I was there when Google started offering turn by turn navigation for free. Other issue was live traffic information. As you might imagine all this caused some concern among employees because that was, I think, the main source of revenue for the company.
They were already doing some other stuff like fitness wearables but they didn't seem to be leaning into it.
Main idea for staying in business, since you can't compete with free, was to go deeper into cooperation with car manufacturers to provide builtin navigation in cars. They were already doing it back then, I think, but they've seen their salvation in capturing bigger part of that market.
I was a software developer there, employed in projects pretty far from their core business, but I learned there a lot about how companies become corporations why they can and do run like a headless
chicken, spilling money left and right. It's basically about survival. Company becomes a corporation when it randomly discovers a gold vein in the economy. For TomTom this gold vein was maps on portable computers. This gold vein brings in absolutely insane amount of money. Then this money needs to be spent on doing a lot of unrelated inefficient discovery work wasting huge amount of money so they have a chance of finding next gold vein before shifting sands of economy and human development burry the original one.
From what I see shared in this thread, TomTom still haven't found their second gold vein.
Maybe I should get hired there again. A lot of my friends from other jobs work there now. I never seen from the inside how corporations die.
Interesting that going deeper integrated into cars was their game plan. I've never used our in-car GPS (other than playing with it once). If it was any good it has a ton of advantages over using Google, including display on the "speedometer" screen.
Sadly, it's pants. It comically announces caution stationary traffic on the M25, generally after we've been stationary for 5 minutes. The navigation directions aren't as good and Google is just so much better at door to door directions to a named destination. Others will get you close to your destination and you have to work it out. Google will, more often than not, take you to the correct carpark.
With Android Auto displaying on the dash it's not even a competition.
For many years post-smartphone I did still use the integrated GPS in our cars. Even though the data and UI was generally (not universally) worse, having it on the comparatively big screen in a central spot, controlling it with the steering wheel controls, and not having it consume phone battery, outweighed the other factors for me. Then came CarPlay and Android Auto and those reason vanished.
I have no experience with tom tom but I was a garmin user, and I got the sense that tom toms were pretty much identical. IMO an integrated tom tom into the car, if it performs as well as the external unit, would be amazingly better than your cell phone. The biggest advantage imo is satellite coverage is much better than quality data network coverage. I'm not even talking about in the boonies. Plenty of times in the middle of LA county I am sitting there waiting on a seemingly stalled LTE connection to render a map I supposedly had already cached locally according to google maps.
I have an older in-car system and my experience is the opposite.
First, the car doesn't download map data. I'm stuck with what was on the car when I bought it unless I want to pay an unreasonable amount to update it.
Second, it does download traffic data, but it's so slow that it's useless. I took its advice once and it cost me over an hour, because the alternate route had already filled up and had the disadvantage of not being a freeway.
Third, it can't navigate a path without connecting to the satellite (seemingly for traffic data, but possibly it isn't even calculating the path locally). So when I visit downtown SF, don't have up-to-date maps, and I'm inevitably behind some building blocking my southern view, it just abandons me.
> Third, it can't navigate a path without connecting to the satellite (seemingly for traffic data, but possibly it isn't even calculating the path locally).
I’m confused by what you are saying here. In-car navigation use satelites to know where the car is. If it can’t path plan without satelite connection then that is most likely because it is waiting for a localisation fix.
Trafic information could be coming through satelite broadcast but I doubt that it does.
There is no way that a navigation tool would receive path planning through satelite. Two way communication is much more complicated than one-way reception, and there is no way it would be financially worth doing that.
Sirius sells traffic info add-on, which is broadcast from the satellite. It is not as detailed as the data-linked apps in cars/phones and is only available for the few big metros but can get the traffic info on an older car's nav system.
>Is that an exorbitant amount of money for maintaining a (global?) digital map?
Absolutely - Google is just one player, Apple Maps, Bing Maps, OSM.
Charging consumers 300$/year for map updates would never work even if free offerings didn't exist - they are just targeting a small niche and optimizing (ie. even if they made the price 30$/year most people would still use phone maps so they might as well milk the market that wants to pay for their solution as high as they can). If there were no free competitors someone would drive the mass market price down way lower than 300$.
Considering standalone GPS units used to charge like 50 bucks (and now I think a lot of them charge nothing/bake it into the up front cost) yeah I'd say so. Garmin currently charges something like 100 bucks for their updates based on some quick searching.
The built in unit for your car is a captive market, they're definitely gouging. Especially nowadays when it's almost impossible to replace them with an aftermarket unit due to how integrated they have become.
>First, the car doesn't download map data. I'm stuck with what was on the car when I bought it unless I want to pay an unreasonable amount to update it.
Apparently car navigation maps are a thing that you can also pirate. I think I saw a Windows tool for downloading Mercedes-Benz map updates. Never tried it though, since I was pretty content to sticking with Google Maps and a phone mount.
The in-car GPS systems are a disaster (because the car manufacturers see them as "cash after sale") but the separate/dedicated GPS units are pretty good.
The updates and traffic information is, or at least was, free.
I perhaps should have said find rather than navigate. I don't expect turn-by-turn navigation when it has no way of knowing where I am. I'm not talking about it directing me along a path; but about finding the path in the first place.
It should use the last known location and vector to find a route. It doesn't. My guess is that it loses the satellite, sees it again and starts recalculating, loses it, and repeats this cycle. Unless the satellite is visible for a long enough period, it never produces any path. Even an out-of-date path would be more useful than simply nothing.
That, of course, is called dead reckoning and some GPSes have it, but I wouldn't trust it for very long. [1] I'm not sure what cgriswald is on about. Maybe he just lives in a tunnel or some dead zone, because I've never lost satellite connections. Maybe cellphones can triangulate via cell towers? But how is he getting cell data in his tunnel?
When I lose navigation I just do without. I haven't replaced it with Google or any other cell-based app. The satellite radio often also drops out in these moments despite having a buffer.
Edit: Ah, I see, I meant something sort of other than that read. I've certainly had the experience of not being able to download maps, but mostly on hikes in the middle of nowhere. When I use navigation on foot in the city, hadn't had the problems I have with in-car nav.
CarPlay, at least (and I kinda assume Android Auto) uses the car's built-in GPS receiver when available. Doesn't necessarily solve the non-cached maps when LTE is unavailable problem, though.
I'm the total opposite. I love my in-car nav. I have a shortcut on the steering wheel that brings up a list of recent destinations, so starting it takes literally seconds. I don't have to plug in my phone, or even look at it. I get turn by turn in the binnacle AND the heads-up display. And on top of that, it _doesn't_ do all the silly stuff that Google does to make people think it's so great, like routing me through some residential neighborhood to save 45 seconds. I'm okay taking one freeway vs another, maybe (I don't like adding miles to my trip), but that's about as smart as I want my navigation to be.
Maybe this is because I don't commute by car though. If I get stuck in traffic, it's the one time that month, and I've probably got a podcast on anyway.
With Android Auto I can save time by starting navigation before I even get into the car. And it does clearly show how much time alternate routes will save, so it's easy to see when a detour through a residential neighborhood isn't worth the hassle.
> I don't have to plug in my phone, or even look at it. I get turn by turn in the binnacle AND the heads-up display. And on top of that, it _doesn't_ do all the silly stuff that Google does to make people think it's so great, like routing me through some residential neighborhood to save 45 seconds.
Apple CarPlay + Apple Maps checks all of those boxes in my car.
Correct. Many new vehicles integrate the CarPlay APIs into the vehicle quite well. And it has wireless carplay, so I don't even take the phone out of my pocket. It just auto-connects when I start the car. I press the voice command button on my steering wheel, tell Siri to navigate somewhere, and all of the navigation displays (hud/cluster/infotainment display) in my car display the directions that Apple Maps is spitting out. It works identically to the way a factory nav would otherwise work.
I was traveling with some friends through Los Gatos on the way to Monterrey and Google had me sit in a residential neighborhood traffic jam for over 45 minutes when I could've turned left and gotten to my destination much quicker. I did end up turning left, but the takeaway that I had is that Google isn't always doing the "right" thing.
There is a particular problem in Los Gatos on summer weekends when everyone wants to escape the Bay Area and go to the beaches around Santa Cruz. Southbound Highway 17 comes to standstill due to idiot timid drivers who slow down going uphill and constantly brake around curves. Then the navigation apps route drivers onto residential streets to try and save a few minutes. It gets so bad that local residents are literally trapped and even emergency vehicles can't get through.
Anecdotally, Waze is (or at least was) better. It would try and redirect traffic to avoid too much congestion. So it would send you over the highway and me over smaller roads in a roundabout way, if possible.
Mind you, I've never seen this properly confirmed :)
I remember TomTom being a lot better than the competition, though. Most other units were terribly slow and sometimes borderline unusable. Not to mention the updates... not software updates, but the map updates. I still remember my parents, with the help of my siblings, spending weeks trying update their cheap Chinese GPS using instructions from random internet forums, only to give up and get a more expensive TomTom unit. The Chinese unit was given away at a Facebook group to someone more adventurous.
Of course, mobile apps have definitely caught up years ago, and I believe you that they're even better now.
> If it was any good it has a ton of advantages over using Google, including display on the "speedometer" screen.
Just as a quick note, when I use Apple Maps via CarPlay on my 2020 Subaru it does display the next turn on the instrument cluster. This doesn't work with Google Maps via CarPlay, so it might be a private CarPlay API that only Apple's first-party apps can use.
I am opposite, I used Android auto once and it was inferior to the car's own: audio distortions, choppy display, takes a while before it figures orientation of the car, does not show in the instrument display and HUD, directions timing is off etc. Distortion and choppiness seem to come from the whatever protocol it uses to communicate with the car, Google Maps on the same phone are pretty smooth.
The car's maps are not as up to date as Google's - they miss some road closures, do not have some businesses names so need to enter address (or can just send a location from Google Map to the car), sometimes believe a street is one-way even if it is not or try to make a turn that does not exist any more but I can deal with an occasional glitch every few months instead of dealing with the inferior UI all the time.
There is an alternative to "wasting" money to give a second gold vein. You can just do the cash cow thing and then die. That's a totally reasonable. If TomTom don't think they can use the money better than other investment alternatives (that their investors have), then they shouldn't.
Of course, politics and personal interests. But sometimes it's just better to allocate resources to something where they're better utilized.
When I was reading the comment, I thought the same: why don't companies just accept that they have one good project, focus on it 100%, stay good at it, and when the market dies, the company could die with it. There is no shame in milking one product for 20 years, providing a living to hundreds/thousands, then just scale back to maintenance and eventually close things down.
It doesn't really happen in practice, because no "visionary CEO" will say "we couldn't come up with a better idea than what we are doing now, so let's just call it a day in terms of exploring other ideas, and focus on this one product".
My current company is a retail company with both lots of physical locations and web shop/mobile app. We always try to come up with features that users can use in the physical stores, and those features get practically zero traction. Nobody is willing to say that the people who go to the stores, in a big percentage, won't use our apps, and the people who use the apps/web shop don't care about the physical stores. Every product person wants to combine these two, and I don't understand why.
(I guess, that's why I'm not in charge of business decisions :))
That is exactly the business model for some private equity firms (corporate raiders). They identify undervalued companies with strong revenue and significant assets where incompetent management is wasting resources and buy the company. Then they stop investing in growth, cut expenses to the bone, borrow against the assets, issue huge dividends to shareholders, and allow the company to gradually die. There's nothing really wrong with this approach and it probably helps increase overall economic growth through better capital allocation. But it can be a rough ride for employees caught in the process.
> But it can be a rough ride for employees caught in the process.
Or an opportunity. They should see the private equity firms coming in as a signal it's time to jump ship and not liquidate their stocks (actually, renegotiate your ESPP while you look out for the next thing!).
> why don't companies just accept that they have one good project, focus on it 100%, stay good at it, and when the market dies, the company could die with it.
Because corporations are organisations (that develop some bureaucracy) and the main existential purpose of every bureaucratic organisation is to survive and grow. No corporation will just voluntarily die I think. First it will be sold, reorganized, reimagined, reinvented, downscaled, pivoted and all that good stuff.
REITs are required by tax law to pay out 90%+ of their income, and everyone invests in them specifically for the dividend.
If the stock price gets too high, they always dilute it by issuing new shares to raise money for new projects. So you're never expecting lots of appreciation.
There's hundreds of them, and also many private REITs that are unlisted with the same fundamental idea.
Oil, utilities, REITs, small business lenders, etc. all have investors expecting management to just sit there, don't kill the golden goose, and pay regular dividends.
That's how companies used to work. You get some people & capital together to accomplish something and once you've accomplished it you shut down and distribute the company assets.
> Then this money needs to be spent on doing a lot of unrelated inefficient discovery work wasting huge amount of money so they have a chance of finding next gold vein before shifting sands of economy and human development burry the original one.
They could also return the money to shareholders and let the shareholders invest it into startups and companies that need investment to make money. These are usually much better bets than the old company re-inventing itself.
A company is not an end in itself, it is a temporary assembly of humans to explore a gold vein. Trying to make it eternal serves the CEO, but not the shareholders.
Instead of facebook trying to create the next facebook, it should return money to shareholders and let them buy into whatever is the next big thing.
I'm always a little confused by this claim. Focusing on revenue-generating products and not the user products they use to sell them: Google Search was their first success, then AdSense (third-party display ads), then YouTube. The latter two each make almost $30B/yr (run rate). Ignoring ads, Google Cloud makes >$20B/yr, as do Google hardware sales, with an additional $30B/yr from "non-advertising Other".
I don't really understand how one supports this claim without using decidedly non-standard definitions and grouping of revenue. If you insist on lumping together separate, wildly-successful revenue-generating products into overbroad groups by the manner in which the revenue is collected, and ignore a couple of objectively enormous revenue streams: Do you similarly feel that Apple "hasn't found a second gold vein" beyond "hardware sales"?
I would say it's the people visiting google that's the gold vein - advertising is the pick-axe. You don't make money with ads if no one visits. So in a sense making more and more products and reasons to visit is the gold vein.
Otherwise just saying advertising is a gold vein would mean people that put up a blank page with a single ad on it and no reason to visit would definitely not be a gold vein. So as others mentioned, its the Youtube and Gmails level products.
Google doesn't release net income numbers by business unit but in 2021 revenue for search was around $148B and Youtube revenue was around $29B. Given that youtube revenue dollars are probably much more expensive than search revenue dollars I'd say that ratio will skew toward more of the profit being in the search category than the you tube category, not less. It does seem on balance to be a relatively small part of their business dollars-wise, although I'd make the case that the cultural relevancy that youtube gives google has a non-zero value.
They don't break out the profitability of some subunits, but according to the WSJ it was "breakeven"[1] in 2014 with $4B in revenue.
I still don't see where the GP comment's confidence that it's not meaningfully profitable comes from. It doesn't seem like an uncontroversial assumption that costs have more than septupled in the last five years in the way that revenue has.
The numbers are trending in the right direction. From 2021Q1 to 2022Q1, revenue grew 43% (vs 34% at AWS and 46% at Azure), loss went down by 4%, and the loss to revenue ratio went from 24% to 16%.
IIRC the rumor leak around that was more nuanced: the leaks reported someone allegedly saying that market economics may not ultimately be able to support more than 2 leaders, because the economics will make #1 and #2 able to profit at prices that numbers 3+ can't compete with due to lack of scale. So the statement was that GCP has keep up or its ability to profit will be at risk, not that they'd shut down just because their slice of the pie isn't big enough if they end up as #3.
I don't believe it was clear who said this, how confident it was that someone said this, and whether it was an off-the-cuff comment in support of a push for more growth or an actual deep assessment of the economics of the space.
If advertisers felt motivated enough, circumventing PiHole would be trivial. Since all they do is block DNS requests based on a blacklist, an ad company just needs to serve their content from a trusted domain. Google owns plenty of domains which few PiHole users are likely to tolerate being blacklisted. They already do this with ads on YouTube.
Youtube ads are not a problem because of uBlock Origin / Newpipe etc... I have not seen an ad in Youtube in more than a decade.
But you are right. This could motivate them to move to a single domain for all Google content. But this is just another escalation in the adblock arms range. uBlock-style blockers would proliferate.
This is basically what youtube is doing. PiHole does not work on Youtube, but uBlock origin does (so does NewPipe, FreeTube and a bunch of software).
This would solve Google's immediate problem, but it's such a huge escalation that I expect lots of unintended effects not to Google's benefit. There is a reason they haven't done this, despite widespread adblocking use.
Yeah, the industry is definitely moving to that. Admiral, probably the most known ad-blocker-blocker already successfully circumvents PiHole and other DNS blocking by being served by the same domain.
I also expect Google to double down on Chrome Manifest v3 limitations if ad-blocking keeps getting more popular. Or even using DNS-over-HTTPS as a default on Chrome if ISP blocking ever becomes a thing.
For most customers, it seems they just went and bought about 2 thousand randomly-named domains and serve third-party scripts. However I've seen a couple places where Admiral was not blocked, because it was being served from a subdomain. I wish I had written down where it was to add to the EasyList or something. :(
The reason why Google (and other advertisers) do not do this is actually not because of the ad blocker arms race. On-domain ads are difficult to block, as can be seen by Facebook. But it also has huge trust problems, as can be seen by... Facebook.
Right now, with normal web advertising, the publisher (person with a website who wants to sell ads) tells your browser to go get an ad from the advertiser (the person paying for the ads), and that means that the advertiser gets a web request every time their ad is sold. This means that they can implement their own analytics and do not have to trust the publisher's, because the publisher merely kicks off the ad delivery process.
However, this requires separate domains or IP addresses, which can be blocked even at the network level[0] with a Pi-Hole. The alternative would be to serve ads straight off the publisher's site, which is how most social networks do it. Except... now you've just cut off every advertiser's data spigot[1]. If you do that, web advertising stops working - not because it's harder to target users, but because it's impossible to verify that you are paying for legitimate traffic to your website.
This is not a hypothetical. Social media companies already implement publisher delivery, and there have been multiple times in which they[2] themselves have admitted that their analytics and attribution were just plain wrong. That meant that advertisers were paying for traffic they never actually got. Publishers have an inherent incentive to inflate their traffic; the ad networks call this "click fraud" and it's when you run a bunch of bots to click on ads so you make more money[3].
The end of separate-domain advertising takes us right back to the days of television, where advertisers were buying specific time slots ("inventory") from specific publishers they trusted. The way that said inventory was priced was through random sampling of television watchers; but that relied on asking people to accurately record their TV watching habits. Good luck doing that when ads are served on a request-by-request basis.
Yes, you could randomly sample web users by having them install an extension that scans all their traffic and generates an equivalent log, but that almost certainly violates every extension repository's rules. Remember how Facebook was caught using their In-House signing cert to ship an iPhone VPN that did just that? That's the sort of sketchy shit we're talking about here. And any rules for detecting and reporting which ads were viewed could also be extracted and used to generate a tool for blocking said ads, which would be counter-productive.
So, basically, the reason why we don't just have publishers delivering ads is because it shuts out smaller publishers from selling them and puts advertisers solely at the mercy of Google and Facebook to verify that they actually got what they paid for. It would be a monopolistic power play few would tolerate.
[0] DoH and encrypted SNI complicates things, since it was also intended to be censorship-resistant - and we're trying to censor advertisements. However, you cannot encrypt IP addresses without taking on all of the inefficiencies of Tor onion routing. And you can also configure your web browser to just use the Pi-Hole's DNS instead of a public DoH server.
[1] Yes, there is an argument that telling the user's browser to make a request to another server is not "sending data"; this argument is stupid.
[2] Minimally, Facebook and Twitter; though other socials probably have the same problem.
[3] This is also why Google's antispam teams are secret police
Of course they’re not. It just might get more complicated for users but it’d be super easy for them to set up cloaking. uBlock could deal with that, ISP won’t.
Either way that will never happen obviously; Why would an ISP “block ads”? They’re literally hosting Google hardware (specifically YouTube’s cache)
In France, Free (one of the major telcos) has done exactly that. They block ads from the router that they give to their subscribers.
I guess they may be doing that to save bandwidth... They also have a tendency to offer features that few of their subscribers use, or even know about (some of their routers come with built-in VPN servers and torrent seedboxes).
I can see ad-blocking as a feature an ISP can try to sell. Imagine an ISP-level PiHole. (I can see this selling easily given how many family and friends asked me to install PiHole for them.
> go deeper into cooperation with car manufacturers to provide builtin navigation in cars.
I feel like this is a dying market as well. Why would I pay $200/year to update the maps in my car's mediocre navigation system when I can just turn on Apple CarPlay/Android Auto and get the same excellent navigation system I enjoy on my smartphone?
It's not dying, it's a dead market. Some haven't quite realized that yet, but they will soon enough. Nobody can complete with Apple Maps or Google Maps, going forward. Not even on quality, let alone the combination of quality and price.
My car's built-in navigation can do things Apple CarPlay can't, like HUD, dashboard mapping, dead-reckoning navigation in tunnels, fuel management, etc.
...until feature parity. Soon Apple/Google will be able to integrate with those features too. Aside from "dead-zones", I'm sure they will eventually have more integrations with car interfaces.
Even so, both Google and Apple seem to predict your location when signal drops. Somehow I still get decent navigation when I am in the middle of nowhere Iowa and have no cell service. Obviously the maps are cached, but somehow it knows I'm still moving. Must be accelerometer and gyroscope? IDK
I'd really like dash HUD integration with CarPlay.
GPS has nothing to do with cell signal. GPS is it's own signal from satellites that your phone has no problem receiving in a place like Iowa. In fact Iowa has a lot of things going for it to enhance GPS receivership - it's flat so you can see most of the sky, it's open - there's just not a lot of vegetation to absorb the signal coming from overhead (e.g. trees), its in the middle of the US which means there's always going to be 4 or 5 satellites with a line of sight to your phone.
I think this is a naive take, the glib view of a worker with no practical insight into company operations and decision making.
It's doubtful that TomTom's foray into mobile was 'accidental' and it's also hard to understand how much money is being spent, and the risks involved in finding other revenue streams.
When mega corps come in and suddenly make a major part of your business unworkable, yes, companies go into reactionary mode. That's normal.
> It's doubtful that TomTom's foray into mobile was 'accidental'
They started as a small company writing random software for palmtops. Until one day they made mapping software. They didn't expect it will be that popular with people. It was popular to a degree that people were buying palmtops just to use their app and didn't care about all other software their new palmtop could have.
It's as if today, small software shop released an app that bumps iPhone device sales by +20% just because people want to use that one app event though they don't care about all other things iPhone can do. Everybody can dream of that, but nobody can plan for that. It was purely accidental.
> When mega corps come in and suddenly make a major part of your business unworkable, yes, companies go into reactionary mode. That's normal.
What I describe as running like a headless chicken started many years before I came to TomTom. I've seen tonnes of internal wiki's that were once created for internal random, ultimately abandoned projects. I even seen two projects attempting the same thing, new one didn't have an idea that somebody, some time ago in that same corporation already tried to build that.
It's standard mode of operation. In corporation you have core business that's kept tight and professional and huge amount of side activity that's just bleeding money trying to discover next big pivot.
No, a corporation is a specific type of business arrangement. For example, you can have a limited liability company (LLC) that is wholly owned by an individual.
TomTom started as a small software company named "Palmtop Software" and was doing exactly that. Random software for palmtops. I'm not sure, but I think they might have changed their formal business structure along with the name once they discovered that they created killer app for palmtops that makes customers buy palmtops as fast as they were made so they can use just their app on them.
I was there when Google started offering turn by turn navigation for free. Other issue was live traffic information. As you might imagine all this caused some concern among employees because that was, I think, the main source of revenue for the company.
They were already doing some other stuff like fitness wearables but they didn't seem to be leaning into it.
Main idea for staying in business, since you can't compete with free, was to go deeper into cooperation with car manufacturers to provide builtin navigation in cars. They were already doing it back then, I think, but they've seen their salvation in capturing bigger part of that market.
I was a software developer there, employed in projects pretty far from their core business, but I learned there a lot about how companies become corporations why they can and do run like a headless chicken, spilling money left and right. It's basically about survival. Company becomes a corporation when it randomly discovers a gold vein in the economy. For TomTom this gold vein was maps on portable computers. This gold vein brings in absolutely insane amount of money. Then this money needs to be spent on doing a lot of unrelated inefficient discovery work wasting huge amount of money so they have a chance of finding next gold vein before shifting sands of economy and human development burry the original one.
From what I see shared in this thread, TomTom still haven't found their second gold vein.
Maybe I should get hired there again. A lot of my friends from other jobs work there now. I never seen from the inside how corporations die.