> People lost their damn minds when Netflix increased prices a year or two ago and I'm like "erm, I get way more value out of this than cable and it's a tenth the price, shut up".
For your analogy to work you would need to say you are content with Netflix raising their prices >10x (no longer a 10th of cable) because that is what Google just did with their pricing.
Most people I know who stream (ok all people I know) get way more value out of streaming than cable. What is your line on fair pricing for streaming compared to cable, as the service has obvious value to the user?
I don't think anyone, here of all places, would suggest a product requiring engineers and infrastructure be free for commercial use and that the company shouldn't recoup costs.
The good news is, like streaming services, there is competition and pricing will work itself out in the market (assuming no collusion :P)
>For your analogy to work you would need to say you are content with Netflix raising their prices >10x (no longer a 10th of cable) because that is what Google just did with their pricing.
Netflix raised their prices what they felt they needed to. Google raised their prices what they felt they needed to.
If people don't like it they're more than welcome to go to the competition... which in both cases generally has inferior product.
It looks like this specific change almost entirely inconveniences businesses and not private individuals. They're allowing 28k FREE requests a month which is still beyond generous. That's enough for a small entity to develop a service or product around the service and not only get it working but develop a decent alpha, or extremely modest beta, base of users. Then, just like other businesses, you get to put on your big boy pants and accept the cost of doing business.
Does the power company hand out free power?
Does the water company hand out free water?
Does the phone company let you have free calls?
No. So Google is still allowing a more than fair FREE level of commercial usage and now want to actually monetize their product. If it's adding value to your business, paying the new rates is a cost of doing business. Build it into your pricing, adjust your budget. This is the real world, not Narnia.
I imagine in the most common cases the application is effectively advertising "here are our locations, come to one" and by the point of showing the map you should have already removed a significant number of non-conversions making it VERY fair pricing.
In instances where you are using it to actually build a product around, it's still likely orders of magnitude cheaper than buying, and maintaining, map data yourself. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if one year's cost is only a few percent of what it would cost you to initially buy all of the data and develop software for navigating and hosting it.
People allow free, and cheap, things to make them feel entitled. It's easy to do, it really is, but it's something people need to be more mindful of before freaking out.
All I read in that blog post is "HOW DARE GOOGLE! They want us to pay for a service we use! Pity us! Shame Google for wanting to not operate at a loss! How dare they! How. Dare. They!"
We’re talking of Google Maps the platform and its B2B offering whereas Netflix, cable and phone companies are services for consumers with fixed and reasonable consumer-level monthly subscriptions.
If you haven’t built an app on top of Google Maps, then you pretty much have no idea how much it costs and have zero valuable input you can give.
Also, this isn’t the first time Google is doing this bait and switch. They did it before with App Engine as well, first fooling early adopters in order to gather popularity and then raising prices enough that it made plenty of startups to move off the platform.
Along with other blunders in their products, it makes one wonder how anyone can trust any of their offerings long term.
Too bad the US has lost its anti-trust teeth btw, because what Google is doing is to subsidize its offerings until they get popular, effectively using their monopoly to gain popularity in other markets, thus hurting their competition unfairly.
>Also, this isn’t the first time Google is doing this bait and switch.
It isn't a bait and switch. It's introductory pricing. They attracted developers and businesses to a product people essentially weren't using, they let people work with it at or near a loss and now that they have a customer base they are trying to make it profitable.
Yes, they'll lose some of their users that want a free ride. They'll also retain many users that will happily pay under the new pricing scheme because they recognize the value add and find it to be a worthy business expense.
It's no different than companies like MailChimp offering free-for-so-many-subscriber pricing and then requiring you to pay once you reach a threshold they've determined makes you a billable customer. Or a company like Evernote allowing you to save so much data (what a map tile is) and use so many devices a month for free before requiring you to subscribe at one of the paid tiers. Or a company like Pushbullet allowing you to mirror so many SMS messages a month before charging.
If you can't easily handle the pricing change, then you are probably wasting your time using it in the first place and need to discontinue using maps anyway or reassess your own business model.
You seem to have read an entirely different story. The customer Google is losing here is clearly willing to pay, not expecting a free ride.
And there is absolutely no similarity between your MailChimp example and what Google has done in this case. The customer didn't complain about costs rising as the number of users starts to exceed an existing threshold.
That said, I wouldn't be so quick to call for the regulator. All businesses have a responsibility to select suppliers carefully and manage their dependency on any one of them. It appears to me that the value of contracts has been forgotten.
The post that I have read complains about an extreme and sudden change in Google's pricing structure and then goes on to compare alternatives for most of post, all of which are non-free.
They also say "Of course, we always knew that as we grew larger, there would be cost to using Google Maps."
For your analogy to work you would need to say you are content with Netflix raising their prices >10x (no longer a 10th of cable) because that is what Google just did with their pricing.
Most people I know who stream (ok all people I know) get way more value out of streaming than cable. What is your line on fair pricing for streaming compared to cable, as the service has obvious value to the user?
I don't think anyone, here of all places, would suggest a product requiring engineers and infrastructure be free for commercial use and that the company shouldn't recoup costs.
The good news is, like streaming services, there is competition and pricing will work itself out in the market (assuming no collusion :P)