Matt has a post up arguing that today’s debut of a seemingly-great Google Maps iOS app represents a strategic success for Apple. The basic idea is that Google used its head-start on mapping to artificially retard the iOS maps experience, in an attempt to give Android a competitive advantage. Now, with Apple competing, they’ve been forced to deliver a first-class, free maps experience to Apple customers.
I think this is a valid description of the present dynamic, but not of how we got here — the account of the underlying strategy is a bit too 7-dimensional-chess-y for my tastes.
What really crystallized my thinking on the maps issue was a conversation with Eric Gundersen of Development Seed/Mapbox. Over beers at Townhouse, I asked him and his colleague Alex Barth what the hell was up with Apple’s maps strategy. Why set up a gigantic and difficult new internal practice? Their lack of expertise meant they had low odds of success, it would be horribly expensive, and Google’s model of offering free computing services to keep users in their ad ecosystem seemed like it was pretty compatible with Apple’s needs.
Eric’s response was pretty simple: “The future is mobile, right? Mobile’s about location. If you want to own that, you need to own the map layer.”
I think that’s right. This mapping fight isn’t about iOS or Android specifically, but rather a play to avoid dependence/achieve dominance over an increasingly vital (and potentially expensive) informational asset. If your software giant steps into the ubiquitous computing/augmented reality era wholly dependent on a mapping provider with monopoly power — which Google was on track to be — you’d be pretty well boned.
So they made an investment (though a rather chintzy one, by some accounts), took a reputational hit, and have their fingers crossed that iOS’s popularity will subsidize the development of their mapping stack into a competitive informational asset.
Google, meanwhile, is facing its own headaches. It’s only in the last year that they’ve tried to monetize GMaps in a big way, and almost immediately they were forced to drop their prices due to credible competition from upstarts like the aforementioned Mapbox (which is pretty awesome, by the way, and deserving of a lot more fawning profiles than I’ve seen so far — if you want a DC software startup with a credible plan for world domination, they’re the ones you should be talking to, not the guys selling coupons).
So Google’s clinging to its vision of a consumer mapping monopoly, I think, by focusing on the quality of their offerings. It’s a credible approach: OpenStreetMap still has licensing problems, everyone hates Apple Maps, and Google’s privileged access to oceans of information about consumers’ preferences and desires really does give them a competitive advantage. They have geographic information that no one else seems to have, and ambitious engineering projects that are going to be very, very difficult for competitors to replicate without paying Google for GIS privileges. So they’re working to build an unapproachably awesome map stack, and retaining users is part of that — as Apple Maps have amply demonstrated, there’s no substitute for users using your product and slowly helping to refine it.
Matt’s right that this dynamic is good for iOS users and consumers in general. It’s competition! But I think the competition is happening over the map layer, not the handset OS layer. Geographic information isn’t just a handset feature, it’s a potential monopoly. These guys legitimately want to crush each other; it’s not just brinksmanship in service of preserving a cross-firm subsidy.