1/17/2024 0 Comments Google maps austin![]() Generally, it goes like this:Ī tiny company makes an inferior product with cheaper technology, which captures the low-end of the market. There’s a book about how companies with a locked-in market like that get dethroned: The Innovator’s Dilemma. That’s for consumers, not serious business people like them, thank you. People who use it cannot imagine using anything as déclassé as Google Maps. ![]() ArcGIS is one of those hostage software systems. “Stockholm Syndrome” would be another word for it. These systems become impossible to get rid of once you’ve installed them. There is a whole industry of SAP consultants, for example: expensive experts that you have to hire after you’ve installed SAP. Users become fanatically loyal to them, because they’ve invested so much effort and money that they’re basically hostages. There are some extremely expensive software packages, like SAP (for business), Oracle Applications, SAS Analytics, and IBM mainframe software of all varieties, which are excruciatingly difficult to learn but have almost every function you can imagine. It’s time for a little digression about customer lock-in: Unfortunately, there already is a big player in that space called ArcGIS. Natural resource companies, developers, governmental units, solar installers, power-generation companies… the list goes on. The idea was that a lot of businesses need accurate geographical data and Google should provide it, for a fee of course. There was a larger effort to make money off Maps, which had always been a money-pit (or “loss leader” in retail terms). My own project moved over there.Īs The Atlantic article says, Google has a vast storehouse of millions of the world’s books, and no one can read them not even Google employees! Hard to believe, isn’t it? Congress could pass some legislation to clear up this mess, but I don’t think they’re even considering it. Now that I’m retired and walking the dog twice a day, I talk to lots and lots of “normal” people who don’t work in high tech, and they’re some of the most fun and interesting people in Silicon Valley.Įventually, book scanning was moved somewhere off campus, and GWC-3 was renovated for normal Google use. I wish I had talked to some of them when I had the chance. I found that I could ask anyone at Google if they’d ever seen a Yellow Badge, and no one had even heard of them. The Yellow Badges were not permitted to go anywhere else on the Google campus, and they couldn’t even get into the microkitchens in their own building.
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