<story><title>Google Maps&apos; Moat Is Evaporating</title><url>https://joemorrison.substack.com/p/google-maps-moat-is-evaporating</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alasdair_</author><text>I worked at a company that &lt;i&gt;heavily&lt;/i&gt; used the maps API in 2018. The 1,400% price hike really was an eye opener. It wasn&amp;#x27;t just the money involved, which was large, but the fact that it came so suddenly and with so much magnitude.&lt;p&gt;Google&amp;#x27;s choice to bump these prices made me realize that they could do the same thing with their compute cloud pricing or other APIs, again with little notice. That, in turn, led to the realization that we needed to remove our reliance on Google&amp;#x27;s entire stack, and quickly, or we&amp;#x27;d be in a terrible bargaining position later.&lt;p&gt;This one choice by the maps team likely cost Google significantly in the medium to long term, if any other companies realized the same things we did.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>Google&amp;#x27;s fundamental relationship with users is statistical, and I think it shows. They&amp;#x27;re very good at optimizing metrics; their search, for example has remained the leader 20+ years on. In that world, if you lose a few users or give a bad experience, well, there are plenty more where those came from, and the ones who leave will often come back.&lt;p&gt;I think they mistakenly bring that attitude to their consumer businesses, though. The stories of bad customer experiences are legion. Like you, I&amp;#x27;ve learned that I can&amp;#x27;t really trust them. Which is true of all companies, of course, but it&amp;#x27;s different with Google. Amazon is even more rapacious, but I trust them to be long-term greedy, to not shoot themselves in the foot with some short-sighted action. For all their flaws, they understand that customer relationships have long-term value.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Maps&apos; Moat Is Evaporating</title><url>https://joemorrison.substack.com/p/google-maps-moat-is-evaporating</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alasdair_</author><text>I worked at a company that &lt;i&gt;heavily&lt;/i&gt; used the maps API in 2018. The 1,400% price hike really was an eye opener. It wasn&amp;#x27;t just the money involved, which was large, but the fact that it came so suddenly and with so much magnitude.&lt;p&gt;Google&amp;#x27;s choice to bump these prices made me realize that they could do the same thing with their compute cloud pricing or other APIs, again with little notice. That, in turn, led to the realization that we needed to remove our reliance on Google&amp;#x27;s entire stack, and quickly, or we&amp;#x27;d be in a terrible bargaining position later.&lt;p&gt;This one choice by the maps team likely cost Google significantly in the medium to long term, if any other companies realized the same things we did.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stiray</author><text>&amp;gt; Google&amp;#x27;s choice to bump these prices made me realize that they could do the same thing with their compute cloud pricing or other APIs, again with little notice. That, in turn, led to the realization that we needed to remove our reliance on Google&amp;#x27;s entire stack, and quickly, or we&amp;#x27;d be in a terrible bargaining position later.&lt;p&gt;Yes. You are right. The whole cloud deal is a try to rule out on premise infrastructure and once it is gone and everyone is dependent on it (due to lost of knowledge, and for cloud providers ideally when hardware vendors are no longer selling hardware to non cloud entities) harvest the dependent businesses left at their mercy and charge dearly (including for all the years before that). It is actually not even a complicated plan but it is staggering how many people are putting cloth over their eyes.</text></comment>