Facebook almost acquired Waze, but we ended up with Google | Hacker News Reader

Facebook almost acquired Waze, but we ended up with Google

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I remember being at the Facebook weekly Q&A session when this was announced and Mark definitely stated it quite differently than the author's perspective. Basically that the Facebook deal was already "done" and just pending final signatures when Google swooped in at the 11th hour and stole the acquisition.

I still think it's a shame that there isn't a second major tech company with a serious mapping product. Apple Maps has always seemed laughably inferior even to what Waze offered 10 years ago.

I don't need all of the fancy features that Waze has. Just a simple map that routes me from A to B. Which is why I use Apple Maps more than Google Maps these days.

You're missing out on the speed trap alerts, though. That's the primary reason I use Waze over anything else.

Apple Maps has this as well and I often get the alerts while driving.

What would be amazing is if the major apps opened the social aspects to share this data.

I don't know when it was added but Apple Maps also has speed trap, collision, object on road, and traffic jam alerts.

I have not found that to be reliable enough to trust overall. I hate Waze wanting to announce every damn thing, it's annoying after a while. I don't care if there is a car on the side of the road, or the tiniest piece of cardboard in the road that someone felt compelled to flag for points.

You can turn off notifications for individual types of alerts.

I personally find speed trap alerts to be without value.

Another thing you could do is simply follow the posted speed limits, instead of using technology to evade law enforcement. It's very relaxing!

Agreed. However...

Speed trap notification are for more than just evading law enforcement. It lets you know that there's going to be a slow down because a lot of people who see cops instinctively tap the break and that has a domino effect. So if you're coming up the hill and you don't see the traffic yet, you can still be prepared.

Sometimes you go from one speed limit zone to another without realizing. I'm not saying I'm flying around as fast as possible, but it's nice to get an alert for a speed trap so I can look down and double check that I'm not speeding.

No need to get on a soapbox.

Apple maps has been good for a long time now. Anecdotally, I find the navigation to be more clear and the UX more intuitive.

I only use Google Maps for discovery and reviews. The navigation experience is not very good.

Main complaints are lack of offline maps (finally coming in iOS 17) and that it pulls business photos from Yelp and then tries to install their app if you want to enlarge an image.

One more complaint: they've had survey vehicles with cameras and LiDAR on the road since at least 2015 [1] but their Street View competitor still only covers 19 cities in the US [2].

It was quite good both times I was within the coverage area, and I was guessing it might roll out much more widely as a feature of their VR headset (since the data is more 3D than street view's), but no.

There's a big list of places where they're mapping this year [3] but who knows when that data will make it to the actual service.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Around_(Apple)#/media/Fil...

[2] https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#maps-look-ar...

[3] https://maps.apple.com/imagecollection/

As one who uses Apple Maps almost exclusively, it’s way too often that I say to myself, “Google has Street View down the Dalton Highway all the way to the Arctic friggin’ Ocean in Deadhorse, Alaska, and Apple can’t show me a street 20 miles outside Seattle?”

Plenty of large cities missing entirely too. San Antonio (1.47 million), Dallas (1.3 million), Austin (974k), Jacksonville (971k), etc.

They've got 4 cities done in California, which leaves 15 for the other 49 states.

I'm in Knoxville which isn't covered, only Nashville here with Memphis presumably next in line. We're the 131st largest city in the US with about 200k people, similar to Salt Lake City or Columbus. Could be a long time before they get the rest of us.

Yep, and Apple maps doesn't do the most annoying thing that Google/Waze do.. show me an Ad when I'm stopped which prevents me from looking at the map and getting my bearings while I'm stopped and it's actually safe to do so.

Apple used to get some things boneheadedly wrong and it's hard to go back to an App that's done that but it has gotten really good, and the UX has been vastly better than the Google products for a long time. Much more legible at dashboard distance, much more clear, not showing popup POI locations based on advertising that you aren't interested in, voice directions are much better, etc..

It feels like both Waze and Google Maps have stood still for the last 10 years, at least if you're using them on the iPhone.

Ads while navigating?

I've never experienced that.... That would be insane...

I've seen them. The ones I have seen are more like pins on the map for locations that clearly say Ad on them.

I've seen this in search results where there is a promoted top result. I've never seen it while navigating, and I use it daily.

A quick search confirms that they do exist so I wonder if they're not rolled out, or potential non legal, in Europe.

I get audio ones, I haven't seen screen ones.

"Turn right at McDonald's" and such.

(It's possible that that's not an ad, just something they thought was a convenient feature, but it sure sounds like the thing that they'd figure out a way to monetize even if it didn't start that way.)

That's not an audio ad. They've identified recognizable signage using street view and then use that to help guide you, because usually it's easier to see the McDonalds than the small street sign behind it.

Seems like leaving money on the table if they aren't getting paid for that. It's brand advertising gold for the shops.

Anyway, my family doesn't care for them. No thanks for another machine sticking brand names into our lives. Hopefully Apple doesn't adopt the same feature.

Especially since - and this is the part that makes it feel most like an ad - it's really seems only to be for certain big brands. "Street name, street name, street name, WENDY'S, street name..."

Oh c'mon, like jedberg said, fast food chain restaurants and gas stations usually have good signage for driving (hat tip Learning from Las Vegas), so it makes sense to use them as visual milestones.

I love Naomi Klein and all, but sometimes looking for small side street sign while everyone's going at least 45mph on a stroad is nearly impossible.

> No thanks for another machine sticking brand names into our lives. Hopefully Apple doesn't adopt the same feature.

I actually find it super useful. I remember the first time it happened to me, because I was surprised but also super pleased.

I was driving and it said "turn into the driveway after the Good Earth sign". And sure enough, I would have totally missed the nearly hidden driveway right past the Good Earth, but the sign on the restaurant was so big it was impossible to miss, even on the 45mph stroad I was on.

I disagree. I absolutely see it as an ad, using driving directions as the trojan horse to sneak it in.

Well, it's not. And they're not paid for it.

Whether or not it's intended as an ad, and whether or not they're getting paid for it, kinda doesn't really matter. I perceive it as a kind of advertising, probably because it came around when maps was adding all sorts of other advertising as well, and advertising was the final straw that drove me away from Google Maps.

I also find it a much less useful way of indicating directions, but I recognize that's just because my brain works differently. That's not a criticism of doing it that way.

It's literally the only thing that matters to the question of whether or not it's an ad. Imagine telling your grandma 30 years ago you don't appreciate her advertising to you because she used a business as a navigational reference giving directions to her house. Absurd.

Eh, to each his own. My grandma is not Google. Google has earned a high degree of suspicion and mistrust. My grandma has not.

Besides, she wouldn't have done that. She would have been more likely to give me directions in a way that is more useful to me than that, because she knows me.

This is definitely NOT the behavior of Google maps in any android device (always default rom) I ever had, never saw any ad as you describe, and I keep using them daily... don't you have by any chance crapware-infested-from-manufacturer brand like Xiaomi or Huawei?

My Waze app shows me ads when I'm stopped too. On my iPhone.

Google maps doesn't do this and that is what the op was stating.

The original comment referred to Google/Waze doing this, which is why I chimed in.

Google owns Waze, so it is "Google/Waze".

Apple Maps also rarely tells you to make unprotected left turns against traffic, whereas Waze will happily give you nearly impossible but theoretically faster directions.

Agree the quality of Apple Maps has improved to the point of acceptability in my experience. In addition to privacy reasons, I end up using Apple Maps because Google Maps has been having a lot of really terrible bugs for me lately. Probably 10+ times over the last few years it re-routes me down random side streets or back country roads, for no reason: sometimes even when it itself thinks doing so will add a significant amount of time to my travel! But for business search and reviews, Gmaps is still unparalleled, so it stays installed.

Certainly my experience (UK based) is that whilst Apple Maps has got much better, it's still pretty terrible and gives outright wrong lane guidance and motorway exit information quite often... Waze is virtually faultless in all the time I've used it.

I use Apple Maps extensively when I’m in Scotland and have not gotten bad directions even on single-track roads in the Highlands (IIRC, its directions to the Fairy Glen on Skye are impeccable; the directions to the Fairy Pools are only slightly worse, but that’s because the parking lot went through fairly recent construction a few years ago).

My wife (used to) swear by Apple Maps and was driving us to the NEC a few weeks ago - when exiting us off the A14 we would have gone completely the wrong way and up the M6 past Birmingham and northbound if we'd followed it's lane guidance - it also had the exit number completely wrong.

If it wasn't for me being slightly familiar with the route and advising my wife to ignore it that's what would have happened.

I've had similar problems, again mostly with lane guidance on exiting/splitting motorways, in Kent as well so I won't touch it with a barge pole now... I can't recall Waze ever letting me down

I have never tried Waze, forgot there was a third option. Will have to give it a try after reading this thread; maybe it avoids some of the bugs in gmaps I keep running into

I hate to say it, but I feel quality of Google Map's direction actually has gone done in recent years, even though I haven't changed any preferences.

It will put me through some ridiculous routes or lead me to incorrect destination for the same place I've been visiting for many years.

I get the feeling that I'm being used as a Guinea pig.

When I went to Venice, Apple map generally worked better in terms of walking directions.

I've definitely noticed weirdness with Google directions lately. It will routinely send me down streets that are obviously, clearly worse choices - slower, with more lights, and more local streets than the arterial streets that I would normally use.

As well, it insists on naming my cities main streets by their highway #s rather than the actual names of the street - which is extra confusing because the two directions of the "highway" are the two one-way main streets through town.

> ridiculous routes > guinea pig

I agree - I've long suspected that I've been used as a "probe" to check if a road is still accessible, or what speed is typical, etc. by being sent on strange sub-optimal routes.

Google maps is free and you're the product. In this case, your services as a convenient information gathering appendage.

All I really want is cardinal points on the map. So simple, and yet Google doesn't know how to do this.

If I know the orientation of the map, then I can usually figure out what my starting direction is. Otherwise, I stuck with Google Maps fumbling direction until I start moving my vehicle, and by that point, it's already mis-navigated me.

I also hate the way their maps are constantly hiding information, like street names, unless you zoom waaaaaay in.

MapQuest provided so much detail at similar scales vs. Google Maps.

> I get the feeling that I'm being used as a Guinea pig.

I understand that feeling completely. I travel all over the US and rely upon it. Google Maps is my only copilot and it can give some really puzzling suggestions.

My last fun one: I was traveling on an interstate and had ~5 miles to go until my exit onto a highway (which I was then going to travel on for ~50 miles.) Instead of continuing down the interstate, it had me exit at the nearest exit, then get onto a rutted out dirt road (which would have connected with the highway.) All to save a mile I guess? I quickly turned around when I realized where Maps had lead me.

One other time I was leaving a residential neighborhood and it literally had me driving in a loop around the block until I restarted the navigation.

It's pretty much a requirement to look at where Google Maps is actually going to take you before setting off, and that's unfortunate.

I live in London and use public transport all the time. Apple Maps has always had a feature where if you leave a large tube/train station with multiple exits, it’ll tell you which to use, or which signs to follow inside. For some reason Google still doesn’t have this so I pretty much always use Apple Maps at least for new journeys.

Apple Maps was a pleasure to use when I last visited Tokyo, for the same reason.

This was in 2019 and I was using google as my default application, and I was blown away how much better Apple handled the trains. The part I remember most was how it denoted each train with proper colors, while showing their live positions. That made it easy to navigate the otherwise intimidating quantity of trains and complexity of the stations.

The experience got me to try Apple Maps in the USA again, where I found the quality had substantially improved and good enough for my use cases. It's only improved since then.

The trains should be about the same in either one since they come from a vendor (Jorudan), but the station info and walking times inside the station come from the maps companies.

Though I haven't used Google Maps there in a while, maybe they stopped using Jorudan.

Yes, I didn't mean to imply they have different information about the trains, rather that how they present the information in the UI was (is) markedly different.

As a Westerner who doesn’t live in Japan, Apple Maps is infinitely better there (2023).

In the US, I use Google Maps / Waze / Apple Maps about 50/20/30% of the time (Google by default / Waze if I care about shaving minutes or police / Apple if I am using Siri or just going somewhere I know and the Map is easily shown)

Interesting. Google Maps showed me which exit to use at stations in Japan, recently.

I can’t speak for London, but I live in NYC and Google Maps definitely does this here: (“Exit via…”) and (“Follow signs for…”)

+1 I switched from Google to Apple maps a few years back, I think it's easily the better product now.

> Apple maps has been good for a long time now

It's good, but I find it offputtingly cartoonish.

Isn't it Apple Maps that Duckduckgo uses? I've used DDG exclusively for search for at least ten years now, but I always end up out of the maps tab and into maps.google.co.uk. 'm' in address bar autosuggests it. I think that speaks for itself.

Apple Maps doesn't even offer (maybe it does on iOS?) public transport directions at all.

As a U.S. user of Apple Maps on iOS, I can say that they do indeed offer directions with a public transportation option.

Apple maps UX kinda sucks. Map preferences are under the Settings app and not the app itself (there are at least two clicks to get here from the Maps app, and it's under your Apple ID, wtf?). You cannot configure it to maintain cardinal directions when driving (I want "north" to always be "top"). The 3D view while driving in a city with skyscrapers is downright dangerous, let alone confusing. It does a terrible job of keeping track of your recent queries (search for "food", select one place and see its location, step away and search the name of that place, if its a chain or there are similar things close by good luck finding again!)

Like Maps is fine but it's like using an off-brand google maps from 10 years ago with a pretty display. Unfortunately I don't really care how pretty the display is, I care about being able to find things and get there.

> Map preferences are under the Settings app

That’s the case for most Apple apps, and some non Apple apps too

Other apps having bad UX doesn't negate this app's bad UX

I use Apple maps almost exclusively, except when I rent a car on a trip sometimes. There are still some goofy things that Apple does (or doesn't do). Like several times in a certain rural area, I had Apple nav tell me to exit at the Nth roundabout exit, except that it didn't count a farm driveway or agricultural access roads while I did count them, not knowing any better. While the nav of the car I was renting did count those as exits.

I can understand the perspective of not counting non-public roads. The ag access was clearly marked as a road for ag/forestry but it was still a road that had a direct access to the roundabout. On the other hand, the driveway was not marked in any way though you could sort of tell it was a driveway.

But when you are driving, you are not necessarily evaluating whether this roundabout exit is one you can use or one you should or shouldn't count.

It was interesting to me that the Apple nav was harder to follow in those cases than the car nav. Before these incidents happened, I am not sure I could have guessed at which would be better.

"Don't drive on other people's private driveways so don't include private roads" is a reasonable heuristic to follow. But "count every road whether or not you might use it" is also reasonable.

Apple Maps tells you "after this light, turn right" which is great while I am on my motorcycle and can't quickly read the street signs.

It means my phone can stay in my pocket and I can still get directions to where I am going without needing to look down at the screen to figure out that I need to pass this next traffic light then turn right at "Something st" when I can't even see the sign for "Something st" and looking for that sign would take my focus off the road/other drivers.

Apple Maps is much better for discovery. Search for “pizza” on Google maps and it shows you the nearest pizza places which advertise with them - for me that misses the two closest pizza places to my house. I have to zoom right into where I know they are to see them.

Google Maps has arguably gotten worse. Many times businesses that don't pay to be listed either won't show up on the map/in search or at best show up basically last. I also live in the Bay Area and sometimes I feel like the GPS routes it chooses are to avoid certain areas even though they'd surely be quicker. For instance sometimes it insists on me taking 101 around Palo Alto/MTV when traffic is just yellowish but other routes are totally clear, and 101 ends up becoming nearly stop and go when the other routes are basically still clear.

I will say google maps is superb for traveling in Japan, though.

> Many times businesses that don't pay to be listed either won't show up on the map/in search or at best show up basically last

Well that explains a butt ton.... Keep having issues with maps showing places on the other side of the city instead of the 15 places in walking distance...

I keep waiting for a racketeering case against Google.

I notice it the most when I'm just trying to find a place whose name I can't quite recall, but I know where it's located. Usually hole in the wall or other lesser known spots. I'll literally zoom in as far as I can on the building or plaza where it's located and Google refuses to show it to me.

Maybe Mark thought it was done from his level, but communication with Waze (or lack of it) gave them a different impression?

I could see them thinking the deal was done, but waze getting shopped around inside Facebook internally might give waze a much different impression.

Meanwhile, I'd say 50% of iPhone users, including 90% of boomers, have no idea they're not using Google Maps.

My parents couldn't open a link I sent them "in Maps"... came to realize they never knew their day-to-day was Apple Maps.

I use Apple Maps while driving in cities now, I find they've put more detail into the navigation experience. Google Maps for navigating anywhere outside of a populated area, they've still got way more data. I've been burned by Apple Maps in the sticks a few times.

Honestly Apple Maps is ok for navigation, I use it most of the time now.

Google Maps is still way better for business reviews, opening hours, or even existing businesses. I try to submit updates to Apple Maps when I can but the review is very slow.

> Google Maps is still way better for business reviews, opening hours, or even existing businesses.

Google Maps has become pretty poor at indicating existing businesses unless those businesses are largish. And I don't want my map application to tell me business reviews, opening hours, or any of that stuff. I just want directions.

So Apple maps is more my style, although I actually use OSM these days.

Great inside look into the psychology behind a big acquisition like this. I can't help but feel Noam's ego was bruised by the poor due diligence experience he experienced at Facebook, causing him to lash out at the company within the post. Otherwise, really insightful details, especially that Instagram was acquired for $1B, which is what he was anchored on.

A straightforward recounting of a negative experience doesn't constitute "lashing out" and I don't see any hyperbolic language or other signs that he's exaggerating. Also - Facebook's offer allowed him to get Google from their original $450M offer to the $1.15B he ultimately accepted. I doubt he's upset over this.

Sadly, in contemporary corporate culture, the truth is considered rude if it's at all negative. You're supposed to imply it, and if that fails you can speak it but it must be sugar-coated heavily to avoid people taking personal offense at it.

And to be clear I'm not talking about rudely blunt truth (which can indeed be pretty rude), I'm simply talking about inconvenient facts that people don't want to hear and try not to acknowledge. Things like "the Facebook engineers belittled our product" should instead become "there were personal chemistry challenges between us and the Facebook engineers." Instead of "the Facebook engineers were young" it should be "we had a culture mismatch" or something like that.

Isn't that mostly corporate US and Asia? I love this type of directness; no sugarcoating inconvenient facts. If someone's ego gets damage because of that, that sounds more like a them problem, in my eyes. Then again I am Dutch so we live and breathe directness...

I think it's primarily West Coast US, and it's the culture of the area to be passive aggressive versus direct. It's unfortunately had a huge impact on current tech corporate culture as a result of where the industry is located.

> it's the culture of the area to be passive aggressive versus direct.

Absolutely nailed it. This is exactly what it is.

It definitely does feel a lot more common on the west coast than the east coast (I'm in the west). I love a lot of people on the west coast, but it can be refreshing sometimes working with east coast people :-)

Yea to me what the prior commentor suggests is nothing more than deception/lying through a form of omission...

If the message isn't clear then they don't hear it, with the only reason you don't so that you can say you said something when shtf all while ignoring that your indirect statement effectively ensured the continuation of the problems...

Blunt honesty is the only way to effectively and efficiently run an enterprise.

We really need to address this culture of Feeling Over Facts...

Israelis also tend to be very direct in my experience working with them. I'm not Israeli (in fact, I hold a passport for a country that doesn't even recognize Israel), but it's something I've always admired about working with people from the region. I think the Israeli culture is really good at cutting through fluff and focusing on getting things done.

The corporate culture is slowly becoming mainstream culture. Look around you, it’s happening everywhere. Our culture isnt driven by musicians or athletes or writers or movies any more. It’s driven by the values of HR and advertising departments, and what content advertisers will pay to associate with

Did someone say toxic positivity?? :)

Yeah, the writer was vague about exactly who said what and never quoted or dropped names, they were very polite about it, never saying anything more negative than he felt some junior engineers were impolite and personalities clashed. Great writeup.

How else would you have explained the key story element of why FB was willing to run down the deal clock?

Edit: removed a sentence that made the same point as benzible already did.

Waze has done nothing in the last 8 years. Things like the auto zoom is horrible and especially on car play I have to manually keep zooming In and Out. It was great 10 years so but now it’s below average.

Meanwhile Apple navigation is now the best. It shows the traffic lights and the navigation is much easier. The only thing it doesn’t have is better traffic notification. The anti zooming in and out of apple navigation is so much better than Waze especially when I’m in areas that I’m unfamiliar with.

I remember when I was laughing at Apple Maps when it first came out but now I use it all the time. It goes to show you the difference between apple and google and how products go to die at google.

And how good products may come from unexpected places. (Yandex) It is the most popular navigation apps in the few countries it's available.

That is the point. Google acquired them to kill waze, and they did.

"By the time we began the acquisition process, we had already met the CEOs of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, and members of the senior teams at Amazon, Apple, and others."

That's already a milestone few small companies can accomplish.

It's also worth reading how he ultimately felt about the acquisition. His original post seems to be gone but this is a good summary... https://www.timesofisrael.com/waze-ceo-noam-bardin-explains-...

Imternet Archive to the rescue! for the original post: https://web.archive.org/web/20210219020655/https://paygo.med...

I want to be able to easily add/remove waypoints to customize my route. Google Maps desktop does this through drag and drop which is awesome but the route can't be transferred to mobile. Apple Maps has this on desktop and transfers to mobile but the UI for it is clunky and the number of points is severely limited. Waze you can add stops but again it's not really designed for customizing a route and it's not friendly, especially not on mobile.

My workaround on mobile is to add a stop that is along the route I wanna take. It mostly works, but you have to remember not to e.g. turn off on the little sidestreet to get to the random waypoint you picked. This is even more of a concern when you use it to give directions to somebody else.

Working URL : https://post.news/@/noam/2RTRvTNNxSCQb3yNjqa0DPfr1Yk

Did anyone use the car sharing feature that have/had? I always wanted to use it but never did.

No, I think it launched right before the pandemic and that likely killed any momentum it could have gained.

Can someone expound on the strategy around the unsolicited offer part of the story. He was unable to engage with the offer legally. He told FB about it to, presumably, let them know about the new BATNA if they tried to get concessions during due diligence. But doesn't that also send the signal he is looking for them to match the offer after he had signed for a price (that he had offered as the won't shop it around price). That seems to have led to them accusing him of leaking the story to solicit the offer during a the period he was supposed to not shop it, which led to the deal blowing up.

I'm also a little unsure about the ethical and legal limitations he was under.

The term sheet potentially had a clause that (a) prevented him from soliciting other offers, and crucially (b) disclose any unsolicited offers immediately. (I don't have a ton of experience with m&a, but we had something similar in my previous exit and it did seemed like a standard clause in such contracts).

So yeah, the leak may be intentional to in effect solicit an offer from Google (and would definitely explain ill will from Facebook).

He definitely mentioned (a) in his write up. I wasn't aware of (b), and I thought he made it sound more like a choice. He talked about fiscal obligations requiring him to tell the board. But if he was contractually obligated to disclose the offer to FB that makes it a lot clearer.

We could never prove it but the quote is interesting: "With accountants, lawyers, board members, and investors involved, the news was bound to leak, and it did. Though I did not leak the information, and to this day I still do not know who did, I think Facebook and Google still believe I leaked the news."

There are 3 statements in this

* "A leak was inevitable"

* "I did not leak it"

* "I do not know who did"

Here is a scenario under which they could all be true:

Noam, his exec team, OR some board members, OR some investors (which are likely to be friends or family members for a private company) are out for late night drinks.

Someone says the words "Ugh, these Facebook guys are idiots, and we don't seem to get along with them. I wish we could get acquired by Google instead. If somehow they got word of the acquisition, I bet they'd reach out with an unsolicited offer. Sure would be a shame if SOMEONE LEAKED IT."

No conspiracy necessary. No orders.

Some party at the table hears, agrees, and contacts their old IDF buddy at Haaretz. Done.

If Waze had taken the FB deal tho, it would have been a stock deal, and it would have been worth 2-3x more than the Google cash deal.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. They could have easily invested their cash in whatever they chose, whereas a stock deal can be limiting.

Or it could’ve ended up at 1/3 by the end of the lockup. With cash, they’re free to put it into FB stock, if they want, though statistically (especially from a variance/gut wrenching swings perspective), an S&P500 fund is a much better option.

Generally, I’d happily take a significant discount on the amount to make it a no/low strings cash deal, unless the stock offer is basically equivalent to a cash deal (super liquid, no restrictions on sale).

FB ca 2012-13 was a pretty sure bet, imho. They basically had no competition in social. TikTok hadn't come out yet. G+ had perished not long ago. Apple hadn't yet kneecapped them on privacy. They hadn't yet turned into supervillains.

If all I cared about was money and the potential upside, I'd have taken FB any day over all the no/low strings cash Google could throw at me.

Noam talks about the civic breakdown caused by FB and how he is happy he chose Google but that could be a case of post facto justification. Google, sans its "Don't be evil" is no saint either. I'm sure if he had gone with FB, he'd find five different things to ding Google on - e.g. firing the AI ethics team, sunsetting products without notice, dropping "don't be evil" from their charter, having no North Star other than maximizing ad rev.

Curious, how much did you make from buying shares in Facebook in 2012/2013?

I did okay, can't complain, but I bought in early 2015, not 2012-13 once the upswing was confirmed.

FB in those years also had horrible mobile apps, made no money on mobile while world was shifting there. And they kept on investing mostly into their desktop website.

It was sure bet, in a hindsight. They could’ve easily botched mobile, open room for competition to swoop in and become irrelevant in the process.

If I remember my tech history, by 2012-13, FB had realized that their html5 FB app wouldn't cut it on mobile devices and had gone all in on a native app.

https://magazine.wharton.upenn.edu/digital/the-pivotal-tale-...

I mean, I myself left Wall Street to work on iOS apps back in 2011. Only a willfully blind person would have ignored mobile/smartphones by 2012-13.

Of course, they could have botched their mobile transition - Reddit's ongoing dumpster fire is an example of corporate self immolation - but even back then Mark Z was no schmuck.

There’s big gap between not being a schmuck and getting your company to be one of the biggest tech behemoths.

Rewriting app, means years of no new features (like Twitter did with their backend rewrite). That’s a very vulnerable period of time. And no guarantee that their apps will be any good (especially given their track record of low quality). It wasn’t guaranteed in any way that they will start making meaningful money on mobile.

They could’ve easily end up like Twitter, plagued with reliability issues and no good monetization.

From the article:

> At the time, the Facebook deal was a stock deal and their share price was ~$25/share. Had we closed with them, the deal could have had a 10X multiplier. Despite that, I feel that Google was the right place for us. We clicked with the engineering team, they let us stay independent and grow (from 10M MAU to 150M MAU)...

I sold a business a decade ago. I had two main offers, $X today, or $X today plus $Y in a year with me staying on board. I took $X and left, no interest in staying on board because I knew what the new owners would do, and I knew they'd wind up blaming me. 3 years later they totally abandoned the business. Some people you just can't work with, and the writer here didn't want to work with Facebook.

"...and the engineers doing the due diligence were very young and were confidently belittling what we had built. Our average engineer was 40 years old,..." - That's so Meta. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to ask them leetcode hard questions during due diligence.

That explains why Waze works so much better than facebook or google products. Because people were hired based on actual competence not high school level "leetcode" questions that serve no purpose.

Do we know those 40yos didn't go through a programming puzzle hiring gauntlet?

(My own experience is that those I've worked with who are the best veterans also enjoy algorithms etc too. As do I. Shrug?)

In the last several years I've done work for some three letter agencies and fortune 500s. None of them required a technical interview really, only about half required a social fit interview. I'm starting to think my experience is really unusual.

Edit: I just remembered I did a piece of work for a power company. The technical lead talked to me before hand and told me the one technical question he was going to ask me during the otherwise social fit interview.

I think there is a lot of the tech world that isn’t quite the stereotype / big tech type world we think of… it just doesn’t get much attention.

FAANG / BigTech is the exception in almost all areas. Scale, pay, interview, just about everything. Some for the better - anyone reading HN can pass just about any non-BigTech (or companies trying to pretend they're BigTech) technical interview without a ton of studying beforehand, especially once they have breadth of experience. And some for the worse - BigTech pay is also the exception, the median programmer salary in the US is something like $110k. 99% of companies give you zero equity, and in my anecdotal experience only 10-20% of companies give any sort of bonus with any sort of regularity.

Work life balance too.

I hear folks talking about insane hours and feeling pressure to work them.

I uh… work when I want… and that’s not uncommon from other folks I talk to.

I think big tech and squeezing out every last dollar in compensation gets folks into a bit of a skewed world where their employer wants to do the same and they don’t always know it.

I’ve never been subject to those crazy programming questions either and I’ve done work for some big companies including Discovery Channel. They were all mainly culture fit. Granted it’s been a long time since I’ve interviewed anywhere. I do however interview people and make a point to not try gotcha questions or leetcode. It’s a how would you do this. Make it clear as long as there’s a solution there’s no wrong answer. I just want to know how they think and approach problems. And not made up hypothetical will never happen questions. Day to day what they’d be doing kinda things. 90% of our interviews is conversation.

The only time I was asked such "leetcode" interview questions was for a contract at a company that coincidentally went under a few months later. Asked something about css colours in HEX and doing some magic stuff with them. When I asked what is the relevance to the task at hand they told me this was a question a friend of theirs was given at a google interview. Hilarious.

I've done more than a few software/"DevOps" engineering interviews at DoD contractors and the only three practical technical questions that I was asked across _all_ of them were 1) what is a CSS selector, 2) how would you join an array of strings into a comma-separated list in C#, and 3) what Linux command one would use to determine disk usage... not exactly LC medium-level problems. These types of places don't seem to be big on even attempting to rigorously test for technical acumen - as long as you had a pulse and sounded like you knew what you were talking about they were happy to extend an offer.

Waze almost certainly hired/s using the same algo based interviews as every other FANG+/FANG adjacent company.

In my experience both Meta and Google's products work great from an engineering perspective. Low downtime, reasonably performant (with an adblock), etc.

It's just that they are designed to maximize ad revenue rather than to provide a good service for the user.

Facebook works great from an engineering perspective? We have entirely different experiences then.

I can't even count the number of times a photo didn't load, a timeline didn't refresh, a like didn't register (or worse, got clicked on accidentally and then didn't unregister).

Google's products have their bugs but the main flows work. That's not the case with Facebook.

Facebook moved name updates to their account center and there are still incredibly basic bugs.

My girlfriend can’t update her name because:

You can't change your name right now because you've changed it in the last 60 days. You can still change the order. Your last name change was on December 31, 1969.

Just compare Facebook to WhatsApp.

WhatsApp is crazy good, and doesn’t make money. Facebook is… what you describe, but very very profitable.

I think you can see the difference in priority in the product.

WhatsApp made hundreds of billions for facebook by preventing rise of major competitor.

It probably helps that WhatsApp's backend is written in Erlang, which excels in fault-tolerance and reliability.

https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/20-years-of-open-sourc...

WhatsApp does make money. About $900 million in 2022. It's a small part of Meta's total revenues, but the margins are really good because of how well built and efficient it is.

These are low priority issues. Real issue is how many times did an ad not load up. And a click to an ad not register.

Prioritie$.

And just today I learned that the CEO of the failed sub exploring the Titanic said that he didn't want to hire 50 year old white guys. What a tool. He said they weren't "inspirational."

I would be highly skeptical of any engineer making grand generalizations about a product without actually working with it for a fairly long time. It’s SO easy to belittle code without really knowing the whys and history.

I get that is what their job is when doing due diligence… but I think it’s also a little bit impossible.

I know I have thought of some code as poor, rewritten it “better” only to find my code is insufficient and quickly evolving into the same code I thought was bad…. for all the same reasons that influenced the original code… and thinking much more of the old / bad—- proven code.

There are still some other metrics and heuristics you can use, such as number (and coverage) of tests, overall code metrics, number of compiler warnings, that tell you a little bit about the care put in maintaining the codebase. You can still have quality codebases without those (do I know...) but then you'd have to look at critical business metrics (uptime, latency, satisfaction surveys) or the number of tickets (even there, beware) or the overall 'cost and duration to deliver a fix or a new feature'.

As for architecture, it's harder to find generic metrics and guidelines for 'quality'... I won't dive in there but external evaluation by people with no or little idea of the actual domain is not very interesting. Moreover people tend to be biased by either 'we at x have done it like this, and we're successful, so...' and 'we at x have built shit' and it's very hard to get in a sort of clean-slate mindset.

There certainly are things they can evaluate.

Just that I think big picture wise I would be hard to draw too much of a conclusion from the testable metrics.

Personally I’d want to test the app itself and if it works / customers are happy, I might worry a lot less about metrics and other decisions.

When I interviewed at twitter, ~2007 they asked me a bunch of questions which they praised my answers for NOT being "...Well, they way we did it at facebook..."

They were happy that I wasnt a young engineer who thought that the only way to do it was the single exposure of just having done it at FB...

Was your previous employer FB at the time?

NO... MY FUTURE EMPLOYER (sorry for caps)

I mean, this is a valid point though? I would not take any stock in a code review or due diligence performed by a 20 year old.

Personally I would hope for a mix of experience when it comes to a due diligence team… but I would lean HEAVILY towards more experience.

>That's so Meta.

That's so meta.

> I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to ask them leetcode hard questions during due diligence.

Based on my experiences interviewing at Google, I wouldn't be surprised if they did that too.

Ehh, I would have preferred someone else. Google already has too many products that they force you to use with the same account.

To be fair, waze is perfectly usable without using any account.

I stopped using it because it was not usable because of the ads.

I just used it twice for a 12 hour trip couple weeks ago and had no ads.

I use it periodically (in Europe) and haven't seen an advert yet?

It depends on where you are driving. If nobody buys ads in your area, then you are probably not seeing ads.

For me the most distraction were the branded pins on the map. Literally ads which hide other places and are distracting.

Does it keep a local search history without logging in? Google Maps doesn't. I guess it takes too much storage. :)

By the way, most of the western world are missing out on the best navigation app which is Yandex. Unfortunately it's only available in a few countries.

Doesn't mean that google won't kill it out of the blue after they've extracted they wanted from it to put in their own app. I think that's the real possibility here

I love Waze, but the product has stagnated. I’d love simple things like the ability for it to get me where I want N minutes early instead of exactly on time (I hate hacking this in with synthetic calendar events). It’d also be nice to be able to file mobile orders with Dunkin’ / Starbucks / etc. on my route and have them executed when I’m within range of them, so my order is hot when I arrive.

But yeah, let’s have more zany celebrity voices.

A google product stagnating? No way!

I'm actually happy it's stagnant. It works well and I don't want it ruined because someone is under pressure to ship a new feature.

But in Google-land, doesn't that mean it's next on the chopping block?

Google puts things on the chopping block due to small userbase or not enough user growth. A very large user base product but which has stagnated should be fine as long as users don't start leavign

Waze was bought to keep it away from Google Maps. Google actually doesn't want it to succeed.

Yes and no. Waze provides data points to Google Maps that it wouldn't otherwise have. Like crashes, objects on road, cars pulled over, police speed traps, etc. Waze users provide that data, and Google Maps gets to display it for free. The day when that data input capability is merged into Google Maps completely is when Waze will be shut down and the user experience will slowly be enshitified.

Take search for example.

Recently they updated Android Auto version of Waze with new UI and it hasn't been as usable since. Route changing features (or some of them) have disappeared somewhere

And also it's nearly impossible to report or confirm hazards for those with a trackpad input. I'd have rather it did remain stagnant, lol!

I dream of using a Stream deck for physical buttons for reporting hazards instantly.

I wish I had permanent "Police reported this side", "police reported that side", "vehicle on shoulder", "Road hazard" buttons immediately accessible like my hazard lights are. Having to tap through a few screens of navigation in the app is annoying.

Yeah I've stopped using it entirely. It feels very dated, the ads are obnoxious, and I don't speed as much anymore so it's primary benefit is gone.

Isn't the last thing the key thing?

I don't think so. It does coincide with me degoogling my life, but I was holding on to waze longer than everything else. It's more the product just became bad. When at a stoplight I sometimes want to take a look at directions, not have an ad for Mcdonalds take over my screen. That's an experience that benefits no one, and infuriates me. I'd say that alone made me stop.

I haven't seen a single ad in Waze ever. Granted I'm fortunate enough to not reside in NA as well.

Interesting, yeah that sounds nice. In NA it's really bad, maybe they have toned it down, but it felt like every stop sign or red light I got an ad.

Give it some time and a Google PM will find a way to shoehorn in chat functionality for their next promotion.

then get cause it to get shutdown on the next cycle

Believe it or not, shutting down a product is something you can brag about in perf. My current manager went form L6 to L7 mainly because of that.

I totally believe it and it's the right way. Few jobs ago I advocated to shut down a business unit that wasn't profitable and as far as I could tell (this was controversial) had no path to profitability.

Shutting it down, we freed up about 200 million per year, which is the same or better as earnings that amount.

Laugh all you want, but Waze actually has less of the "social" side to it today than it had ten years ago. Maybe some Google PM even got promoted for removing some chat functionality for once.

It’s stagnated as google is pushing people to maps. No surprise there.

Former CEO has a big rant on why it's impossible to do things at Google: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-did-i-leave-google-stay-s...

Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26165809

> This counted on the fact that Google had promised us autonomy to continue to act as Waze and we believed them.

Why does this keep happening? It is false 100% of the time. Are people really watching the sun come up every morning and thinking, "okay but tomorrow it won't."

> I believed that I could build out Waze within Google, breaking the myth about what happens to companies after being acquired by large corporations

Nice cautionary tale, but I'm different.

> Perhaps Corp-Tech should move to employee share buy back where employees must sacrifice some of their salary for equity or change equity to vest by a product related metric to connect the teams performance with the employee returns.

Performance based incentives never work for people who are not directly revenue generating. One piston in your engine working extra hard is meaningless, the credit to getting you to your destination is the driver. And when cogs in the machine lose out on their "performance" incentive because they never had any control to begin with they get angry, burnt out, and leave. Within a corporation you have to make the labor theory of value true and reward effort even if it's pointless. You put the responsibility of delivering meaningful value on the people directing where that effort goes.

> while on line, a Googler ahead of us was overheard saying “What? Sushi again???” which became our inside joke around entitlement. But several months later, we had been co-opted as well and it was Waze employees complaining about the food

This both completely misunderstands and exactly gets why entitlement is the wrong concept. Everyone's happiness and contentment regresses to the mean eventually when their lives get better and when they get worse. Someone complaining about the sushi is genuinely and reasonably annoyed because that very literally made their day worse. People see that as entitlement because they're forgetting how happiness in humans actually works.

Whether this is a comfort or nihilistic is up to you but Elon Musk is not happier than you.

Tbf, they were acquired back when Google wasn’t seen as evil yet. A lot of things seemed more promising in 2013.

TL;DR he wanted to be a dick to his org and Google wouldn't enable that. He wanted to move fast by ignoring privacy and security. He wanted to abuse Google's market position to get his app pre-installed and artificially ranked in the Play store. Sounds like a real prince.

To be fair..lets be honest with ourselves: Google bought Waze for exactly one brutally obvious reason: To prevent competition for Google Maps.

Google has sat on it since, eventually they will port features to Maps and kill it when it is convenient. As for installing...uh..Google Maps? It's Google's Android, Google could do whatever they want. That was the whole point of the 'Free' OS Phone post yesterday.

I’m not arguing that will never happen, but it seems like if their only reason was to prevent competition for Google Maps, they would have killed it a long time ago.

The fact that it’s still around 10 years later suggests it wasn’t their only motivation behind the acquisition.

I always assumed they bought it to augment Google Maps with Waze's superior real-time stream of road condition data?

Is that actually a different idea though? Augment and protect.

They already combined under Geo

In all fairness, Google's security record is the best of any FAANG. I still treat my phone as compromised, but no one got (0 click) Pegaus'd.

I read the article and the guy sounds like the typical CEO that wants the team to work weekends and to be passionate about it.

I am the opposite. I enjoy using waze precisely because it doesn't change much. If i want to find a specific shop i use google maps, which then opens to location directly in waze.

I had Mr. T yelling directions at me from my old TomTom. It really cut through any other noise in the car. I miss that

The only downside mr T couldn't tell me street names (though with ai voice...)

More people need Mr. T yelling at them in the car. MERGE, FOOL!

`I pity the foo that doesn't take a right at the second exit in the upcoming round-about`

It feels like a lot of the 'fun' in apps has been removed over the years.

> It’d also be nice to be able to file mobile orders with Dunkin’ / Starbucks / etc. on my route and have them executed when I’m within range of them, so my order is hot when I arrive.

So much talk about AI, but we dont get simple things that go a long way, and don't even need AI to function. What we will get instead is a forced option that buys dunkin and starbucks anytime you drive near them because whenever tech giants release things they think of the most obscure / under QA'd way to implement and release them.

Well, celebrity voices, and updates that break things! The recently released a nice, pretty new Android Auto UI that prevents people from reporting and confirming hazards if they are using a trackpad input. So there's that.

Stagnated? Pray they don't sunset it any further.

>I’d love simple things like the ability for it to get me where I want N minutes early instead of exactly on time

It's really astonishing how many obvious things like this aren't implemented on either Google Maps or Waze. And for those that do exist, they feel like they've been designed by someone who has never driven outside of California and never used mixed-mode transport.

McDonalds was building this kind of thing years ago. Ie ask the app to ping you in a few hours when you’re near a McDonald’s on your road trip. Two clicks: one to order the usual, one to give you directions.

The tech exists + it’s an obvious good idea. I wonder if just not enough people used it

Why do you use Waze instead of Google maps? I read the wikipedia article and it sounds like google maps with a bit of extra user input.

Never felt a reason to switch.

For me, its a better CarPlay experience with the phone. Google maps has very tiny text that is hard to read. Waze has a great high contract view of all upcoming turns that is easy to drive with.

Wow, I can't believe it has been 10 years, and all the Waze data is still not integrated into google maps.

What I find interesting is that the end goal for many companies is to be sold to a global monopoly. It is not a fair competition. But I guess it's good for consumers who get free stuff - but the question is - would we get a better product if there was competition!? So in order to compete: 1) Get to know people working for a monopoly 2) Make a better product 3) Profit (or bleed to death)

Link is broken?

broken for me too. Any mirrors?

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:C5LXloS...

Refresh the page.

Seems like this Post is having difficulty displaying text for some reason.

Oh, 2023 Internet… it’s so difficult to just “display a page of static hypertext” when you’ve got so many microservices to write, then to rewrite in Rust, so many react components to create, so many lambdas to execute serverless in the cloud, and of course so many adtech components to integrate on top of it all.

https://imgur.com/gallery/izcx4Se

Interesting details on the negotiations, especially the lack of chemistry with the Facebook teams.

Also just realized Noam is a founder of this site. Nice way to create buzz.

Did they build anything after? Great read

By they do you mean Noam? Because this website - Post.news is literally the startup he's working on.

Waze would've been a much better fit with Facebook because of its social angle.

I've been really impressed with out much Apple Maps has improved. I remember when it first launched I had Waze and Google maps on my phone since I would need to fall back to them often. Haven't had to do that in a long time now

It depends where you are using it. Apple Maps is still missing public transport locations or information about shops in many areas.

Yep, I pretty much exclusively use Apple Maps in the US and it's great but when I'm on vacation it's often unusable.

Most recently, I was in Georgia (country) and navigation of any kind is nonexistent. Like often times I would look something up and want walking directions there but it simply isn't available. Google Maps worked great.

I also find generally that both Apple Maps and Google Maps are extremely unsatisfying to use if you typically travel by bicycle.

Google Maps looks like it supports combining public transit and bicycle, since you can select bike as a connecting mode to/from public transit, but then it never proposes bike routes. Apple Maps doesn't pretend to be able to do this. It is annoying, because mixing and matching bike/bus/train is a very common way of getting around in the DC area.

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