While I've experienced the frustration of having a formerly free service develop paid tiers (and policies that put me in those tiers), of all the changes a software service can make, this is the one that frustrates me the least, or at any rate less than:
* shutting down the service entirely because the user base never grew into customers who actually valued the service
* changing your terms of service to forbid an activity that was previously allowed, because someone discovered a use that messed up the price points and the service owners would rather forbid that than offer a reasonable price point allowing it
* moving to opaquely metered service potentially with apparently arbitrary levels of financial exposure to the client
A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service.
When it comes to Google, I'm more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim.
> A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service.
It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable. They raise prices rapidly to see how many people jump ship, and when your revenue begins to decline you've gone a bit too far.
Of course, they've done it very quickly, so they've likely not allowed enough time for the competition to step in or all their customers to abandon your now-expensive product.
> It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable.
Is the marginal cost of serving extra users really a big part of Google's costs? Bandwidth is cheap; I would have expected that building and updating the map data was the expensive part.
After all, they've long done away with the tile servers of the past and the giant render farms to make the millions of tiles at 20 different zoom levels to cover the earth. Now it's in browser rendered vector graphics.
Unless the vector information is getting much more expensive (shouldn't be, they own Waze and GMaps mobile products to make their own maps from user data), the cost of running GMaps should be going down on a per user bases, not up.
Maybe they expect a big increase in the cost of imagery acquisition
(from what I was able to glean they had a deal for a certain fixed price for a certain period, which might be coming to an end - https://spacenews.com/planet-confirms-google-stake-as-terra-...).
I'm not concerned about bandwidth costs. I'm concerned about support costs. People who use an API have an annoying habit of calling and submitting support tickets for that API.
>A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service.
See this is the important thing. Sustainable. People and companies use these free services that take quite a bit of work to maintain and then when the company decides it needs to stop hemorrhaging money they start charging, often a fairly modest fee, and people lose their damn minds "ermagerd, you're evil, I need this, you can't expect me to pay!". The simple fact that adding a price, or increasing the price, creates such an outrage is indicative, more oft than not, that it is a fair move because the service or good has obvious value to the user.
People lost their damn minds when Netflix increased prices a year or two ago and I'm like "erm, I get way more value out of this than cable and it's a tenth the price, shut up".
>When it comes to Google, I'm more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim.
I've been a Project Fi user for 2 and a half years now. This has been my worry every, single, day. Especially since they still owe me like 800$ in statement credits ha.
> People lost their damn minds when Netflix increased prices a year or two ago and I'm like "erm, I get way more value out of this than cable and it's a tenth the price, shut up".
For your analogy to work you would need to say you are content with Netflix raising their prices >10x (no longer a 10th of cable) because that is what Google just did with their pricing.
Most people I know who stream (ok all people I know) get way more value out of streaming than cable. What is your line on fair pricing for streaming compared to cable, as the service has obvious value to the user?
I don't think anyone, here of all places, would suggest a product requiring engineers and infrastructure be free for commercial use and that the company shouldn't recoup costs.
The good news is, like streaming services, there is competition and pricing will work itself out in the market (assuming no collusion :P)
>For your analogy to work you would need to say you are content with Netflix raising their prices >10x (no longer a 10th of cable) because that is what Google just did with their pricing.
Netflix raised their prices what they felt they needed to. Google raised their prices what they felt they needed to.
If people don't like it they're more than welcome to go to the competition... which in both cases generally has inferior product.
It looks like this specific change almost entirely inconveniences businesses and not private individuals. They're allowing 28k FREE requests a month which is still beyond generous. That's enough for a small entity to develop a service or product around the service and not only get it working but develop a decent alpha, or extremely modest beta, base of users. Then, just like other businesses, you get to put on your big boy pants and accept the cost of doing business.
Does the power company hand out free power?
Does the water company hand out free water?
Does the phone company let you have free calls?
No. So Google is still allowing a more than fair FREE level of commercial usage and now want to actually monetize their product. If it's adding value to your business, paying the new rates is a cost of doing business. Build it into your pricing, adjust your budget. This is the real world, not Narnia.
I imagine in the most common cases the application is effectively advertising "here are our locations, come to one" and by the point of showing the map you should have already removed a significant number of non-conversions making it VERY fair pricing.
In instances where you are using it to actually build a product around, it's still likely orders of magnitude cheaper than buying, and maintaining, map data yourself. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if one year's cost is only a few percent of what it would cost you to initially buy all of the data and develop software for navigating and hosting it.
People allow free, and cheap, things to make them feel entitled. It's easy to do, it really is, but it's something people need to be more mindful of before freaking out.
All I read in that blog post is "HOW DARE GOOGLE! They want us to pay for a service we use! Pity us! Shame Google for wanting to not operate at a loss! How dare they! How. Dare. They!"
We’re talking of Google Maps the platform and its B2B offering whereas Netflix, cable and phone companies are services for consumers with fixed and reasonable consumer-level monthly subscriptions.
If you haven’t built an app on top of Google Maps, then you pretty much have no idea how much it costs and have zero valuable input you can give.
Also, this isn’t the first time Google is doing this bait and switch. They did it before with App Engine as well, first fooling early adopters in order to gather popularity and then raising prices enough that it made plenty of startups to move off the platform.
Along with other blunders in their products, it makes one wonder how anyone can trust any of their offerings long term.
Too bad the US has lost its anti-trust teeth btw, because what Google is doing is to subsidize its offerings until they get popular, effectively using their monopoly to gain popularity in other markets, thus hurting their competition unfairly.
>Also, this isn’t the first time Google is doing this bait and switch.
It isn't a bait and switch. It's introductory pricing. They attracted developers and businesses to a product people essentially weren't using, they let people work with it at or near a loss and now that they have a customer base they are trying to make it profitable.
Yes, they'll lose some of their users that want a free ride. They'll also retain many users that will happily pay under the new pricing scheme because they recognize the value add and find it to be a worthy business expense.
It's no different than companies like MailChimp offering free-for-so-many-subscriber pricing and then requiring you to pay once you reach a threshold they've determined makes you a billable customer. Or a company like Evernote allowing you to save so much data (what a map tile is) and use so many devices a month for free before requiring you to subscribe at one of the paid tiers. Or a company like Pushbullet allowing you to mirror so many SMS messages a month before charging.
If you can't easily handle the pricing change, then you are probably wasting your time using it in the first place and need to discontinue using maps anyway or reassess your own business model.
You seem to have read an entirely different story. The customer Google is losing here is clearly willing to pay, not expecting a free ride.
And there is absolutely no similarity between your MailChimp example and what Google has done in this case. The customer didn't complain about costs rising as the number of users starts to exceed an existing threshold.
That said, I wouldn't be so quick to call for the regulator. All businesses have a responsibility to select suppliers carefully and manage their dependency on any one of them. It appears to me that the value of contracts has been forgotten.
The post that I have read complains about an extreme and sudden change in Google's pricing structure and then goes on to compare alternatives for most of post, all of which are non-free.
They also say "Of course, we always knew that as we grew larger, there would be cost to using Google Maps."
> A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service.
This is a bit of “thank you sir may I have another”. 10x price increases? It’s not sustainable? This is just a money grab - they’re not going to give a roadmap for how in the future google maps will be worth 10x the value - it seems to me more of a statement from Google that they have no real competition in the space.
The simple existence of competitors in a market segment is not proof that there is no monopoly. We wouldn't say for example that there are realistic copetitors in the web search space or in the desktop OS space - maps is similar to both of these sitations.
(Now I realise that some people like to argue the toss about whether search and desktop OS are monopolies and to that I have no comment)
It's helpful to think about market share per "competitor", not number of competitors:
"However, from a regulatory view, monopoly power exists when a single firm controls 25% or more of a particular market. For example, De Beers is known to have a monopoly in the diamond industry."
Since API's aren't standardized and conversion from one product to another likely requires development work and probably impacts your usage in some way even then - the barriers to switching are high enough that the availability of alternative maps still doesn't represent a whole lot of competition.
Sure, typically yes. It's not necessary - interoperable APIs exist, and for underdogs they're even attractive as a selling point - but market leaders tend not to play by those rules.
Jacking up the price so far that it becomes prohibitive to actually use, on short notice, isn't much different from shutting it down, is it? In both cases you suddenly can't use the service anymore.
Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.
I mean, there's a real cry-me-a-river aspect here. No one has a Google-granted fundamental right to mapping. It's a free product Google released to drive traffic to their own offerings, and which they happen to make available for free for a lot of purposes.
As it turns out, yeah, there's a lot of value we as a society can derive from low cost pervasive mapping. So let's find a way to share the cost and not just whine about Google, no?
The problem isn’t that Google wants to charge for a service. The issue is that they offered it for years for free or below cost effectively price gouging any competition. Now, with no alternatives they jack up the price. Classic monopolistic and anticompetitive behaviour.
When I was a teenage I was told that thats how drug dealers operated - get you hooked on something for free, then ramp up the price once you are hooked.
Never heard of any drug dealer that did that in my adult life, but I do see a lot of large corporations using that business model.
I'm always so confused by this. I switched to Feedly the day Reader went away. It was just as good then and is better now. I subscribe to way more stuff now than I did then. I've never understood how this "killed the entire medium".
I use RSS daily, but I am very much anomaly among my friends. For most people I know RSS just withered and died and got replaced by Facebook or whatever asocial media they are on.
I ended up rolling my own server (in scheme using sxml) and writing some minimal clients for it (tui, Emacs and web). It is running on a raspberry pi 2 and is currently using about 5mb of memory (the guile runtime is a large chunk of that) and has been down once since I started it 5 years ago (power outage).
Reader was to me the absolute best example of the good old web. Since then it seems like the web became insane with the idea of reinventing UI, which was then forced down our throats for both web and desktop, ruining two paradigms that worked just fine.
Sure, yeah, using RSS is rare, but it always was, and nothing was going to keep the vast majority of people from using Facebook and Twitter instead.
I don't understand why you rolled your own server. Feedly works great. If you did it because it's a fun project, that's awesome! But it certainly isn't necessary if your goal is just to subscribe to RSS feeds.
Back then the only alternatives were either commercial with shitty data policies or TTRSS which scared me away as it back then was probably the most hostile open source project on GitHub.
So I rolled my own. I will probably port it to use SQL so I can do easy searching when my kids move out :)
If we're doing anecdata when Reader was killed off I tried Feedly, didn't like it, stopped consuming via RSS. I've recently tried Newsblur but honestly I never check the thing despite having it on every device I can. I don't think RSS is a thing for me anymore outside of technically podcasts
Uh... the linked article compared 8 different competitors on various metrics. There are reasonable ways to disagree with Google's policy here, but "no alternatives" and "monopolistic" are just laughably silly.
I’d disagree a bit. There are competitors but the quality and the service is not on the same level. Google have made it hard to compete so that they stay in the leadership position. More importantly google maps “owns” more market share than all of them combined so it is kinda a monopoly.
I might not have explained my point well but I do think you get what I’m saying.
If players with the resources of Apple and Microsoft are lagging here, it's not because Google "made it hard", it's because it's a hard problem. Yet they are competing, and that's a good thing. Google is just better. And you want it for free. And thus we get back to the cry-me-a-river bit.
Companies with deep pockets trying and failing to gain a meaningful share in a market is more proof of a monopoly or other anti-competitive behavior, not less.
"Dumping" i.e. Putting out a product below cost to eliminate competitors is one of the fundamental forms of anticompetitive behaviour. All of Googles "free" products seem to fit the definition - they would not profitable standalone without Google's dominance in other markets and companies only operating in a single market cannot compete.
They are failing to provide comparable service, and thus failing to get meaningful share. I heard Apple maps is recently ok, but a couple of years ago when I tried it, it was still bad. Google has about 10 times more info than Apple or bing per building I look up (though, surprisingly, OSM is 90% of the way there for me).
Or is it because being in a #1 market position with a (until now) free price tag attracted thousands of volunteers submitting content and corrections for free?
There are reasonable ways to disagree with Microsoft's policy here, but "no alternatives" and "monopolistic" are just laughably silly.
Your comment completely disregarded the possibility that there's a dominant market position. Which there is. It is hard to compete with free. Ask e.g. TomTom or Microsoft.
The article said nothing about making it free, it said that the costs, which were previously in line with competitors, increased by very, very large amounts without any perceived increase in value. Then they looked at options which were commercial offerings which cost dramatically less. They are paying for the service, it's not subsidized or free. It's like you didn't read any of the article.
I'm doing the same. Been a local guide aswell. And if you are not based in the US, you never got ANY benefit from Google for that effort. I did it for the society. And now Google is earning 10x more with it...
>Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.
If startups need a giant subsidized operating system for free or else they weren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.
Do you see how ridiculous that argument is?
>As it turns out, yeah, there's a lot of value we as a society can derive from low cost pervasive mapping. So let's find a way to share the cost and not just whine about Google, no?
Yeah, Google has vacuumed up incredible amounts of mapping data from users and has now jacked up the prices with the lead this gave them. OSM (or something similar) is the way to share the cost. Google just abused their goodwill and used their other power positions to discourage open source. Whining about Google while moving elsewhere is entirely appropriate.
What? Your counter-counterpoint doesn't make sense at. Lots of startups can afford the per seat cost of OSX or Windows. If your business can't recoup the cost of an os per employee then yeah...maybe it's not a worthwhile venture.
> Lots of startups can afford the per seat cost of OSX or Windows.
On the desktop side of things that only happens because of Linux, otherwise (if guys like Ballmer would have had their way at the end of the '90s - early 2000s) those startups would now be paying hundreds of dollars per Windows license per each machine (and maybe more depending on the number of cores? the sky would have been the limit, the same as Oracle did in their field). And not to mention the server side of things, I'm pretty sure the costs for server OS licenses would have been prohibitive for the vast majority of startups without the alternative free OS solutions.
It is not about free. It is about being more expensive than before. We live in the economy, where small companies operate at such a thin margin (even if they're profitable), that such an increase in cost often kills any hope for profitability, especially with the economies of scale. Would you prefer to fire one developer from the team, or stop using Google Maps?
I am not saying that mapping should be free, but such price bumps should be communicated better to allow paying customers prepare for changes and alternative scenarios.
And again, just another reminder, that whenever choosing a provider for anything related to your core business - think of an exit plan!
Here we go again with the "No subscription fees means you have the right to like what we give you" argument. Haven't we beaten the "nothing is actually free" horse into the ground by now? There is the matter of the vast amounts of data Google collects from people, and the other intangible costs you incur from the lack of alternative products due to the high barrier to entry (hard to compete with 'free'), and of course the risks that come with the lack of incentive on the vendor's part to maintain good will with the end user (this thread is case in point).
I completely disagree. You can find Google's pricing tactic aggressive, but it made me think about the entitlement there.
They complain that Maps at new prices would be more than the cost of their infrastructure, when actually their entire startup revolves around this data, and 5k to be able to use an amazing piece of high tech software that is ahead of the competition is..peanuts.
No matter what other business interests and strategies Google follows, there is no right to using such valuable tech for less than the monthly salary of an engineer. I find this incredible entitled.
No, although of course there is the point that a lot of Google's mapping data was subsidized with tax money by virtue of using the various geodata sources the U.S makes available for free to build on.
Anyone can use those, so why are people complaining?
Google does a whole lot more, and can charge whatever they want for it. OSM provides usable solutions the vast majority of users; i’ve Moved to OSM a couple of years ago in everything for privacy reasons and except for the occasional Waze route or verifications, get nothing from google that I can’t get from OSM.
Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized transport infrastructure/global telecomunications network/permissive government/low-cost computer hardware/solid legal system or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.
* shutting down the service entirely because the user base never grew into customers who actually valued the service
* changing your terms of service to forbid an activity that was previously allowed, because someone discovered a use that messed up the price points and the service owners would rather forbid that than offer a reasonable price point allowing it
* moving to opaquely metered service potentially with apparently arbitrary levels of financial exposure to the client
A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service.
When it comes to Google, I'm more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim.