Uber Acquires Part of Bing’s Mapping Assets | Hacker News Reader

Uber Acquires Part of Bing’s Mapping Assets

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121 pointscaseysoftware37 comments

This acquisition plus the Carnegie Mellon robotics lab acquisition [1] makes it pretty certain they are doubling down and putting huge technical investments into autonomous cars. They are perfect for it too - but damn if that isn't quick considering how long they have been on the market.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-uber-a-friend-or-foe-of-carne...

Agreed, and another thing they're doubling down on: disentangling themselves from Google. Eventually they'll stop using Google Maps, and I'd guess Google Ventures will sell their stake in Uber at their next stratospheric private financing raise, if they haven't already.

It's vaguely reminiscent of Google/Apple's friendly status up until 2007, when it quickly deteriorated to "frenemy" then "direct competitor in nearly every market."

Why would Google Ventures sell their stake? I've heard that they are not strategic to Google.

Ah, but wouldn't Google want to keep it's investments in sectors that it believes will grow, even if they're competing with them, a la Microsoft & Apple[1]?

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/05/apples...

Uber has had a lot of trouble with routing their drivers using directions from Apple Maps. (E.g. in SF, Apple Maps commonly recommends making [either illegal or dangerous] left turns off of Market Street). Sounds like this acquisition focused on engineers who process street-view-like image/sensor data, which Uber could probably collect much more quickly than Microsoft. It makes sense that they'd want to have engineers who were good at gardening the data (tho not necessarily doing robotics/CV-oriented research on it). This purchase has some rather realistic near-term wins.

Those are just 'disruptive' lefts.

Illegal left turns across Market Street? That's not so bad. If I'm heading home from south Brooklyn then Uber tells my driver to make a right turn into a "do not enter / buses only" area followed by a left turn that takes you the wrong way on a one way street.

(Someone with too much time on their hands can probably figure out my address from that description. Or my Instagram feed.)

If the Uber driver is using an Android phone the Uber app can launch the native Google Maps navigation. For the short term it wouldn't take much other than providing or even requiring Android devices for the driver

UberPool requires the driver to accept fares during navigation.

Any idea on how this affects their alliance with OpenStreetMap? http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing

It doesn't.

There are no planned changes to this.

https://twitter.com/rbrundritt/status/616028862531530752

(from the Bing Maps program manager)

This is notable in my mind as I can't recall a "reverse-acqui-hire" of this size quite like this. What I mean is, usually it is the MSFTs/GOOG/APPLs of the world scooping out chunks of tech talent from smaller firms or taking them over altogether, not the other way around.

I particularly like the part where the assets^Whuman resources^W^Wemployees are bundled off with the tech.

Hopefully they got some kind of decent compensation?

Usually when there's an acquisition like this, there's some sort of bonus as long as the employee stays for X months/years. I think 2 years is pretty common but considering how young Uber is, it may be different.

If they're getting Uber options it could be a real blessing.

Does this mean that Uber now has an engineering presence in the Seattle area? Or are they acquiring the old Vexcel team based in Boulder?

Uber has had an engineering presence in Seattle for at least four months: http://www.geekwire.com/2015/uber-opening-seattle-engineerin...

I immediately thought it was Boulder when I read this, based on what I know of the Bing office here(Boulder). Seattle would make more sense if there's a mapping team AND Uber already there though.

Not sure if it also include Seattle but it appears to include Boulder http://www.dailycamera.com/business/ci_28402965/uber-buys-bo...

At first glance this seems like a terrible business decision by Microsoft.

Satya Nadella did just state in an employee memo that Microsoft has to "make some tough choices in areas where things are not working". This and their exit from the display ads business (http://seekingalpha.com/news/2605555-bloomberg-microsoft-exi... ) seems to be a move in that direction.

How is bing anything but an enormous gift to google?

What I see is a marginally profitable business (finally, following years of huge / $4B per year losses) that obscures google's true monopoly in the US. For all the claims of 20% search marketshare, on my personal blog, google has 98.7% marketshare in the last 10k search visits. It's an open question if bing is worth the hassle -- is it foreseeably profitable enough that msft should continue in that business?

imo, it would quite damaging to google if msft shut bing down, reallocated the engineers to more profitable projects, and let google own their 75% + bing's 20% == undeniable monopoly search marketshare, with the immediate antitrust implications, in the US.

Microsoft's biggest threats appears to be things like chromebook, google apps, and ios/android rendering windows and office largely unnecessary. I don't see how having a search engine helps any of the above.

A lot of microsoft's cloud expertise comes from running bing. Also how do you expect them to push stuff like cortana if bing (the brain) shuts down.

Why is cortana important? They will be competing with similar free products that are hardware subsidized or ad subsidized. Where and how does this turn into income? msft just sold off a big chunk of their ad operations, and almost certainly will not be selling large amounts of hardware. Xbox one has sold ~10mm units, and as a road into the living room has been mostly a complete failure. That's neither large enough for ad subsidies or hardware subsidies to work. What am I missing?

Because Cortana is the manifestation of engineering capacity to crunch user data to make deeper decisions and better offerings to end users. That capacity is why Google, Apple and now MSFT are all chasing the ability to do voice, because that means they can do highly sophisticated data crunching on their massive computational capacity.

It aligns directly with each's desire to deliver products and services (yes, even Apple - music suggestions is one example) rather than just be a hardware/software retailer.

If Windows Phone were to become a real business (not saying it will), it'd be software subsidized. Ad & hardware are not the only options.

Cortana, siri and Google now are the future of advertising and sales. "Okay Google, order me a pizza". "Hey siri, call me a cab". "Cortana, I need restaurant reservations at 8. Something nice".

The virtual assistant's job is to pick a supplier and spend your money on your behalf. Everybody wants a piece of that.

Maybe - but users won't go for it if there's a principal-agent problem. Google and Apple will face a temptation to choose suppliers that pay the highest commissions and they'll have to overcome that temptation if they want their services to take off.

They won't get users to say "Siri, book me a flight" if it books you a $500 American Airlines flight when you wanted a $300 Southwest flight.

Curious what your blog is about, because people who use bing normally don't pick it, they just use it because whatever they last installed made it the default.

It's about R, data science, etc. So that's a fair point, but "the search engine used by people who don't know they're using it" doesn't seem like a winning business proposition.

I know tons of people who only use Windows because they don't know how to use anything else.

Microsoft said Bing is a multibillion business and pay for itself. http://marketingland.com/microsoft-bing-sustainable-standalo...

Even having a 95% market share in would not interest US antitrust regulators. US antitrust law exists to protect the consumer. Someone has to abuse the consumer before anyone cares.

Actually Uber would be a very sustainable way to constantly street-map a lot of cities if they just put cameras on the cars' roofs.

That's actually an excellent point. Through a partnership with Uber, Microsoft could offer very up-to-date street imaging that Google wouldn't be able to match (at this point anyway).

This is a very astute observation and I certainly agree that this is on the cards.

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