* shutting down the service entirely because the user base never grew into customers who actually valued the service

* changing your terms of service to forbid an activity that was previously allowed, because someone discovered a use that messed up the price points and the service owners would rather forbid that than offer a reasonable price point allowing it

* moving to opaquely metered service potentially with apparently arbitrary levels of financial exposure to the client

A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service.

When it comes to Google, I'm more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim.

It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable. They raise prices rapidly to see how many people jump ship, and when your revenue begins to decline you've gone a bit too far.

Of course, they've done it very quickly, so they've likely not allowed enough time for the competition to step in or all their customers to abandon your now-expensive product.

Is the marginal cost of serving extra users really a big part of Google's costs? Bandwidth is cheap; I would have expected that building and updating the map data was the expensive part.

Unless the vector information is getting much more expensive (shouldn't be, they own Waze and GMaps mobile products to make their own maps from user data), the cost of running GMaps should be going down on a per user bases, not up.

See this is the important thing. Sustainable. People and companies use these free services that take quite a bit of work to maintain and then when the company decides it needs to stop hemorrhaging money they start charging, often a fairly modest fee, and people lose their damn minds "ermagerd, you're evil, I need this, you can't expect me to pay!". The simple fact that adding a price, or increasing the price, creates such an outrage is indicative, more oft than not, that it is a fair move because the service or good has obvious value to the user.

People lost their damn minds when Netflix increased prices a year or two ago and I'm like "erm, I get way more value out of this than cable and it's a tenth the price, shut up".

>When it comes to Google, I'm more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim.

I've been a Project Fi user for 2 and a half years now. This has been my worry every, single, day. Especially since they still owe me like 800$ in statement credits ha.

For your analogy to work you would need to say you are content with Netflix raising their prices >10x (no longer a 10th of cable) because that is what Google just did with their pricing.

Most people I know who stream (ok all people I know) get way more value out of streaming than cable. What is your line on fair pricing for streaming compared to cable, as the service has obvious value to the user?

I don't think anyone, here of all places, would suggest a product requiring engineers and infrastructure be free for commercial use and that the company shouldn't recoup costs.

The good news is, like streaming services, there is competition and pricing will work itself out in the market (assuming no collusion :P)

Netflix raised their prices what they felt they needed to. Google raised their prices what they felt they needed to.

If people don't like it they're more than welcome to go to the competition... which in both cases generally has inferior product.

It looks like this specific change almost entirely inconveniences businesses and not private individuals. They're allowing 28k FREE requests a month which is still beyond generous. That's enough for a small entity to develop a service or product around the service and not only get it working but develop a decent alpha, or extremely modest beta, base of users. Then, just like other businesses, you get to put on your big boy pants and accept the cost of doing business.

Does the power company hand out free power?

Does the water company hand out free water?

Does the phone company let you have free calls?

No. So Google is still allowing a more than fair FREE level of commercial usage and now want to actually monetize their product. If it's adding value to your business, paying the new rates is a cost of doing business. Build it into your pricing, adjust your budget. This is the real world, not Narnia.

I imagine in the most common cases the application is effectively advertising "here are our locations, come to one" and by the point of showing the map you should have already removed a significant number of non-conversions making it VERY fair pricing.

In instances where you are using it to actually build a product around, it's still likely orders of magnitude cheaper than buying, and maintaining, map data yourself. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if one year's cost is only a few percent of what it would cost you to initially buy all of the data and develop software for navigating and hosting it.

People allow free, and cheap, things to make them feel entitled. It's easy to do, it really is, but it's something people need to be more mindful of before freaking out.

All I read in that blog post is "HOW DARE GOOGLE! They want us to pay for a service we use! Pity us! Shame Google for wanting to not operate at a loss! How dare they! How. Dare. They!"

We’re talking of Google Maps the platform and its B2B offering whereas Netflix, cable and phone companies are services for consumers with fixed and reasonable consumer-level monthly subscriptions.

If you haven’t built an app on top of Google Maps, then you pretty much have no idea how much it costs and have zero valuable input you can give.

Also, this isn’t the first time Google is doing this bait and switch. They did it before with App Engine as well, first fooling early adopters in order to gather popularity and then raising prices enough that it made plenty of startups to move off the platform.

Along with other blunders in their products, it makes one wonder how anyone can trust any of their offerings long term.

Too bad the US has lost its anti-trust teeth btw, because what Google is doing is to subsidize its offerings until they get popular, effectively using their monopoly to gain popularity in other markets, thus hurting their competition unfairly.

It isn't a bait and switch. It's introductory pricing. They attracted developers and businesses to a product people essentially weren't using, they let people work with it at or near a loss and now that they have a customer base they are trying to make it profitable.

Yes, they'll lose some of their users that want a free ride. They'll also retain many users that will happily pay under the new pricing scheme because they recognize the value add and find it to be a worthy business expense.

It's no different than companies like MailChimp offering free-for-so-many-subscriber pricing and then requiring you to pay once you reach a threshold they've determined makes you a billable customer. Or a company like Evernote allowing you to save so much data (what a map tile is) and use so many devices a month for free before requiring you to subscribe at one of the paid tiers. Or a company like Pushbullet allowing you to mirror so many SMS messages a month before charging.

If you can't easily handle the pricing change, then you are probably wasting your time using it in the first place and need to discontinue using maps anyway or reassess your own business model.

And there is absolutely no similarity between your MailChimp example and what Google has done in this case. The customer didn't complain about costs rising as the number of users starts to exceed an existing threshold.

That said, I wouldn't be so quick to call for the regulator. All businesses have a responsibility to select suppliers carefully and manage their dependency on any one of them. It appears to me that the value of contracts has been forgotten.

Yet they spend the entire post whining about it.

They also say "Of course, we always knew that as we grew larger, there would be cost to using Google Maps."

This is a bit of “thank you sir may I have another”. 10x price increases? It’s not sustainable? This is just a money grab - they’re not going to give a roadmap for how in the future google maps will be worth 10x the value - it seems to me more of a statement from Google that they have no real competition in the space.

"However, from a regulatory view, monopoly power exists when a single firm controls 25% or more of a particular market. For example, De Beers is known to have a monopoly in the diamond industry."

https://www.intelligenteconomist.com/monopoly-market-structu...

I mean, there's a real cry-me-a-river aspect here. No one has a Google-granted fundamental right to mapping. It's a free product Google released to drive traffic to their own offerings, and which they happen to make available for free for a lot of purposes.

As it turns out, yeah, there's a lot of value we as a society can derive from low cost pervasive mapping. So let's find a way to share the cost and not just whine about Google, no?

Never heard of any drug dealer that did that in my adult life, but I do see a lot of large corporations using that business model.

I ended up rolling my own server (in scheme using sxml) and writing some minimal clients for it (tui, Emacs and web). It is running on a raspberry pi 2 and is currently using about 5mb of memory (the guile runtime is a large chunk of that) and has been down once since I started it 5 years ago (power outage).

Reader was to me the absolute best example of the good old web. Since then it seems like the web became insane with the idea of reinventing UI, which was then forced down our throats for both web and desktop, ruining two paradigms that worked just fine.

I am old,I know.

I don't understand why you rolled your own server. Feedly works great. If you did it because it's a fun project, that's awesome! But it certainly isn't necessary if your goal is just to subscribe to RSS feeds.

So I rolled my own. I will probably port it to use SQL so I can do easy searching when my kids move out :)

I might not have explained my point well but I do think you get what I’m saying.

There are reasonable ways to disagree with Microsoft's policy here, but "no alternatives" and "monopolistic" are just laughably silly.

Your comment completely disregarded the possibility that there's a dominant market position. Which there is. It is hard to compete with free. Ask e.g. TomTom or Microsoft.

"If Google needs to engage in anticompetitive behavior to keep Android profitable/viable, then they weren't ever profitable."

If startups need a giant subsidized operating system for free or else they weren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.

Do you see how ridiculous that argument is?

>As it turns out, yeah, there's a lot of value we as a society can derive from low cost pervasive mapping. So let's find a way to share the cost and not just whine about Google, no?

Yeah, Google has vacuumed up incredible amounts of mapping data from users and has now jacked up the prices with the lead this gave them. OSM (or something similar) is the way to share the cost. Google just abused their goodwill and used their other power positions to discourage open source. Whining about Google while moving elsewhere is entirely appropriate.

What? Your counter-counterpoint doesn't make sense at. Lots of startups can afford the per seat cost of OSX or Windows. If your business can't recoup the cost of an os per employee then yeah...maybe it's not a worthwhile venture.

On the desktop side of things that only happens because of Linux, otherwise (if guys like Ballmer would have had their way at the end of the '90s - early 2000s) those startups would now be paying hundreds of dollars per Windows license per each machine (and maybe more depending on the number of cores? the sky would have been the limit, the same as Oracle did in their field). And not to mention the server side of things, I'm pretty sure the costs for server OS licenses would have been prohibitive for the vast majority of startups without the alternative free OS solutions.

I mean, kind of, but on the other hand, think about all the companies whose costs are subsidized by having public roads.

I am not saying that mapping should be free, but such price bumps should be communicated better to allow paying customers prepare for changes and alternative scenarios.

And again, just another reminder, that whenever choosing a provider for anything related to your core business - think of an exit plan!

They complain that Maps at new prices would be more than the cost of their infrastructure, when actually their entire startup revolves around this data, and 5k to be able to use an amazing piece of high tech software that is ahead of the competition is..peanuts.

No matter what other business interests and strategies Google follows, there is no right to using such valuable tech for less than the monthly salary of an engineer. I find this incredible entitled.

You see where this argument leads to?

Google does a whole lot more, and can charge whatever they want for it. OSM provides usable solutions the vast majority of users; i’ve Moved to OSM a couple of years ago in everything for privacy reasons and except for the occasional Waze route or verifications, get nothing from google that I can’t get from OSM.

Spot on. I would that if a site / application is hitting Maps' paid tier they can (somehow) monitize that traffic and cover the cost.

But monitization can't help you if / when they pull the plug.

p.s. I sometimes wonder how often Google looks at Slack and regrets mothballing Wave.

There was a related discussion[0] on HN a few weeks ago that I found enlightening. Commentator ucaetano's phrasing of the strategy was "create a desert of profitability around you". The discussion of moats vs deserts found here [1] is also useful.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17047348 "Laws of Tech Economics: Commoditize Your Complement"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17048492

I remember like 3 or 4 years ago having this conversation at a hackathon with a bunch of "Machine Learning" / "Sentiment Analysis" APIs present... right as google started offering both for free on their cloud platform.

Paul Graham, September 2001:

> "And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.”

Google is today's Microsoft :)

Wrong, maybe that "space" (feature or product) goes well with Google's business model, but wouldn't support a viable business mode by itself.

I still have to understand openstreetmap mapping solutions. It's named open, not free, so I guess providing your own server with osm data would work. Only with FreeStreetMap the data would be infected also.

There's a great deal of competition and that generally results in a race to the bottom. The market leader just removed themselves from the market and the best way to capitalize is stay low and build your userbase.

We won't see price changes by any of these companies. They all want to be #1.

I'm not sure what you mean with "free"/"open". The OSM licence has a share-alike part if you merge your own map data with OSM data. If you just have a map and put points on it, it'd be fine.

[1] https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/ [2] https://github.com/openstreetmap/chef/pull/78 [3] https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/

OSM.org doesn't prohibit commericial usage, per se. But if you're running a business, you shouldn't rely on volunteers from another project which you're not paying for.

ianal and all that, but isn't somewhere antitrust- or monopoly- adjacent?

I know if walmart moved into a new city and started giving away hardware for free, then waited until all the local hardware stores had been shut down for 10 months, and then jacked up their prices to 100 times what they used to be before going free, that'd be pretty illegal.

I don't know if this qualifies, and I don't know how much appetite there is for prosecuting Google for offering useful things for free. I don't think they've had much of a history of jacking up prices after killing off a market, until relatively recently. Interesting question, though.

Not to mention Internet.org from Facebook, TOM's (free) shoes in Africa.

Saying things like that could get you disbarred.

Much less likely if you have VPN, did not give email and made random login/password. OPSec.

In the highly hypothetical case that someone would actually investigate this they'd get this IP from HN's host or Cloudflare, then get their identity and then go forward with removing him from the bar association if found guilty.

VPN case. I logged in HN and gave legal advice :) Minute later I logged in Reddit, same IP, same browser, probably tracking cookies too (Reddit is behind CF too). Now CF can link my HN and Reddit logins. Chances are, I logged into Reddit without VPN days ago - IP - Busted. Not so hypothetical, imho.

It matters in part because truth matters to a lot of people here. Actual reality matters to a lot of people here. It's a bunch of pedants.

And if you want to make it a habit of genuinely claiming to be a lawyer when you aren't and intentionally giving bad advice, you might eventually find that the mods will ban you for trolling.

This culture, while nice, cannot scale. At some point or another, an online community becomes an image of the wider social community it serves, regardless of the intentions of the founders or ephemeral royalty.

Just like Facebook or Reddit (d)evolved, HN cannot forever maintain a 70s hacker ethos and mannerisms. At some point or another the current reality of today's Silicon Valley tech bros and gold rush mentality will come to dominate, as it indeed has.

So I believe paulie has a point, IANAL is superfluous on any internet forum, this one included. And yes, that's solid legal advice I can give with full professional authority.

I can't say that I agree with you.

I have a history of joining forums, watching them grow dramatically while I'm there, leaving and watching them become a shell of their former selves afterwards. I spent some years feeling like a forum killer and afraid of the power I appeared to wield, but didn't understand and didn't feel in control of.

I have not played such a central role on HN. But it is quite clear in my mind that the right cultural practices are critical to making a large forum live and breathe at all. Because if they are enforced by only one person and that person walks out the door, the forum collapses in upon itself and traffic shrinks to a level that can be sustained by the cultural practices that remain.

I think this is a battle worth fighting. Merely agreeing with your point of view and throwing in the towel guarantees defeat.

HN doesn’t currently have any traditional hacker ethos. The points of view accepted on HN are all quite homogenous and mainstream.

It's like giving a restaurant recommendation second-hand, "but I've never eaten there". Or with tech, "but I've never done it".

With people I know I disclaim _social_ liability with "this is not legal advice" -- it's not for legal reasons, it's to say please ask a lawyer before you rely on this for something serious, don't blame me you need to check for yourself.

You could call it manners.

But most people here aren't likely to agree with you.

This is the internet. All I have to go by is the actual writing on my screen. I was merely being as accurate and clear as I know how to be and not assuming it was a misspelling. I was merely covering all bases to make sure we are as on the same page as possible.

That's what pedants do.

Poor grandparent got nuked in the votes, but I actually think this is an interesting discussion. It ties to my thoughts about politeness and behavior on the internet, which ties to my thoughts about the same IRL. Dale Carnegie, "How to Win Friends" type stuff.

Is it effective to "hedge" your arguments/posts/words with a "now I might be wrong" / "you may know more about this than me" / "I'm not a lawyer" ? I spent 4 years hearing sales gurus tell me to not do it, exude confidence. Then I had Dale Carnegie and my favorite manager ever tell me the exact opposite. I've tried both, and the "Carnegie" method seems to work best for me both online and off.

It's not just "IANAL" - the most positive responses I've seen on reddit, twitter, and here have some sort of "hedge." When I employ it, I get great responses (and lots of upvotes, which is other than response rate and quality of responses the only measure we can really use). When I don't, I get downvotes.

Sometimes the "confident asshole" approach works here and on reddit, but it can backfire HORRIBLY - see the absolute nightmare situation happening over at ArenaNet - some guy didn't quite hedge in the right way and caused a total breakdown of community/developer trust. What a mess. I bet the developer wouldn't have felt quite so attacked if the commentor had hedged a bit better. See also, any email chain Linus Torvald gets involved in.

Now this just starts a whole other discussion about whether someone should "have to" hedge, etc etc. I'm just voicing my thoughts here, curious what others think.

For (a super basic) example, instead of going with:

  Now, I might be wrong... but you should probabably do foo, then bar.  That would avoid baz completely.

  Would it be better to do foo, then bar?  That seems like it would avoid baz completely.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17565218/arenanet-guild-w...

https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/10/17550276/guild-wars-2-aren...

https://www.pcgamer.com/fired-arenanet-dev-calls-dismissal-a...

In short, a woman working at ArenaNet, the company running GuildWars2 (an MMORPG), posted a twitter thread about her thoughts on designing narratives in an MMO. A prominent (male) streamer of the game responded with his opinion, which (as he stated) was a disagreement of her point of view. To this, the ArenaNet employee expressed her opinion that the streamer was explaining to her how to do her job, and implied he was doing this because she is a woman.

Quite predictably the exchange exploded into a shitstorm of epic proportions, which supernovaed when ArenaNet responded to the incident by firing the employee.

I think the response by the community at large to the woman's firing is despicable, and the firing was probably not justified. But, I have been thinking a lot about the words of the exchange, and how much of a clusterfuck the situation is. The exchange itself is, in my opinion, not black and white. To be fair, I say this as a guy, so it's entirely possible that I Just Don't/Can't Get It. I accept that and am happy to be pushed back on.

The words:

>ArenaNetEmployee: {{29 tweet thread discussing character writing in MMOS}}

>Streamer: "Really interesting thread to read! However, allow me to disagree slightly. I don't believe the issue lies in the MMORPG genre itself..."

>ArenaNetEmployee: "Today in being a female game dev: "Allow me--a person who does not work with you--explain to you how you do your job."" {{quotes streamer}}

I feel like this whole shitstorm could have been avoided if the streamer had hedged just a bit better, or instead had asked her opinion. Basically, in the discussion, setting her up as the expert (which she is), while still expressing an opposed position. This is basically what hedging does anyway.

It might be a bit hard to swallow, though. Who's to say that a streamer is less qualified to analyze character writing in MMOs? After all, the writer is usually not the one impacted by the game. Streamers are.

I know nothing about this situation, though. </hedge> I'm just saying that it would personally feel difficult to adopt this mindset if I felt like I were qualified to express a dissenting opinion.

To your second point, that's another thing I think a lot about. Honesty, in its many forms. I value honesty tremendously, because how can two individuals (or a community) operate in good faith if people are being dishonest with each other? However... we are irrational. When I was a recruiter, going to a company with my candidate's actual rate, and then turning around and giving my candidate the actual offer, would lead to bad tastes on both sides. Instead, I'd lie to the company, tellm my candidate was asking for more, then then around and tell the candidate that the offer was less than what they were looking for. Then I'd let both parties stew for a bit, give the candidate a call back, and lo and behold I got them an extra five bucks an hour like magic (citing the actual offer). Then, both parties would feel they had really gotten the most possible value out of the transaction and be happier for it.

So then what do you do in interpersonal communication? Are you upfront and honest about your feelings regarding your qualifications? Do you state your opinions forthright, while still being polite? Or do you "play the game?"

I guess it boils down to your values. If you want to consistently be liked more, listened to more, and "get your way" more, you heed the wisdom of the ancients and do the Dale Carnegie. Even if it hurts.

In my experience though, it stops hurting very quickly. Turns out a lot of the times I was confidence in how right I was, I was way off base... And I usually end up learning something by seeing things from the opponent's perspective.

1) The day before there was a big AMA where players and developers talked about the story design, initiated and organized by the game studio. The fired developer was a prominent figure in the discussions, and the twitter thread was seen by most as an further extension to that AMA. People can have different opinion about this, but its important to know the context of when the twitter thread appeared.

2) The initial response by the community at large was both on reddit and on the official Guild Wars 2 Forum to not fire anyone. It was only later unearthed that the developer had also celebrated when cancer victim John Bane died at age 33. At this point many have pointed out that the community changed view and could no longer support having such individual in the community, and a massive thread called something like "Developers should also have to follow Anet own conduct policy" was created.

Hedging is useful, but there is some lines which companies and communities are unlikely to accept. Celebrating the death of cancer victims is one, and is likely not something any one want to be associated with. The second aspect is to not responding to art criticism with labeling the person as sexist to 10k followers, which given the close connection to Anet organized AMA and the fact that their name is directly next to the message could make Anet legal liable for slander. Third, game developer is closely connected to community management and there is a good reason why conduct policies exist and get enforced. One could argue in defense that twitter is "personal" and out of the conduct policy scope, but that is very much up to discussion and it seems that the guild wars 2 community is generally in favor that such policy do cover developers talking about the game on social media, especially in connection to community events.

If you start making silly things about gender than the real problems gets lost and you hurt the cause that you are trying to promote. The subsequent twitter posts doesn't read good to me either. But some of the backlash against her was equally or probably even more so outrageous. The anonymity and distance that social media gives it users seem to in general bring out the worst in people except for rare exceptions.

What is often overlooked, is that in communication you are first an employee of a company, and your own opinions and feelings come way later.

As is clear in this example, not everybody can do this (all of the time).

She is certainly entitled to this opinion. But as an employee, she should not have expressed it. Most likely the company didn't reflect on this before allowing/encouraging her to use twitter to communicate.

I'm speculating that the company didn't have a communication strategy to contain a shit storm. And in the end just fired the employee. Firing the employee only makes sense if she has a history of causing the kinds of issues.

Again, just my personal opinion.

If you find a live claymore in the middle of the company meeting room, exploding it can be avoided by circumspect behavior.

If that's all you do about it, you might as well start calling it "boss".

Etc..

Nobody has to, but in my experience, you do seem to get a much more positive reaction when you do.

At least in Western culture, it seems a well played "humble" character is admirable, especially when it is known that the particular person has absolutely no reason to be humble.

EDIT: I don't expect anybody to hedge "just because", but I expect that a person with extremely good interpersonal communication skills to hedge.

In science and engineering, I prefer it has some meaning. If you're sure in what you're saying, have data to back it up, dealt with it before - say straight. If it's a guess, say it is a guess.

So I would not spend time guessing was it politeness of lack of facts behind that hedging. Btw, I upvoted GP :)

There's a pretty darn big difference between "my gut feeling is that this approach is too complicated, but I've not analyzed the problem sufficiently to know whether my gut is correct" and "there's no way this is the right architecture, it'll have harmful impact, and there's lots of better ways to do it".

It's imo especially important to do so from positions of authority where others might be less critical in accepting ones statements as truth.

This is what drug dealers do.

It was also the plot of the James Bond film Live and Let Die.

I don't really think that happens at all. If so where are they?

That's not too say that there's guys on street corners offering free drugs to random passersby. Rather there's lots of dealers who just deal to aquaintances, friends, friends of friends, neighbors, etc. In that case they can spread a few hundred dollars worth of product around to non-users within their social network in hopes of picking up another client or two, who will end up generating reliable profit for a long time.

unsure if that’s also predatory pricing? seems different to me

Whether their competition is Lyft, Taxis, or public transportation, their subsidized pricing is a big factor to their customers.

Maybe having a searchable historical database of everything imaginable and their prices would keep companies honest and prevent price gouging.

Very annoying. Especially because by default every GCP service logs a bunch of crap to Stackdriver.

Our log cost was going to be as high as our compute cost.

My issue is with devs that write software that spits out a couple of gigs an hour and refuse to trim it down or exclude things.

I don't know how many bait and switch episodes from google I need to see but by 2008 I was done with them -- for the first time. Ad-nauseam.

If you boycotted and didn't use Google they would wither and die and stop being something to worry about: for immediate google specific free offerings that are sucker bait. Also for self aggrandizing standards/inclusions and buying the overt talent. But whatever. The HN community is full of dupes and buy ins, culture whores and fifth columnists. True belief in OSS died when everyone else took it and got rich.

I was under the impression the trust for Google evaporated a long time ago. Sure, alternatives can be few at times. But anyone committed to and in bed with Google has to be sleeping with one eye open.

Ah, the classic Oracle trick. Good to see the tradition is alive.

It seems like they haven't learned anything at all. Sure it was google that shafted them in this case, but the problem isn't google, it's that their business is entirely dependent on a third party who has the power to do this. They rejected the option that would have prevented this from happening in the future with another company.

Oracle probably has a sales team on the way to their offices now.

What do you mean it's evil? People call Google evil for so many things that are hardly evil at all, that the word has lost its meaning in the context of Google. For example I honestly cannot tell if you're calling them evil for increasing Maps pricing (thereby hurting maps-consuming startups) or for previously asking a low price (thereby hurting startups that offer maps).