Google Maps has a multi-layered business moat that makes competition really difficult
* Massive staff and fleet of vehicles on the ground with multiple sensors mapping the entire planet. Capital costs here are enormous
* Massive network and bandwidth with caches in just about every major IX to deliver ultra high performance maps
* Major established contracts with satellite mapping vendors to get the best data as early as possible
* Major brand recognition with many users using the app and knowing it to be the best of the best
I would never want to compete here, but a major institutional player could
You're talking about competing as a consumer map/gps, which is not what the blog post is talking about (or the parent comment, I assume).
Rather, GMaps used to be the default choice if you wanted to build an app on top of a map (in this case, looking at the effects of nuclear bomb detonations). The blog post explains why GMaps is no longer a reasonable choice, which (as the parent notes) opens up room for competitors.
> ”Google Maps has a multi-layered business moat that makes competition really difficult”
OpenStreetMap is going from strength to strength. Maps startups no longer need to duplicate Google's on-the-ground mapping efforts. Now, they can make use of open data.
When Pokemon Go switched from Gmaps to OSM, the quality drop was dramatic and noticeable. I want OSM to be a real competitor, but I think it represents a perfect example of how difficult it is to compete with Google Maps.
It counts as "Good Enough", but man, it's disappointing to see how inferior Pokemon Go maps are these days. Roads that don't exist, buildings in random places with roads going through them, and map data that seems manipulated for game advantage (by players contributing to OSM for gameplay reasons, not for accuracy reason) ... and this is in the midtown area of a top 10 US city.
> "Roads that don't exist, buildings in random places with roads going through them"
This is unfortunate and surprising. In my experience (mostly UK/Europe) the quality of street data in OSM matches, and in some cases exceeds that of Google Maps. (Points-of-interest data does not, however).
If you do notice errors and omissions, fixes can be made in seconds by getting an OSM account and clicking the "edit" button on OpenStreetMap.org. In recent years the development of the "ID" editor has significantly lowered the barriers to entry of editing OSM.
> "map data that seems manipulated for game advantage"
Perhaps OSM needs some sort of Wikipedia-style spam detection/prevention if this is happening on a wide scale.
If you do notice errors and omissions, fixes can be made in seconds by getting an OSM account and clicking the "edit" button on OpenStreetMap.org. In recent years the development of the "ID" editor has significantly lowered the barriers to entry of editing OSM.
This is the same argument that keeps every year from being the year of Linux on the desktop.
"My computer crashed!" "Oh, just become a Linux kernel developer and fix it yourself."
Most people who just want to eat an apple (even an apple a day) don't have bandwidth to pick them. Offer them the option of picking apples at an orchard for free vs. buying a bag of apples at a grocery, and most people will go buy the bag.
The same happens with an OS. Most people don't want a free labor-intensive solution. They want something that just works, runs their software and stays out of the way. People don't want to think about what OS they use.
Yes, typical users want a "just works" solution. But yc-news commenters aren't typical users. In the time it takes to post a comment on this forum, anyone here can just fix the problem themselves using OSM's very simple point-and-click editor.
Contrast to Google Maps, where the process of getting a change made can take weeks or months - if the fixes ever show up at all.
There really is a lot of power in having a map of the world that we can all "just edit".
IMO, HN readers can't be the target audience of a mapping product that's being used as a backbone of so many large projects. You have to make it painfully simple and give people a real incentive to do it.
The act of contributing an edit to OSM is vastly simpler than fixing a kernel bug. But OSM does still have the massive barrier to entry in that if you are using an application built on OSM data, it is usually not easy to realize this and understand that OSM is where you need to go to fix a map error, unless you are already familiar with OSM.
> it is usually not easy to realize this and understand that OSM is where you need to go to fix a map error
The OSM licence requires that people using OSM data attribute OSM, i.e. that their users are aware that the data comes from OSM. In theory this means that the final user should know that OSM is where they should go to fix data issues.
If you're not already familiar with what OSM is, the copyright notice is really not going to be enough to alert the user to the fact that OSM works differently from commercial map data suppliers and can easily accept user contributions.
So when my grand
mother has an issue with her app, she’s sure to notice that it says “open street maps” in the corner and go to the website, make an account, and contribute more accurate data? I don’t think so.
Really, it’s not even an age thing. I work in tech. I visit HN on the regular. OSM, Google, and Apple all have inaccurate data about my daily commute to work. They all say a path that exists doesn’t. Have I don’t anything about it? Absolutely not.
Imagine the average Pokémon Go user; if they even read the boilerplate that stood between them and playing the game, how many of them understood what role OSM data played in their experience, realized what the word “open” meant, and correctly concluded that they could do something to influence/correct the situation vs just thinking the game had a bug or glitch?
I'm far from a power Pokemon Go player, and I live in a city that's likely to have very good map coverage, but those caveats asides I didn't know that this even happened.
I agree that there are disadvantages in OpenStreetMap. In other parts of the world, Google maps is worse. However, for showing which parts of a city would be dead by a nuke, you don't need to have every road laid out accurately.
The moat's draining because more of this data is becoming commodity.
OpenStreetmap data is quite good. I can run a local instance with all the data and the tile server and a web server in a docker image in maybe ~10 min. Source: did this a few years ago during a particularly boring meeting.
The thing benchmarked in my other comment loads an OSM dump into PostGIS (in 1 particular format, translating the OSM data from an editing/versioning friendly format to something more useful for map making as it goes). The current full planet dump is 84 GB:
It’s kind of ironic that Google Maps is so bad at some things then. Walking & Cycling directions are especially bad - I get much better directions from OSM than I do from Google Maps.
For driving directions GMaps is much better. I presume that’s where the majority of their userbase is.
In my experience GMaps route optimizations don't account for elevation or road size in my country. When I drive outside city I strictly use OSMand for routing.
GMaps driving directions failed HARD for me last night.
I had to make a trip during rush hour. I was already going to be cutting it close on timing as this is a 12 minute drive that can take 15-20 minutes at rush hour. I plugged in my destination and GMaps routed me a way I would rarely take but didn't seem too odd. One block past my last alternate route, I saw the lights ahead. There was a 4 car crash with at least 5 emergency vehicles on scene about 1/2 mile ahead. GMaps had no clue and I had no choice but to inch through about 10 light cycles to reach the turn Gmaps wanted me to take.
The 15 minute trip took me 35 minutes. Thanks for nothing.
You mean, there was an edge case where Google didn't have real-life data for a specific accident available for you? This is an extreme case that we wouldn't even expect to exist a few years ago, (and then got annoyed by passive surveillance) but now gmaps is failing for missing it? Is this the new norm?
Did you mark the accident yourself when you saw it?
If it weren't already aware of the accident so it could warn you, you could have let Waze know about it and, at the least, helped out many others who were coming after you.
A few days ago I had a rideshare driver unable to find me because Google kept telling him to take a non-existent road through the middle of a building.
You wouldn't compete on the things that Google does well, but rather on the things they don't. Not saying it is easy. Price and user interaction is something I believe could be improved upon. Also maybe crowd sourcing info.
that's not true though. I know from doing HOTOSM that there are quite a lot places where there is only a road or two going through it only google maps but there is actually a city/town there. there are some counties where Google Street view cars have never even visited.
* Massive staff and fleet of vehicles on the ground with multiple sensors mapping the entire planet. Capital costs here are enormous * Massive network and bandwidth with caches in just about every major IX to deliver ultra high performance maps * Major established contracts with satellite mapping vendors to get the best data as early as possible * Major brand recognition with many users using the app and knowing it to be the best of the best
I would never want to compete here, but a major institutional player could