is investigating the sale. Well, well, well. Waze has hit the big time. Google may be paying a lot more than $1.5B, in fines.

Monopoly?


Via my iPhone 4S

Antitrust. Basically trying to prevent google from becoming a monopoly. But with the amount of competition, I doubt it will go anywhere. If they couldn't get google for its search engine, I don't think they can get them for the maps.


Via my iPhone 4S

I am very excited about this buy-out if true. I like the concept of Waze a lot, but after lots of use in a variety of different circumstances and locations, it just seems like it will have a very hard time growing beyond a "commuter solution" in the major cities. I just don't feel like it can achieve critical mass beyond the biggest cities.

I live in a city of 275,000 in a metro area of about 550,000. The Waze data is marginal at best. I was almost always the one entering data like hazards instead of being the recipient of other's entries. The traffic on the freeways was pretty good but the side road traffic was almost always wrong - stale basically. It would include traffic on meaningless little residential streets but miss congestion on major divided 4 lanes arterials. We suffered from massive flooding last month, closing hundreds of streets and over 30 highways. I could find none of those closures entered into Waze by other users.

I love the idea that Waze learned from my personal driving and adapted road segment speeds, etc. I hope that Google includes that technology in the merged solution someday. I like the social aspects of warning other drivers of issues - there just aren't enough users. Same problem as Dash Navigation. Great idea - couldn't achieve critical mass except in major cities.

I greatly prefer the Google client over Waze both from a UI perspective as well as functionality, integration with the overall smartphone apps, and especially Google Now. Waze not being impeded into the OS in terms of being a handler app for clicking on addresses in other apps was always a huge drawback to it from my perspective. Google not yet doing automatic traffic rerouting is insane but that is coming this summer. That is one of the main reasons why I kept coming back to Waze under certain circumstances.

Finally, from a POI perspective, the biggest thing that I like about Google Navigation is the placement of POI's relative to their exact building location versus simply their street address. This, combined with Google's inclusion of terminal roads helps tremendously when trying to find a specific POI in the midst of a very dense retail area for example.

I think there are definitely benefits to the Waze app that will make Google better. I also believe that this is a defensive purchase as well - it was worth it for Google to take Waze away from others.

Waze wasn't profiting from your data? I'd say that customer data was worth about 99% of the $1B+ windfall they are about to receive.

Google doesn't need Waze for the traffic content. They have every Android phone in the US to know where traffic is. Their user base dwarfs Waze's base. My guess is that Google will incorporate the social incident sharing aspects of Waze into Google's app. I can't see the Waze app or editor surviving though. I don't know what the point would be.

So it seems like we know that Google Maps will get some of the social traffic intelligence from Waze and Waze will get Google search. Those seem like two things that can be implemented fairly quickly and benefit both communities. Beyond that, I don't think we know much of anything at this point.

The tone of the Waze announcement was much more "nothing will change" then the Google announcement was in my opinion.

Long term, it doesn't seem to be in either community's best interest to continue to fragment the editing community between two different map editors. But obviously consolidating these two services into one unified app and editor is a much longer term proposition. I don't think they can publicly say that is what is going to happen yet without risking alienating thousands of editors that they really need to continue what they are doing.

Think about it though, is there really any practical purpose in an editing community spending time editing a change in one mapping platform when the other mapping platform already contains the change? How they reconcile the current status of both mapping databases though seems like a technical challenge way beyond my comprehension.

I don't see how there is an ounce of difference between Google Navigation, not Google Maps, and Waze as it relates to the intended use of the app while driving.

I hope that functionality of both apps is integrated into one solution. I see no reason why a single app can't be great at navigation, social traffic, and search all in one. It was the maddening switching between the two apps to achieve all of those things that drove me nuts. The idea of having them within the same app makes perfect sense to me and I hope they do it.