There is a good reason why everyone here on HN considers any startup that might potentially compete with Google dead in the water – or, when Google starts a product, any companies that operated in that business previously are seen as dead.<p>Google uses predatory pricing (financed by having all parts of their company make losses except for a select few), Google uses their market might in one business to create a monopoly in others, like every time you searched with Firefox you used to get a banner ad &quot;upgrade now to chrome&quot;. The cases where Google was literally scraping content from competitors and displayed it without a link back – the current Antitrust trial with Yelp!, where Google scraped reviews, and displayed them in Google places comes to mind. (And when Yelp! complained, Google threatened to throw them out of the results)<p>And yes, Google’s Maps API is another such situation. Maps is installed by default on all Android devices, giving it a huge boost for apps embedding it. Google Maps is making losses everywhere, breaking laws (see StreetView) and is still running.<p>At this point everyone still using Maps should switch to competitors, because otherwise we’ll get a situation where Maps becomes <i>again</i> a monopoly.<p>Google’s long-term strategy seems to be &quot;get a monopoly for <i>everything</i>&quot;.<p>Every monopoly is an Antitrust situation, and Maps is steering right into one.