[telltruth]

A lot of things have changed in this team since its long gone golden days. Previously it was run by Marissa Mayer and she was given essentially a blank check (being ex-girlfriend of founder also didn't hurt). She went out in massive spending spree and bought tons of startups, started streetview project, got much better aerial data and so on. Thanks to her aggressive investment and ambition, she managed to make Google Maps better than maps many government themselves had at the time. After she had to report to Huber and she left, the team had been in turmoil with not much of ambition and just usual executives thinking about how to make profits. So vast amount of affort in recent years has gone into those stuff and less into making maps unconditionally better. There is also no competition now that Apple Maps have pretty much given up matching the coverage and details of Google Maps.

This is exactly the kind of things we need to worry about when monopoly invest in making super good "free stuff". They will put ton of money to leapfrog but then they will realize that they have created massive capital barrier for others to enter the market. So they will now just loiter and squeeze the customers out for profits.