> I wonder if Google Maps could close down....

No. Google has bought what must be dozens of companies at this point just to support and improve Maps (Waze being the latest), it's reportedly profitable & popular, with the continued rise of mobile I'd expect it to become more important, and my little survival analysis (http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns) gives it 87% odds of surviving to May 2018 (which IMO is too low).

Also there are a bunch of government people who work on it I think.

I saw a bunch of public linkedIn profiles with NSA analysts and people in the private sector with google maps listed as experience for whatever reason

Google maps and Google earth are used extensively for imagery analysis and intelligence work. They aren't working with the maps team so much as using it as a tool.

That page is always really interesting when it comes up, but have you considered adding data for existing product improvements by acquisition? You include a variable for whether it was initially acquired or not, but perhaps big acquisitions clearly for the purpose of improving a product are a strong signal of longevity?

That's not a bad idea, but at this point it would be hard to go back and be able to classify each product by how many other products were merged into it. That information is not always clearly laid out publicly (to say the least).

The more relevant question is not whether Google Maps could close down but whether it will change in a manner that adversely affects you. For example, with their new vector-based system, will Google phase out tiles at some point? There are some apps that might be incompatible with vector-based data, so this could matter. Or more relevantly, will Google restrict API access? Think of Twitter -- it's never closed its Tweet stream, but it has changed the rules for API usage, to the detriment of certain Twitter clients.

As a (for context, Android) user, changes to Google Maps have already adversely affected me. I (until very recently) lived in NYC.

The best way to tell what direction you were facing when you came above ground from being on the subway was to look at the direction of traffic aligning with the arrows on Google Maps... but they decided that was no longer an important map feature and got rid of it.

I would frequently be zoomed into a specific location, and relatively soon after need to switch contexts on the OS (to check an email, answer a text message, etc.). When I returned to the app it used to be that it would retain the zoom level, but after updates it seems that Google thinks it's useful/funny/cute to zoom back out to the full zoom of the overall trip. For the life of me, I can't imagine a context in which this is useful.

They've got a monopoly on mapping data, and insist on taking a great app and making it worse. I can't understand why.

Umm... Google maps has a compass... which rotates with you as you turn. Just look at your icon on the map, at has an arrow facing the direction you are.

Well, no. Some devices have a compass in them, and Google Maps uses it if possible.

If your device has no inbuilt compass (think iPhone 3G, from memory), there's nothing Google Maps can do about it.

Oh, my bad. I actually thought it was a feature of the GPS, not a separate sensor.

To be fair, that does require your device has a compass-sensor.

They recently got rid of topographic data for the mobile Maps application. For serious stuff, relying on your phone is a bad idea - you need a real map - but for casual walks, having some idea of elevations was really handy, and now it's gone.

Mapping is such a core part of the mobile OS experience I can't see them shuttering it. Separate from that, they use it to show ads and promote their other services (like Google Plus).

I doubt they'll kill it, but would you be confident the APIs will be there in a few years? Between Apple and the mass defections to OpenStreetMap et al when they raised pricing, their third-party use is not what it was.

That's insane, maps collects huge amounts of data, google's raw material.

But you'd have to assume that Checkout also collected lots of raw data about people and their purchasing habits. It wasn't as if nobody used the service, it just wasn't the most popular.

Not enough data to be useful though. If they can't make behavioural predictive models of you to make ads & sell to the NSA it's not useful