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Comment by jug | Hacker News Reader

I think this should have been the link:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/maps-platform/going-b...

It's a new initiative with multiple new API's: Solar API, Air Quality API, Pollen API. And that link gives an overview for them all.

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Solar I sort of get since I don't think anyone does it the scale like Google Sunroof, but not sure what the added value is for Google to create the APIs for Air Quality and Pollen? There are service providers and models that do these already at global scale (e.g. https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/air-quality & https://silam.fmi.fi/).

If a company already uses Google APIs, integrating a new API from Google may be easier than integrating a new provider. So for Google, there's certainly a market, even if they have to source the raw data.

But if Google introduces something new, there's a strong likelihood that it will be killed off in 18 months. Going with a new provider that has been around longer than that would be a much more logical idea.

This is certainly true for consumer products, but it’s a lot less true for enterprise. Google Cloud had a few missteps with product shuttering (domains?), but largely google has a better track record serving enterprise customers.

Google has to slowly build better trust among customers, clearly. But “new provider” may sound like it’s logically obvious but the benefits of an established relationship goes deep into the complexities of businesses managing contracts and payment relationships. It’s a huge effort for random teams in big companies.

We had a lot of trouble with the IoT Core shutdown.

I get that defining an endpoint Tom all and managing a token is some overhead but is it that much to manage that using Google offers that much benefit? my point is that this is trivial to setup

To an engineer, maybe it's trivial.

To a business owner, that's a whole other vendor to diligence the security, privacy, terms, and, if it is used at scale, negotiate a deal with.

They show the data in search results

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