Wow. I like how he treats Waze and Google as if they're two different things. It wasn't 3D that was difficult for Apple - their stuff always looked good. more than that it only looked good in places they could throw it all together and prove it looked good, which is different than being right. It's that whole "being right" thing they fucked up - Apple Maps used public databases and mixed them up in a proprietary way which is how it created situations like the "turn left onto the 101 freeway from this underpass two stories below it" that made us all give up on Apple Maps in the first place, which fucked us hard when Apple rolled out iOS 5, which didn't have Google Maps on it, so we literally had to download Waze in order to navigate, which Google made an end-run around by buying Waze. I mean, Apple didn't just fuck that up, they shit the bed. And they never un-shit the bed. They never actually went through and proofed their data. They did the Apple thing, which is hodgepodge open protocols and databases and mixed them up with their own proprietary bullshit. I guess they're using OpenStreetMaps, C3, Poly9 and some other shit to try and trail mix their way to success. That's why I maintain that the important sentence is: Here's the thing: Google Earth Pro, before they killed it, had awesome data in it. It had demographics. It had parcel data. It had traffic data. It had tax rolls. And it reflected the ground truth provided by the databases it drew from: in Whatcom County, WA, for example, the roads were off by about 15 feet west because the Whatcom County GIS data was exported to the national databases wrong. Snohomish County and King County disagreed about where property lines were and that was just the shit I noticed. Google had to go through and resolve all those conflicts and the way to do it, apparently, was to drive every road and proof everything. Once they'd done that, they killed Google Earth Pro. Google Earth desktop runs an entirely different database as Google Earth mobile and the Google Earth desktop database has been deprecated. The mobile one has a closed API. No touchy. Their data. Trimble paid less than $90m for Sketchup. I reckon that means they didn't get to grab Google's links between Sketchup's earth models and Google's GPS data. That means Google kept it. That means Apple couldn't buy Trimble to get a back door into Google's witness marks. Google didn't like the survey markers because they were off, so they went out and surveyed the world. Then they pulled up the markers so no one else could use them. I've realized something as a Google for Business user, as a Google Pixel user, as an Android Auto user, as a Google Fi customer, as a Google Earth Pro user, as a Hangouts user, as a victim of Google Plus. Google SUCKS at customer-facing stuff. And they don't fucking care. Try and get a response out of Google on a consumer product - welcome to the forums which are full of other frustrated users shouting at each other and a tone-deaf Google representative saying "hi there and fuck off! It doesn't work that way and never will! TTYL!" Try the same with a business product and the same rep will deal with you every time, and they've got a file on you, and they can look up every previous case. Google made Maps for business customers. Apple tried Apple Maps because they didn't like the price but that didn't pen out. Apple makes everything for consumers. B2B within the Apple ecosphere is a joke. And that's why Apple Maps will never catch up - Apple doesn't want to be a database company, they want to be a consumer company.Street View vehicles once drove across the main routes nine years ago—but they never returned to capture the rest.
Totally. The Google Maps API is about as B2B as I have interacted with Google, and it is a very nicely put together documentation. It doesn't have all the cool Earth Pro stuff, but it's more than enough if you ask me. They have business onboarding wizards. I mean, Google even allows you as a business to update your business information through an API.. Apple on the other hand has some things for iOS developers) and that's about it. My impression of Street View was that it was a bonkers idea that they did anyway, and once they had all the data they found a whole range of problems that could be solved with it. The power of 'geo' is that you can glue a bunch of geo-located data points together and figure out much more out of the glued whole than out of the sum of its parts. Did you see that Google has been adding "how busy is this place" to Maps? You can see down to the hour how busy your grocery store is when you look the business up in Maps. It seems like a fun side thing, but there are companies whose entire business is providing retail and real estate with accurate data on how many people a location will have walk by, because it's such a solid predictor of revenue that commercial real estate values are heavily determined by it (over here, at least). They figure those numbers out with costly, manual tallies and prediction models. Google hasn't explained how they do it, but my guess is that Google has accurately geolocated most, if not all wifi hotspots to physical locations by logging which hotspots people's Android phones pick up on and combining that with people who have their location services on. I'm speculating, but I wouldn't be surprised if that also started out with Streetview logging wifi. As soon as a few people have geolocated a wifi hotspot, they can then use logs from all other hundreds of Android phones to figure out how busy a place gets. It only takes a few users providing the initial ground truth, after which you can keep it updated with basic metadata logs. Just like in the article. I don't know if you also have that, but since this summer Google has been pushing location services hard, giving me a popup every. single. time I open any location-using app if I want to turn it on. It doesn't turn itself off anymore, too. I think they want more data on walkability, since Maps is not very good at that at times, but who knows what clever things they're up to.Google made Maps for business customers. Apple tried Apple Maps because they didn't like the price but that didn't pen out. Apple makes everything for consumers. B2B within the Apple ecosphere is a joke. And that's why Apple Maps will never catch up - Apple doesn't want to be a database company, they want to be a consumer company.
Google Maps traffic data is due to Google Maps tracking the MAC address and GPS coordinates of everyone using Google Maps. Google also knows the IP address of every business that talks to Google. If Google gives you an address, and you go to it, and you start showing that MAC address from that IP, google knows that business is that IP. They then know everyone else at that business. And yes. Google Street View was wardriving. But probably more because they could, than because they had to. I reckon they did it because they knew that whoever's databases they grabbed, they were inadequate for error-free navigation and the only way to reconcile them was to pound the pavement. Quora thinks Google spent $125-$700 a mile to do it. That means they spent between $700m and $2.8b on the US alone... the first time. They've spent about a billion dollars on self-driving cars. I'll bet if they hadn't spent that much the first time, they wouldn't have even tried self-driving cars.