Why are they shutting down?
They have a very nice product but competing with the likes of Google is hard.
You are correct. They are not owned by Samsung, they were simply part of the accelerator.
> These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern the terms by which you (if registering on behalf of yourself) or the entity you represent (if registering as a business) (“Customer,” “you” or “your”) may utilize the mapping tools and services made available by Samsung Research America, Inc. on behalf of its Mapzen business unit (“Mapzen˝ or ˝we˝ or ˝us˝ or “our”).
Seems they were actually part of Samsung. Makes me wonder why they shuttered Mapzen. I can see this being useful to them for Tizen amongst other things.
Additionally, companies like Mapzen make this mistake in believing that because Google (and a few others) have this massive Maps API ecosystem that there's a ton of money in this market. I've seen similar investment slides and their argument boils down to something like, "well Google/msft is aggressively going after this market so that means there MUST be money here" and that's the bulk of the justification. Honestly, I don't even think Google/MSFT know why they have been going after the Maps API market so aggressively. For one, Google has completely and utterly failed to leverage the Maps API to transition or segue customers onto Google Cloud Platform where there is obviously a lot of money to be made. So like what else is there? There's no way the geo services business matches the cloud, ads, youtube, or chrome/android business. Not to mention all the other shit going on.
In conclusion, I feel like we will see other services fail as well. I would be SHOCKED to see MapBox continue on or even IPO. They will most likely be sold once investors realize what I've just discussed or shut down. I also predict that Google / MSFT will just limit their interest in this product unless they can find a way to help it drive GCP/Azure business.
It remains to be seen whether 200+ employees and sunk costs is a sustainable business; it's an audacious bet on their part that it is. But Mapbox without doubt has the foundations of a very sustainable business within it.
Mapzen never had the revenue, and never looked like it was trying very hard to get it, presumably betting that its Samsung parent would keep the tap running (and, to their credit, being aggressively open-source so that their work wasn't wasted when the day came that the tap was turned off). A bunch of the stuff they did was technologically really fascinating and valuable, such as Who's On First (their geocoder), but never got to saleable product stage. Commercially Mapzen hobbled themselves for geocoding by their laudable insistence on being a 100% open solution: you simply can't do worldwide, reliable, saleable address-level geocoding with open data yet.
Note too that there are a bunch of less noisy players within the OSM ecosystem - Geofabrik, Thunderforest, Graphhopper - who do work which is often as interesting and performant as the Silicon Valley companies, yet with a much lower profile. If you're looking for alternatives following the Mapzen shutdown, I'd commend all three.
My thesis is that "geo services" ventures need to be subsidized or else they can't sustainably exist at prices that developers are today accustomed to pay for.
>But Mapbox without doubt has the foundations of a very sustainable business within it.
Are you sure about that? The world is littered with failed companies with amazing products that couldn't find enough people to sell them to. Just because you have a lot of people who want to buy your $100 bills for $50 doesn't mean you have a strong business.
Saw a great article comparing to Apple maps and this stuff must cost Google a fortune to do.
https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/ Google Maps's Moat - Justin O'Beirne
But more to my point Google and MSFT have a "multi-faceted" geo business so they can make money in many different places. Whereas someone like Mapzen or Mapbox ONLY has the geo services/APIs end. So where can the go to subsidize the cost of the services? The answer is they cant so the revenue from the services to carry the entire cost of their efforts.
Theoretically, if Mapbox could get enough views, they could also enter the advertising market. But from my understanding of their company and business model, that would be a really tough sell.
Yes. Apple learned this with their disastrous rollout of their custom mapping solution a few years back. Mapping/geographic projects are nothing to sneeze at, even for the big guys. There's just so well-integrated and useful that we hardly think about the complication involved.
ANOUNCEMENT: The Valhalla team is joining Mapbox where we'll be taking Valhalla to the next level! Stay Tuned!! An Open Source Routing Library/Service