Google is a large monopoly that subsidizes “free” products to burn a thousand mile clearing around their money engine.
If Google maps was not free, there would be more of a market for competing mapping products.
A mapping product has a natural intersection with advertisements - a non-negligible number of mapped trips are commercial in nature, and can thus catch consumers right before the moment of purchase. This might prove fertile ground for a new competitor.
So Google gives maps away, and anyone who wants to compete has to compete with free, and starts with a tremendous data disadvantage.
Through this lens, requiring you to disclose more data makes sense. They strengthen their data moat around the free product, which in turn protects their dominant position in ads.
I would like to see regulators crack down on this kind of anti-competitive behavior.
Makes me wonder, was the DoJ right that it was bad for Microsoft to bundle Internet Explorer for free? I know it sounds insane now to have an OS without a browser, but was this the “original sin” that permanently warped expectations for what amounts people should be willing to pay for software?
Even today, outside of gaming/entertainment, the consumer software market is basically a wasteland. But if you had to pay for a browser today (pick your favorite), how much would that be worth to you? (Netscape cost $50! Or $90 in today’s equivalent.) I can’t think of any other market where we expect so much in exchange for paying so little.
Most likely today’s end state was inevitable; if MSFT hadn’t bundled IE, someone else would have made a similar play and capitalized on the network effects.
you could make similar arguments for any integrated or bundled technology. even products like microsoft office which knocked out competition back in the day when there were competing spreadsheet packages.
where it gets philosophically interesting is how this integration can cut across dimensions. software can be bundled horizontally, and software+hardware+commerce+service can be bundled vertically.
integration often leads to smoother experiences for end users at reduced cost, but comes at the expense of winner take all economics in the marketplace.
finding the right balance across both dimensions will be the great challenge for 21st century technology regulation. it's unclear to me how much antitrust experience from the past will help with this (or if consolidation may actually be desirable, freeing up capacity for new problems)
Thank you :-) I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I'm sad not seeing it reported more often.
I consider that Google Maps being free stagnated the maps market, and stopped any innovation from happening. Often when I say this, I get "But OpenStreetMap". When only volunteers can compete, that's a definite proof something's wrong.
(though arguably Google Maps did improve a bit over time, while gmail really didn't at all)
It's worth pointing out that OpenStreetMap has Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Facebook and many other corporate contributors and they are contributing huge amounts of data, all the time, everywhere.
"Apple Maps, is by far the most prolific current corporate editor and was responsible for almost 80% of all edits to pre-existing roads in 2018."
This bandwagon only happened because OSM gained traction, sometime in the 2010s. Sure, popularity breeds more popularity, afterwards. Even for all this, the biggest single event that boosted interest in OSM was, ironically, Google imposing far stricter gratis limits on its Maps, a few years back (2018, IIRC?)
I do btw, fully agree. If Google Search was forced to exist as an independent company it would radically affect (I believe for the better) the finance model of the rest of their products and help the market as a whole.
If Google maps was not free, there would be more of a market for competing mapping products.
A mapping product has a natural intersection with advertisements - a non-negligible number of mapped trips are commercial in nature, and can thus catch consumers right before the moment of purchase. This might prove fertile ground for a new competitor.
So Google gives maps away, and anyone who wants to compete has to compete with free, and starts with a tremendous data disadvantage.
Through this lens, requiring you to disclose more data makes sense. They strengthen their data moat around the free product, which in turn protects their dominant position in ads.
I would like to see regulators crack down on this kind of anti-competitive behavior.