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Fair... but the competition needs a lot of years to catch up, I feel. I had to use another map tool for a client in a country that didn't love Google. God... it was so clunky horrible. All the stuff I thought was simple, like dropping map pins, and stylizing the UI... with the other map it took 10x as long, and just behaved poorly. We were dropping like 40k pins across a country, and the other service didn't even have like a smart clustering feature... so we had to create a bunch of filters and toggles -- rather than just being able to say "5k pins in this city" when they were zoomed out, we had to force users to selected the right filters and then just slow them scattered "blah" as they zoomed. Anyway, totally agree it'd be good to have more competition on this space... but like it's gonna be a few years before the competition pushes Google to do much more than just iterate. Apple is doing a pretty good job with directions, but they still don't have the "business listings" or abstract searches done right. A lot of tools out there are OK for directions, but without street-view... or even somewhat recent satellite view... the maps aren't up-to-date. Like... take an area in your city where you know there's construction. Google's on it, like almost as soon as the construction crews start. Apple... they're not far off, especially if there's a detour required. Bing... Open Street Map... forget it, it'll be a month or two, or longer, before they can plot around construction. I'm sure it's hard for companies to dedicate resources until people are using the tool, and of course nobody will use the tool until the dedicate resources. Google's ability to pull in business listings, and reviews, and good directions... it's gonna be a really tall order to get anyone else to dedicate enough resources to push Google farther. |