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Comment by inasio | Hacker News Reader

Positive impact: Google maps

The amount of people that were empowered to explore and discover (or time saved from getting lost) is incredible by any measure

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Navigating without a map or with a paper map is a basic skill somewhat smart and civilized people should have. Also a passive map on a screen would be intellectually OK, but the usability sucks in many cases, especially on phones.

GPS has made people dumber and lazier. I don't remember when I turned on GPS last time.

For maps I find Openstreetmap superiour to Google maps in many cases.

Doing basic arithmetic with logarithms is a basic skill somewhat smart and civilized people should have...

Calculators have made people dumber and lazier. I don't remember when I last multiplied two numbers using a calculator last time.

Gmail with 1gb of storage was breath of fresh air. It wasn't that long prior to that Yahoo mail only gave a few mega bytes of storage.

It's not as if Google invented the idea of a website the plots directions. Sure their product was better than all the rest, especially once they started purchasing satellite imagery, but Bing and Nokia Here were not that far behind, not to mention the traditional GPS players.

I'm not trying to be negative, just don't see where the praise is coming from, it's a crowded market.

They took a chance on mapping and photographing damn near every road on the planet. They had a huge number of business/restaurant locations marked on the map which you could search for. They were the first to have great turn by turn directions that rerouted if you make a wrong turn (this existed but the user experience sucked and they had to be manually updated when roads changed).

They created Google Earth which was _mindblowing_ at the time.

They didn't invent it but they advanced it so much farther and faster that they might as well have.

I'll grant you those points, I was 13 or 14 when all this was happening so I wasn't aware of the finer points. Now that I think of it I remember all the trouble they went through to send physical mail to business addresses to allow the owners to update their own data. That was smart.

I wasn't sure of the details of acquisition vs invention so I went to Google Earth's wiki and found a pretty interesting timeline. iirc Google News was invented right after 9/11 because the news sites themselves were falling over from increased traffic, and Google Earth has its ties to the war as well:

>> During the [2003 Iraq] invasion, It was used extensively by Miles O'Brien and other on-air broadcasters, allowing CNN and millions of viewers to follow the progress of the war in a way that had never been seen before. Public interest in the software exploded and Keyhole servers were not able to keep up with demand. Keyhole was soon contacted by the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, for use with defense mapping databases, which gave Keyhole a much-needed cash infusion.

>> In October 2004, Google acquired Keyhole as part of a strategy to better serve its users.

People used to pay hundreds of dollars for GPS units and hundreds more for annual maps updates before Google entered the picture. There may be alternatives now, but Google Maps absolutely revolutionized the space when it showed up and brought online maps/GPS to regular consumers for the first time.

You should thank Steve Jobs much more than Google for this revolution. Mapquest was the true pioneer. Apple and the iPhone then made maps and driving directions slightly more portable. Google iterated on their initial idea by integrating GPS, street view, and finally traffic data onto those driving directions.

People used to have an avenue to pay for their usage and not get turned into a product. Killing that off is the opposite of progress.

>Bing and Nokia Here were not that far behind

I can assure you they were. I worked at Microsoft through the entire Windows Phone era and used the devices from the Samsung Focus through the Lumia 950.

They were WAY behind. Traffic data, road closure data, what lane you should be in to make your turn data. Street view, business hours, voice-guided turn by turn navigation - they were way behind in all those areas the entire time and it was heartbreaking. I loved Windows Phone the platform, but maps were at least as strong a reason as apps for me finally giving up.

Of course they haven't invented it. But it's the execution and scaling that's more difficult than ideas. Like Elon Musk says, Ideas are easy, Execution is difficult and scaling is excruciating. I find it amusing how much we as a civilization don't value execution, scaling and operations.

oh come on, of all the things Elon can take credit for, paraphrasing thomas edison cannot be one of them

"Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration"

Again, Elon hasn't invented that quote. His companies have done the hard work of scaling.

Mapquest was fine too…

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