Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating
I worked at a company that <i>heavily</i> used the maps API in 2018. The 1,400% price hike really was an eye opener. It wasn&#x27;t just the money involved, which was large, but the fact that it came so suddenly and with so much magnitude.<p>Google&#x27;s choice to bump these prices made me realize that they could do the same thing with their compute cloud pricing or other APIs, again with little notice. That, in turn, led to the realization that we needed to remove our reliance on Google&#x27;s entire stack, and quickly, or we&#x27;d be in a terrible bargaining position later.<p>This one choice by the maps team likely cost Google significantly in the medium to long term, if any other companies realized the same things we did.