How Google bought Waze
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
On a couple visits to Israel I used Waze because everyone did. Every single ride I was taken through "crazy" routes that wasted my time. Every 5 minutes i got an ad showing me a small discount for something I don't need if I detour 5 or 20 minutes off my route. I don't get that with Google maps.
Google Maps has gotten worse if anything over time. The mid Atlantic corridor is a great example -- it's real difficult to transit the DC region without being directed to the Baltimore-Washington parkway, although alternate routes exist that are within a few minutes of each other.
The other thing it is missing is the ability to protect traffic over a long road trip. If I'm driving from NYC to Maine, they should know about typical commute cycles. The Microsoft Map desktop app had a manual capability to do that in the 90s.
and waze is far in the other direction, often telling people to get on and off highways repeatedly to save 30 seconds.
In fact, waze estimates it will save time, but in practice, it rarely does for me.
The routing of either is just a cost model for the same path finding engine. Maps seems to try to avoid various types of road transitions, assuming that it's traffic data isn't perfect and these things have some cost (IE traffic lights, etc, which are not accounted for except as average traffic speed) Waze seems to simply assume the apparently shortest fastest path will actually turn out that way.
Waze is often wrong, Maps rarely is. When Waze is wrong, it often takes only as long as Maps does or longer, (i've had Waze tell me to take routes it claimed were 5 minutes faster, that were 10 minutes longer). Maps is usually accurate, but it may leave something on the table.
I'd still rather have the second. Trying to pretend you have good data when you don't doesn't lead to good results. (IE garbage in, garbage out).
Basically, I want a mapping app which looks at a long trip and suggests alternate routes based on traffic, accident reports, etc. and is smart enough to weight routes based on historical trends. Waze has much of that but could use the kind of tuning which Google should be really good at and the much larger dataset it'd get if e.g. all Google Maps users were contributing data points.
The only other complaint I have with Waze is the clumsy UI for searching & adding stops (not to mention the 1 waypoint limit), the former being an area where Google should be able to deliver huge quality improvements almost effortlessly.
(There was an accident on interstate 5 south, the backup was obviously affecting traffic on the highway but also the surface streets leading up to the onramp. GMaps had the most direct route, of following the traffic to the nearest ramp as the alternate route, with the default route being a snaking journey down some streets to the next ramp that was beyond the traffic.)
As a user of both (and investor in neither) it always seemed to me that Waze did the crowdsourcing thing pretty well but their map editing tools were really clunky, UI was much less responsive, and they just didn't have any good way to fund the service (as indicated by the fact that all I ever saw in terms of advertising were little Taco Bell icons any time I was near a Taco Bell).
Google has the backend, the framework for making money from the service, and established routing and mapping systems whereas Waze's more granular and up-to-date info on traffic conditions offered something Maps didn't have.
Basically, the reasons people used Waze over Maps also made good additions to Maps. Would've been fine the other way around too but the reality was that Google was the larger, more established company so in typical fashion, they bought the smaller one to gain their features.
For me the really sad thing about this is thinking about all that community collected data. If a company manages to attract a community of people volunteering and contributing data, it's wrong for that to be taken away. Hopefully it won't be taken away completely in this case, but if the app is phased out, then you'll just have to hope your data shows up within google maps in some form. You're at their mercy. The data was collected by the community but it never belonged to the community.
There's a broad principle here which I think we need to be more collectively savvy about. Community "Crowd sourcing" should always go hand-in hand with community ownership of the data. This means open licensing and offering of bulk downloads. There needs to be increased awareness, and strong campaigns against the behaviour of companies who recruit a volunteer community, but don't give the data back (and I mean give it back properly, in a raw unencumbered open-licensed form)
Waze is not the worst example of this because I think a lot of waze contribution is in the form of very passive data collection. The value comes from algorithms rather than dedicated passionate contribution from volunteers. But even so. The community puts data in. The community loses the data in the end.
There hasn't been any news on this for a while, but Waze has also stayed almost exactly the same. There's a little integration the other way (Google Maps sometimes shows incidents reported on Waze), but that's it.
Other gripes:
It suggests using HOV lanes despite not knowing if there is someone else in the car, that can dramatically effect routes (say route A is faster only if you can use the HOV lane).
For ferries (I live in Seattle) it doesn't count the time on the ferry which can give you wildly incorrect time estimates. There's also not a way to ask for a route that doesn't include a ferry (sometimes you can drive around). For example Google Maps suggests 1:04 to get to a spot on Bainbrdige for me right now where Waze says 25 minutes. Considering the ferry ride itself takes ~30 minutes...
@jonknee is your name jon kneeland? I'm a John Kneeland. Small world!
I find that Google Maps is simple, clean, and quite accurate in predicting time to destination. Plus, now it displays traffic jams and incidents signaled by Waze users.
Trapster was originally positioned @ speed trap avoidance but as they grew to tens-of-millions of users their feature set more closely mirrored Waze (or vice versa?).
Trapster was eventually scooped up and killed by Nokia (1), is there any true competitor to Waze @ this point?
(1) http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/01/trapster-shutting-down/
Google maps in these countries has easily slipped inside the daily behavior of people in these countries in a way that is heartening to see - Drivers use it, students use it, hotels use it to show the way about town, bus drivers use it. It is amazing how accurate it is in these countries. I am thankful it exists.
I thought it was quite interesting how quickly Apple has come up to speed. Or maybe how slowly Google has been once they started to dominate.
The really annoying things is that even after Microsoft makes it painfully easy for Android apps to be brought into Windows 10, Google probably still won't do it.
I depend on Waze every day and its issues are nothing compared to value it provides. Unfortunately it's not integrated into my Model S so sometimes I drive with both the "native" Model S GPS (= Google Maps) and Waze so I can benefit from the greater maps on the 17" screen as well as the better directions from Waze. It's mighty confusing though.