Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.

I mean, there's a real cry-me-a-river aspect here. No one has a Google-granted fundamental right to mapping. It's a free product Google released to drive traffic to their own offerings, and which they happen to make available for free for a lot of purposes.

As it turns out, yeah, there's a lot of value we as a society can derive from low cost pervasive mapping. So let's find a way to share the cost and not just whine about Google, no?

View on HN

The problem isn’t that Google wants to charge for a service. The issue is that they offered it for years for free or below cost effectively price gouging any competition. Now, with no alternatives they jack up the price. Classic monopolistic and anticompetitive behaviour.

Essentially the Google Reader effect, right? Where killing their offering basically killed the entire medium.

You've got the causality reversed here. The medium was dying, so the Reader product was killed.

You mean Google+ needed promotion so the Reader product was killed.

In the first place they'd rather you used something other than RSS so they can inject promoted content into it.

Nothing stops promoted content being injected by the feed reader. Feedly does it on their free plans.

Google+ only existed in the first place because of the thing that was killing the medium and its one hundred and forty character-limited cousin.

As I look at the big list of RSS feeds I found this very thread in, I can't help but imagine that news of it's death is a tad exaggerated.

Well, there's that too, but people complaining about Google's decision r.e. Reader don't like being reminded that there are dozens of alternatives.

I'm always so confused by this. I switched to Feedly the day Reader went away. It was just as good then and is better now. I subscribe to way more stuff now than I did then. I've never understood how this "killed the entire medium".

If we're doing anecdata when Reader was killed off I tried Feedly, didn't like it, stopped consuming via RSS. I've recently tried Newsblur but honestly I never check the thing despite having it on every device I can. I don't think RSS is a thing for me anymore outside of technically podcasts

Same here. I miss it but I haven't been satisfied with the options I tried (anyway Google long ago killed my list of feeds).

I use RSS daily, but I am very much anomaly among my friends. For most people I know RSS just withered and died and got replaced by Facebook or whatever asocial media they are on.

I ended up rolling my own server (in scheme using sxml) and writing some minimal clients for it (tui, Emacs and web). It is running on a raspberry pi 2 and is currently using about 5mb of memory (the guile runtime is a large chunk of that) and has been down once since I started it 5 years ago (power outage).

Reader was to me the absolute best example of the good old web. Since then it seems like the web became insane with the idea of reinventing UI, which was then forced down our throats for both web and desktop, ruining two paradigms that worked just fine.

I am old,I know.

Sure, yeah, using RSS is rare, but it always was, and nothing was going to keep the vast majority of people from using Facebook and Twitter instead.

I don't understand why you rolled your own server. Feedly works great. If you did it because it's a fun project, that's awesome! But it certainly isn't necessary if your goal is just to subscribe to RSS feeds.

Back then the only alternatives were either commercial with shitty data policies or TTRSS which scared me away as it back then was probably the most hostile open source project on GitHub.

So I rolled my own. I will probably port it to use SQL so I can do easy searching when my kids move out :)

Uh... the linked article compared 8 different competitors on various metrics. There are reasonable ways to disagree with Google's policy here, but "no alternatives" and "monopolistic" are just laughably silly.

I’d disagree a bit. There are competitors but the quality and the service is not on the same level. Google have made it hard to compete so that they stay in the leadership position. More importantly google maps “owns” more market share than all of them combined so it is kinda a monopoly.

I might not have explained my point well but I do think you get what I’m saying.

If players with the resources of Apple and Microsoft are lagging here, it's not because Google "made it hard", it's because it's a hard problem. Yet they are competing, and that's a good thing. Google is just better. And you want it for free. And thus we get back to the cry-me-a-river bit.

Or is it because being in a #1 market position with a (until now) free price tag attracted thousands of volunteers submitting content and corrections for free?

I've probably spent a few hours correcting Google Maps (and a couple of days on OSM).

Maps quality like search engine probably increases with the number of users.

Companies with deep pockets trying and failing to gain a meaningful share in a market is more proof of a monopoly or other anti-competitive behavior, not less.

Could you point to this supposed behavior? Price and quality are, in themselves, not anticompetitive.

"Dumping" i.e. Putting out a product below cost to eliminate competitors is one of the fundamental forms of anticompetitive behaviour. All of Googles "free" products seem to fit the definition - they would not profitable standalone without Google's dominance in other markets and companies only operating in a single market cannot compete.

They are failing to provide comparable service, and thus failing to get meaningful share. I heard Apple maps is recently ok, but a couple of years ago when I tried it, it was still bad. Google has about 10 times more info than Apple or bing per building I look up (though, surprisingly, OSM is 90% of the way there for me).

Thats a ridiculous argument. There were competitors to standard oil too.

MacOS, BeOS, AmigaOS, FreeDOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux (Red Hat Linux, SUSE Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, Slackware, Mandrake, ...), Amithlon, MorphOS, Haiku, QNX, OS/2, Novell NetWare, PalmOS, ...

There are reasonable ways to disagree with Microsoft's policy here, but "no alternatives" and "monopolistic" are just laughably silly.

Your comment completely disregarded the possibility that there's a dominant market position. Which there is. It is hard to compete with free. Ask e.g. TomTom or Microsoft.

mapbox is totally a reasonable alternative, and in a lot of cases you can build something quickly with leaflet that gives you everything you need.

When I was a teenage I was told that thats how drug dealers operated - get you hooked on something for free, then ramp up the price once you are hooked.

Never heard of any drug dealer that did that in my adult life, but I do see a lot of large corporations using that business model.

The article said nothing about making it free, it said that the costs, which were previously in line with competitors, increased by very, very large amounts without any perceived increase in value. Then they looked at options which were commercial offerings which cost dramatically less. They are paying for the service, it's not subsidized or free. It's like you didn't read any of the article.

They were in the free tier, so they were not paying. They even have a nice graph that shows it.

Sounds like a great opportunity for their competitors, then!

I have been doing a lot of Local Guide work, photos, verifying, etc. in a rural area. Will be switching to OSM. This was the last straw.

I'm doing the same. Been a local guide aswell. And if you are not based in the US, you never got ANY benefit from Google for that effort. I did it for the society. And now Google is earning 10x more with it...

One could say the same about Google's cry-me-a-river response to the EU's decision on Android:

"If Google needs to engage in anticompetitive behavior to keep Android profitable/viable, then they weren't ever profitable."

>Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.

If startups need a giant subsidized operating system for free or else they weren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.

Do you see how ridiculous that argument is?

>As it turns out, yeah, there's a lot of value we as a society can derive from low cost pervasive mapping. So let's find a way to share the cost and not just whine about Google, no?

Yeah, Google has vacuumed up incredible amounts of mapping data from users and has now jacked up the prices with the lead this gave them. OSM (or something similar) is the way to share the cost. Google just abused their goodwill and used their other power positions to discourage open source. Whining about Google while moving elsewhere is entirely appropriate.

>Do you see how ridiculous that argument is?

What? Your counter-counterpoint doesn't make sense at. Lots of startups can afford the per seat cost of OSX or Windows. If your business can't recoup the cost of an os per employee then yeah...maybe it's not a worthwhile venture.

> Lots of startups can afford the per seat cost of OSX or Windows.

On the desktop side of things that only happens because of Linux, otherwise (if guys like Ballmer would have had their way at the end of the '90s - early 2000s) those startups would now be paying hundreds of dollars per Windows license per each machine (and maybe more depending on the number of cores? the sky would have been the limit, the same as Oracle did in their field). And not to mention the server side of things, I'm pretty sure the costs for server OS licenses would have been prohibitive for the vast majority of startups without the alternative free OS solutions.

We pay a lot more than that for MSDN licenses (which includes the OS if it's only used for development).

> Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.

I mean, kind of, but on the other hand, think about all the companies whose costs are subsidized by having public roads.

Yup and in the UK because freight is all on tax payer paid roads private rail has become incredibly expensive for normal people travelling.

It is not about free. It is about being more expensive than before. We live in the economy, where small companies operate at such a thin margin (even if they're profitable), that such an increase in cost often kills any hope for profitability, especially with the economies of scale. Would you prefer to fire one developer from the team, or stop using Google Maps?

I am not saying that mapping should be free, but such price bumps should be communicated better to allow paying customers prepare for changes and alternative scenarios.

And again, just another reminder, that whenever choosing a provider for anything related to your core business - think of an exit plan!

Here we go again with the "No subscription fees means you have the right to like what we give you" argument. Haven't we beaten the "nothing is actually free" horse into the ground by now? There is the matter of the vast amounts of data Google collects from people, and the other intangible costs you incur from the lack of alternative products due to the high barrier to entry (hard to compete with 'free'), and of course the risks that come with the lack of incentive on the vendor's part to maintain good will with the end user (this thread is case in point).

I completely disagree. You can find Google's pricing tactic aggressive, but it made me think about the entitlement there.

They complain that Maps at new prices would be more than the cost of their infrastructure, when actually their entire startup revolves around this data, and 5k to be able to use an amazing piece of high tech software that is ahead of the competition is..peanuts.

No matter what other business interests and strategies Google follows, there is no right to using such valuable tech for less than the monthly salary of an engineer. I find this incredible entitled.

If a startup needs a giant system of subsidized roads for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.

You see where this argument leads to?

No, the roads are subsidized by those who pay for them. There is a right to use them for business purposes, unlike private map services.

In most countries startups don't pay for taxes and therefore are not contributing to roads.

Is Google infrastructure now? Should we fund Google with tax money? Nationalize it?

No, although of course there is the point that a lot of Google's mapping data was subsidized with tax money by virtue of using the various geodata sources the U.S makes available for free to build on.

Anyone can use those, so why are people complaining?

Google does a whole lot more, and can charge whatever they want for it. OSM provides usable solutions the vast majority of users; i’ve Moved to OSM a couple of years ago in everything for privacy reasons and except for the occasional Waze route or verifications, get nothing from google that I can’t get from OSM.

Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized transport infrastructure/global telecomunications network/permissive government/low-cost computer hardware/solid legal system or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com