Google opening up the APIs for maps and making them available for commercial use shows they are serious when it comes to maps. Reserving the right to add ads to the maps is seriously ingenious.
Yahoo building out a stable of web services which forbid commercial usage show they are seriously joking.
Can you guess which jokers are offering a $5,000 prize for building an app with their webservices, and which one is going to have about 5,000 new apps built in the next few weeks.
And that giant sucking sound? Is it the noise of Microsoft's MapPoint customers dropping the pay-per-use MapPoint web service and switching to Google's free for all API.
Hackers will hack and enterprises will pay for the SLA's. There are all kinds of ways to create cool and free mapping apps using supported web services like MapPoint, or unsupported ones like Google and soon MSN Virtual Earth, but an enterprise or an organization that has real busisess needs -mission critical or otherwise- will pay to use a supported environment with guaranteed up-time, response times, data updates and support. I mean, what would happen if you were running a site for example that uses a Google map as part of your offering and one day you came to work to find out that they had made a breaking change to their API and now all your maps were gone or broken? Your business may be affected but you would have no recourse because you have no service level agreement, and Google would have no obligation to you, your customers or users, to fix it. Or maybe that is what they are counting on and soon what was once free will be a paid service.
Posted by: buttons | July 05, 2005 at 02:46 PM