Justin O’Beirne: Google Map’s Moat
As much as I love Apple’s products, it’s hard to ignore just how much deeper a product is Google Maps. At this point, they are just doing laps around Apple’s offering.
So if Apple had been extracting place data from street-level imagery since 2015, wouldn’t these businesses have been better placed?
Even today, there are similar situations across San Francisco. For example, as of this writing, Apple labels San Francisco’s tallest building, Salesforce Tower, across the street from its actual location.
So it doesn’t appear as if Apple is extracting place data from whatever its vehicles are collecting. And if this is true, then Apple is still a couple stages behind Google in map-making.
Google has repeatedly told journalists that it started extracting data from Street View imagery in 2008, as part of its “Ground Truth” project. So this suggests that Google may have a 6+ year lead over Apple in data collection.
And as we saw with AOIs, Google has gathered so much data, in so many areas, that it’s now crunching it together and creating features that Apple can’t make—surrounding Google Maps with a moat of time.
It makes you wonder how long back Google was planning all of this—and what it’s planning next…
Simply Robert 