• Album@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    I mean… We probably should have seen it coming.

    They’re not a “disruptor” in an industry when they give away the product for free at a loss…they’re just anti-competitive. We got a free ride at the cost of basically destroying all competition for Google. They got to sit back and chill and now they can reap the benefits of zero competition… eg doing whatever the fuck they want since there’s no competitive alternative.

    Uber did this too. Remember when you didn’t have to tip?

    • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      Zero competition only for so long, I have seen a notable uptick in for example OSM being used even by companies instead of gmaps.

      People are lazy creatures of habit, but once the enshittification starts impacting companies reliant on affected services there will be an alternative cooked up.

      Possibly leading to the slow enshittification again, but either way. And it is not like google has some patent on web maps either.

      • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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        5 months ago

        If it’s free, we’re the product.

        That’s where they messed up.

        The product is crowdsourced realtime traffic and editing so searchers can use a mapper that will get them there effectively. They need to understand how it affects ad revenue from search. If the app isn’t easy to use, their editor army and distributed telemetry will dry up.

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      They got to sit back and chill and now they can reap the benefits of zero competition… eg doing whatever the fuck they want since there’s no competitive alternative.

      Ah, capitalism. <3

    • foggy@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      It won’t work. It will just lower the barrier to entry. I don’t disagree that this is their angle, it’s just… Short sighted.