Investing $71m though? Customers paying $10/month for this??? It's not that awesome.
The UI for the Dash is also considerably better than Garmin, which is also considerably better than Tomtom. As it stands by itself, the Dash is a pretty darn good GPS unit.
Also, as for the iPhone competing with it. Maybe, but we made it kind of hard to position it that way.
I don't know though - it's just not something I'd pay for. Especially $10 a month.
TomTom made an announcement with Vodafone back in 06. Nothing's come out of that. You still need a traffic receiver attached to your unit to get data over the air or you need to plug the unit in to your computer with the Internet to share your map corrections. Dash does this in real time over the air.
As for 10 dollars a month: well no one pointed a gun at your head. I find the product more valuable than 10 bucks a month and I'm willing to pay. My yearly Garmin map updates would have been 80 bucks or so anyways without the added benefits.
Sure, I expect if you drive a lot, in traffic hotspots, with a lot of other Dash users, it's worth it.
Also, wouldn't it be awesome for it to know where I am at the side of the read and beam that info to AAA?
As for your complaints:
Social network for the highways is reporter-speak. What the Dash does is it consolidates traffic data from all the users, analyze it, and then pushes back to the users. So if car A slows down or stops because he encounters a traffic jam that data is sent out to other cars behind car A to inform them of such a problem. It then redirects them to another route as a means of saving you time. If you don't think that's freakin' awesome, well then I don't know, you must live on the moon.
Also hardware companies have a considerably higher overhead than web 2.0 companies considering the amount of R&D and manufacturing costs associated with releasing a, you know, actual product.