[nunodonato]

why do so many people rely on Google for this? ArcGIS is vastly superior and much cheaper.

[Helmut10001]

ESRI is as evil as Google (if not worse). If pricing is the only consideration, maybe ESRI is the way to go, but I would take other aspects into account, too (e.g. walled-garden signals, tricking customers, software-lock-in).