> Noam Bardin opened a can of worms in a famous post that analyzed Google's problematic attitude towards Waze and innovation in general. Google, instead of seeing Waze as a brand to be nurtured and promoted, treated it as an incubator of ideas that should be exploited. "Every idea we had was quickly adopted by Google Maps," he wrote. Nor did the company use its vast resources to attract new users to Waze: "The Android app store treated us as a third-party application. There were no pre-installations on devices and no further distribution. We had a much larger marketing budget, but we were limited in what we could do and the third parties we could work with because of corporate policy. All of Waze’s post-acquisition growth came from work we did, not from mothership support. Looking back, we could probably grow much faster and much more efficiently if we had remained independent."
Waze is better than Google maps, but it's impossible to compete with someone just copying everything. It's a shame they were allowed to buy their competitions. Google maps still doesn't have the features I'm using Waze for, like traffic cameras, road hazards warnings, police warnings etc.
I guess that's a good time for a Waze clone to come up. Probably a matter of time until it becomes another thing Google destroyed.