[anc84]

> What Google's doing is harder and more nuanced -- they want to accurately capture the world as it exists around you right now.

I challenge that. I do not believe it is true. Google wants to be the go-to directory for spatial queries so that they can display their ads and make tons of money. The quality of the data is irrelevant after a certain level, as long as there is no viable alternative or people just blindly trust Google. Google Maps' data is quantity over quality by a wide margin.

[jdm2212]

Google is a huge organization. It is possible for Larry or Sundar to have a 30 year plan that involves Maps making money while every engineer working on Maps day to day (including Director and VP-level people) cares deeply about product quality and has the freedom to actually put a lot of resources towards that.

I agree about quantity over quality -- the product strategy boils down to "collect lots of data and build models with it". In the short term, each new feature has middling quality data with middling quality models. But over time they get better and better. It's just Maps keeps adding new features that are at that early, kind of crappy stage, and you forget how much the really polished ones used to suck.