I was there when Google started offering turn by turn navigation for free. Other issue was live traffic information. As you might imagine all this caused some concern among employees because that was, I think, the main source of revenue for the company.
They were already doing some other stuff like fitness wearables but they didn't seem to be leaning into it.
Main idea for staying in business, since you can't compete with free, was to go deeper into cooperation with car manufacturers to provide builtin navigation in cars. They were already doing it back then, I think, but they've seen their salvation in capturing bigger part of that market.
I was a software developer there, employed in projects pretty far from their core business, but I learned there a lot about how companies become corporations why they can and do run like a headless
chicken, spilling money left and right. It's basically about survival. Company becomes a corporation when it randomly discovers a gold vein in the economy. For TomTom this gold vein was maps on portable computers. This gold vein brings in absolutely insane amount of money. Then this money needs to be spent on doing a lot of unrelated inefficient discovery work wasting huge amount of money so they have a chance of finding next gold vein before shifting sands of economy and human development burry the original one.
From what I see shared in this thread, TomTom still haven't found their second gold vein.
Maybe I should get hired there again. A lot of my friends from other jobs work there now. I never seen from the inside how corporations die.
Interesting that going deeper integrated into cars was their game plan. I've never used our in-car GPS (other than playing with it once). If it was any good it has a ton of advantages over using Google, including display on the "speedometer" screen.
Sadly, it's pants. It comically announces caution stationary traffic on the M25, generally after we've been stationary for 5 minutes. The navigation directions aren't as good and Google is just so much better at door to door directions to a named destination. Others will get you close to your destination and you have to work it out. Google will, more often than not, take you to the correct carpark.
With Android Auto displaying on the dash it's not even a competition.
For many years post-smartphone I did still use the integrated GPS in our cars. Even though the data and UI was generally (not universally) worse, having it on the comparatively big screen in a central spot, controlling it with the steering wheel controls, and not having it consume phone battery, outweighed the other factors for me. Then came CarPlay and Android Auto and those reason vanished.
I have no experience with tom tom but I was a garmin user, and I got the sense that tom toms were pretty much identical. IMO an integrated tom tom into the car, if it performs as well as the external unit, would be amazingly better than your cell phone. The biggest advantage imo is satellite coverage is much better than quality data network coverage. I'm not even talking about in the boonies. Plenty of times in the middle of LA county I am sitting there waiting on a seemingly stalled LTE connection to render a map I supposedly had already cached locally according to google maps.
I have an older in-car system and my experience is the opposite.
First, the car doesn't download map data. I'm stuck with what was on the car when I bought it unless I want to pay an unreasonable amount to update it.
Second, it does download traffic data, but it's so slow that it's useless. I took its advice once and it cost me over an hour, because the alternate route had already filled up and had the disadvantage of not being a freeway.
Third, it can't navigate a path without connecting to the satellite (seemingly for traffic data, but possibly it isn't even calculating the path locally). So when I visit downtown SF, don't have up-to-date maps, and I'm inevitably behind some building blocking my southern view, it just abandons me.
> Third, it can't navigate a path without connecting to the satellite (seemingly for traffic data, but possibly it isn't even calculating the path locally).
I’m confused by what you are saying here. In-car navigation use satelites to know where the car is. If it can’t path plan without satelite connection then that is most likely because it is waiting for a localisation fix.
Trafic information could be coming through satelite broadcast but I doubt that it does.
There is no way that a navigation tool would receive path planning through satelite. Two way communication is much more complicated than one-way reception, and there is no way it would be financially worth doing that.
Sirius sells traffic info add-on, which is broadcast from the satellite. It is not as detailed as the data-linked apps in cars/phones and is only available for the few big metros but can get the traffic info on an older car's nav system.
>Is that an exorbitant amount of money for maintaining a (global?) digital map?
Absolutely - Google is just one player, Apple Maps, Bing Maps, OSM.
Charging consumers 300$/year for map updates would never work even if free offerings didn't exist - they are just targeting a small niche and optimizing (ie. even if they made the price 30$/year most people would still use phone maps so they might as well milk the market that wants to pay for their solution as high as they can). If there were no free competitors someone would drive the mass market price down way lower than 300$.
Considering standalone GPS units used to charge like 50 bucks (and now I think a lot of them charge nothing/bake it into the up front cost) yeah I'd say so. Garmin currently charges something like 100 bucks for their updates based on some quick searching.
The built in unit for your car is a captive market, they're definitely gouging. Especially nowadays when it's almost impossible to replace them with an aftermarket unit due to how integrated they have become.
>First, the car doesn't download map data. I'm stuck with what was on the car when I bought it unless I want to pay an unreasonable amount to update it.
Apparently car navigation maps are a thing that you can also pirate. I think I saw a Windows tool for downloading Mercedes-Benz map updates. Never tried it though, since I was pretty content to sticking with Google Maps and a phone mount.
The in-car GPS systems are a disaster (because the car manufacturers see them as "cash after sale") but the separate/dedicated GPS units are pretty good.
The updates and traffic information is, or at least was, free.
I perhaps should have said find rather than navigate. I don't expect turn-by-turn navigation when it has no way of knowing where I am. I'm not talking about it directing me along a path; but about finding the path in the first place.
It should use the last known location and vector to find a route. It doesn't. My guess is that it loses the satellite, sees it again and starts recalculating, loses it, and repeats this cycle. Unless the satellite is visible for a long enough period, it never produces any path. Even an out-of-date path would be more useful than simply nothing.
That, of course, is called dead reckoning and some GPSes have it, but I wouldn't trust it for very long. [1] I'm not sure what cgriswald is on about. Maybe he just lives in a tunnel or some dead zone, because I've never lost satellite connections. Maybe cellphones can triangulate via cell towers? But how is he getting cell data in his tunnel?
When I lose navigation I just do without. I haven't replaced it with Google or any other cell-based app. The satellite radio often also drops out in these moments despite having a buffer.
Edit: Ah, I see, I meant something sort of other than that read. I've certainly had the experience of not being able to download maps, but mostly on hikes in the middle of nowhere. When I use navigation on foot in the city, hadn't had the problems I have with in-car nav.
CarPlay, at least (and I kinda assume Android Auto) uses the car's built-in GPS receiver when available. Doesn't necessarily solve the non-cached maps when LTE is unavailable problem, though.
I'm the total opposite. I love my in-car nav. I have a shortcut on the steering wheel that brings up a list of recent destinations, so starting it takes literally seconds. I don't have to plug in my phone, or even look at it. I get turn by turn in the binnacle AND the heads-up display. And on top of that, it _doesn't_ do all the silly stuff that Google does to make people think it's so great, like routing me through some residential neighborhood to save 45 seconds. I'm okay taking one freeway vs another, maybe (I don't like adding miles to my trip), but that's about as smart as I want my navigation to be.
Maybe this is because I don't commute by car though. If I get stuck in traffic, it's the one time that month, and I've probably got a podcast on anyway.
With Android Auto I can save time by starting navigation before I even get into the car. And it does clearly show how much time alternate routes will save, so it's easy to see when a detour through a residential neighborhood isn't worth the hassle.
> I don't have to plug in my phone, or even look at it. I get turn by turn in the binnacle AND the heads-up display. And on top of that, it _doesn't_ do all the silly stuff that Google does to make people think it's so great, like routing me through some residential neighborhood to save 45 seconds.
Apple CarPlay + Apple Maps checks all of those boxes in my car.
Correct. Many new vehicles integrate the CarPlay APIs into the vehicle quite well. And it has wireless carplay, so I don't even take the phone out of my pocket. It just auto-connects when I start the car. I press the voice command button on my steering wheel, tell Siri to navigate somewhere, and all of the navigation displays (hud/cluster/infotainment display) in my car display the directions that Apple Maps is spitting out. It works identically to the way a factory nav would otherwise work.
I was traveling with some friends through Los Gatos on the way to Monterrey and Google had me sit in a residential neighborhood traffic jam for over 45 minutes when I could've turned left and gotten to my destination much quicker. I did end up turning left, but the takeaway that I had is that Google isn't always doing the "right" thing.
There is a particular problem in Los Gatos on summer weekends when everyone wants to escape the Bay Area and go to the beaches around Santa Cruz. Southbound Highway 17 comes to standstill due to idiot timid drivers who slow down going uphill and constantly brake around curves. Then the navigation apps route drivers onto residential streets to try and save a few minutes. It gets so bad that local residents are literally trapped and even emergency vehicles can't get through.
Anecdotally, Waze is (or at least was) better. It would try and redirect traffic to avoid too much congestion. So it would send you over the highway and me over smaller roads in a roundabout way, if possible.
Mind you, I've never seen this properly confirmed :)
I remember TomTom being a lot better than the competition, though. Most other units were terribly slow and sometimes borderline unusable. Not to mention the updates... not software updates, but the map updates. I still remember my parents, with the help of my siblings, spending weeks trying update their cheap Chinese GPS using instructions from random internet forums, only to give up and get a more expensive TomTom unit. The Chinese unit was given away at a Facebook group to someone more adventurous.
Of course, mobile apps have definitely caught up years ago, and I believe you that they're even better now.
> If it was any good it has a ton of advantages over using Google, including display on the "speedometer" screen.
Just as a quick note, when I use Apple Maps via CarPlay on my 2020 Subaru it does display the next turn on the instrument cluster. This doesn't work with Google Maps via CarPlay, so it might be a private CarPlay API that only Apple's first-party apps can use.
I am opposite, I used Android auto once and it was inferior to the car's own: audio distortions, choppy display, takes a while before it figures orientation of the car, does not show in the instrument display and HUD, directions timing is off etc. Distortion and choppiness seem to come from the whatever protocol it uses to communicate with the car, Google Maps on the same phone are pretty smooth.
The car's maps are not as up to date as Google's - they miss some road closures, do not have some businesses names so need to enter address (or can just send a location from Google Map to the car), sometimes believe a street is one-way even if it is not or try to make a turn that does not exist any more but I can deal with an occasional glitch every few months instead of dealing with the inferior UI all the time.
There is an alternative to "wasting" money to give a second gold vein. You can just do the cash cow thing and then die. That's a totally reasonable. If TomTom don't think they can use the money better than other investment alternatives (that their investors have), then they shouldn't.
Of course, politics and personal interests. But sometimes it's just better to allocate resources to something where they're better utilized.
When I was reading the comment, I thought the same: why don't companies just accept that they have one good project, focus on it 100%, stay good at it, and when the market dies, the company could die with it. There is no shame in milking one product for 20 years, providing a living to hundreds/thousands, then just scale back to maintenance and eventually close things down.
It doesn't really happen in practice, because no "visionary CEO" will say "we couldn't come up with a better idea than what we are doing now, so let's just call it a day in terms of exploring other ideas, and focus on this one product".
My current company is a retail company with both lots of physical locations and web shop/mobile app. We always try to come up with features that users can use in the physical stores, and those features get practically zero traction. Nobody is willing to say that the people who go to the stores, in a big percentage, won't use our apps, and the people who use the apps/web shop don't care about the physical stores. Every product person wants to combine these two, and I don't understand why.
(I guess, that's why I'm not in charge of business decisions :))
That is exactly the business model for some private equity firms (corporate raiders). They identify undervalued companies with strong revenue and significant assets where incompetent management is wasting resources and buy the company. Then they stop investing in growth, cut expenses to the bone, borrow against the assets, issue huge dividends to shareholders, and allow the company to gradually die. There's nothing really wrong with this approach and it probably helps increase overall economic growth through better capital allocation. But it can be a rough ride for employees caught in the process.
> But it can be a rough ride for employees caught in the process.
Or an opportunity. They should see the private equity firms coming in as a signal it's time to jump ship and not liquidate their stocks (actually, renegotiate your ESPP while you look out for the next thing!).
> why don't companies just accept that they have one good project, focus on it 100%, stay good at it, and when the market dies, the company could die with it.
Because corporations are organisations (that develop some bureaucracy) and the main existential purpose of every bureaucratic organisation is to survive and grow. No corporation will just voluntarily die I think. First it will be sold, reorganized, reimagined, reinvented, downscaled, pivoted and all that good stuff.
REITs are required by tax law to pay out 90%+ of their income, and everyone invests in them specifically for the dividend.
If the stock price gets too high, they always dilute it by issuing new shares to raise money for new projects. So you're never expecting lots of appreciation.
There's hundreds of them, and also many private REITs that are unlisted with the same fundamental idea.
Oil, utilities, REITs, small business lenders, etc. all have investors expecting management to just sit there, don't kill the golden goose, and pay regular dividends.
That's how companies used to work. You get some people & capital together to accomplish something and once you've accomplished it you shut down and distribute the company assets.
> Then this money needs to be spent on doing a lot of unrelated inefficient discovery work wasting huge amount of money so they have a chance of finding next gold vein before shifting sands of economy and human development burry the original one.
They could also return the money to shareholders and let the shareholders invest it into startups and companies that need investment to make money. These are usually much better bets than the old company re-inventing itself.
A company is not an end in itself, it is a temporary assembly of humans to explore a gold vein. Trying to make it eternal serves the CEO, but not the shareholders.
Instead of facebook trying to create the next facebook, it should return money to shareholders and let them buy into whatever is the next big thing.
I'm always a little confused by this claim. Focusing on revenue-generating products and not the user products they use to sell them: Google Search was their first success, then AdSense (third-party display ads), then YouTube. The latter two each make almost $30B/yr (run rate). Ignoring ads, Google Cloud makes >$20B/yr, as do Google hardware sales, with an additional $30B/yr from "non-advertising Other".
I don't really understand how one supports this claim without using decidedly non-standard definitions and grouping of revenue. If you insist on lumping together separate, wildly-successful revenue-generating products into overbroad groups by the manner in which the revenue is collected, and ignore a couple of objectively enormous revenue streams: Do you similarly feel that Apple "hasn't found a second gold vein" beyond "hardware sales"?
I would say it's the people visiting google that's the gold vein - advertising is the pick-axe. You don't make money with ads if no one visits. So in a sense making more and more products and reasons to visit is the gold vein.
Otherwise just saying advertising is a gold vein would mean people that put up a blank page with a single ad on it and no reason to visit would definitely not be a gold vein. So as others mentioned, its the Youtube and Gmails level products.
Google doesn't release net income numbers by business unit but in 2021 revenue for search was around $148B and Youtube revenue was around $29B. Given that youtube revenue dollars are probably much more expensive than search revenue dollars I'd say that ratio will skew toward more of the profit being in the search category than the you tube category, not less. It does seem on balance to be a relatively small part of their business dollars-wise, although I'd make the case that the cultural relevancy that youtube gives google has a non-zero value.
They don't break out the profitability of some subunits, but according to the WSJ it was "breakeven"[1] in 2014 with $4B in revenue.
I still don't see where the GP comment's confidence that it's not meaningfully profitable comes from. It doesn't seem like an uncontroversial assumption that costs have more than septupled in the last five years in the way that revenue has.
The numbers are trending in the right direction. From 2021Q1 to 2022Q1, revenue grew 43% (vs 34% at AWS and 46% at Azure), loss went down by 4%, and the loss to revenue ratio went from 24% to 16%.
IIRC the rumor leak around that was more nuanced: the leaks reported someone allegedly saying that market economics may not ultimately be able to support more than 2 leaders, because the economics will make #1 and #2 able to profit at prices that numbers 3+ can't compete with due to lack of scale. So the statement was that GCP has keep up or its ability to profit will be at risk, not that they'd shut down just because their slice of the pie isn't big enough if they end up as #3.
I don't believe it was clear who said this, how confident it was that someone said this, and whether it was an off-the-cuff comment in support of a push for more growth or an actual deep assessment of the economics of the space.
If advertisers felt motivated enough, circumventing PiHole would be trivial. Since all they do is block DNS requests based on a blacklist, an ad company just needs to serve their content from a trusted domain. Google owns plenty of domains which few PiHole users are likely to tolerate being blacklisted. They already do this with ads on YouTube.
Youtube ads are not a problem because of uBlock Origin / Newpipe etc... I have not seen an ad in Youtube in more than a decade.
But you are right. This could motivate them to move to a single domain for all Google content. But this is just another escalation in the adblock arms range. uBlock-style blockers would proliferate.
This is basically what youtube is doing. PiHole does not work on Youtube, but uBlock origin does (so does NewPipe, FreeTube and a bunch of software).
This would solve Google's immediate problem, but it's such a huge escalation that I expect lots of unintended effects not to Google's benefit. There is a reason they haven't done this, despite widespread adblocking use.
Yeah, the industry is definitely moving to that. Admiral, probably the most known ad-blocker-blocker already successfully circumvents PiHole and other DNS blocking by being served by the same domain.
I also expect Google to double down on Chrome Manifest v3 limitations if ad-blocking keeps getting more popular. Or even using DNS-over-HTTPS as a default on Chrome if ISP blocking ever becomes a thing.
For most customers, it seems they just went and bought about 2 thousand randomly-named domains and serve third-party scripts. However I've seen a couple places where Admiral was not blocked, because it was being served from a subdomain. I wish I had written down where it was to add to the EasyList or something. :(
The reason why Google (and other advertisers) do not do this is actually not because of the ad blocker arms race. On-domain ads are difficult to block, as can be seen by Facebook. But it also has huge trust problems, as can be seen by... Facebook.
Right now, with normal web advertising, the publisher (person with a website who wants to sell ads) tells your browser to go get an ad from the advertiser (the person paying for the ads), and that means that the advertiser gets a web request every time their ad is sold. This means that they can implement their own analytics and do not have to trust the publisher's, because the publisher merely kicks off the ad delivery process.
However, this requires separate domains or IP addresses, which can be blocked even at the network level[0] with a Pi-Hole. The alternative would be to serve ads straight off the publisher's site, which is how most social networks do it. Except... now you've just cut off every advertiser's data spigot[1]. If you do that, web advertising stops working - not because it's harder to target users, but because it's impossible to verify that you are paying for legitimate traffic to your website.
This is not a hypothetical. Social media companies already implement publisher delivery, and there have been multiple times in which they[2] themselves have admitted that their analytics and attribution were just plain wrong. That meant that advertisers were paying for traffic they never actually got. Publishers have an inherent incentive to inflate their traffic; the ad networks call this "click fraud" and it's when you run a bunch of bots to click on ads so you make more money[3].
The end of separate-domain advertising takes us right back to the days of television, where advertisers were buying specific time slots ("inventory") from specific publishers they trusted. The way that said inventory was priced was through random sampling of television watchers; but that relied on asking people to accurately record their TV watching habits. Good luck doing that when ads are served on a request-by-request basis.
Yes, you could randomly sample web users by having them install an extension that scans all their traffic and generates an equivalent log, but that almost certainly violates every extension repository's rules. Remember how Facebook was caught using their In-House signing cert to ship an iPhone VPN that did just that? That's the sort of sketchy shit we're talking about here. And any rules for detecting and reporting which ads were viewed could also be extracted and used to generate a tool for blocking said ads, which would be counter-productive.
So, basically, the reason why we don't just have publishers delivering ads is because it shuts out smaller publishers from selling them and puts advertisers solely at the mercy of Google and Facebook to verify that they actually got what they paid for. It would be a monopolistic power play few would tolerate.
[0] DoH and encrypted SNI complicates things, since it was also intended to be censorship-resistant - and we're trying to censor advertisements. However, you cannot encrypt IP addresses without taking on all of the inefficiencies of Tor onion routing. And you can also configure your web browser to just use the Pi-Hole's DNS instead of a public DoH server.
[1] Yes, there is an argument that telling the user's browser to make a request to another server is not "sending data"; this argument is stupid.
[2] Minimally, Facebook and Twitter; though other socials probably have the same problem.
[3] This is also why Google's antispam teams are secret police
Of course they’re not. It just might get more complicated for users but it’d be super easy for them to set up cloaking. uBlock could deal with that, ISP won’t.
Either way that will never happen obviously; Why would an ISP “block ads”? They’re literally hosting Google hardware (specifically YouTube’s cache)
In France, Free (one of the major telcos) has done exactly that. They block ads from the router that they give to their subscribers.
I guess they may be doing that to save bandwidth... They also have a tendency to offer features that few of their subscribers use, or even know about (some of their routers come with built-in VPN servers and torrent seedboxes).
I can see ad-blocking as a feature an ISP can try to sell. Imagine an ISP-level PiHole. (I can see this selling easily given how many family and friends asked me to install PiHole for them.
> go deeper into cooperation with car manufacturers to provide builtin navigation in cars.
I feel like this is a dying market as well. Why would I pay $200/year to update the maps in my car's mediocre navigation system when I can just turn on Apple CarPlay/Android Auto and get the same excellent navigation system I enjoy on my smartphone?
It's not dying, it's a dead market. Some haven't quite realized that yet, but they will soon enough. Nobody can complete with Apple Maps or Google Maps, going forward. Not even on quality, let alone the combination of quality and price.
My car's built-in navigation can do things Apple CarPlay can't, like HUD, dashboard mapping, dead-reckoning navigation in tunnels, fuel management, etc.
...until feature parity. Soon Apple/Google will be able to integrate with those features too. Aside from "dead-zones", I'm sure they will eventually have more integrations with car interfaces.
Even so, both Google and Apple seem to predict your location when signal drops. Somehow I still get decent navigation when I am in the middle of nowhere Iowa and have no cell service. Obviously the maps are cached, but somehow it knows I'm still moving. Must be accelerometer and gyroscope? IDK
I'd really like dash HUD integration with CarPlay.
GPS has nothing to do with cell signal. GPS is it's own signal from satellites that your phone has no problem receiving in a place like Iowa. In fact Iowa has a lot of things going for it to enhance GPS receivership - it's flat so you can see most of the sky, it's open - there's just not a lot of vegetation to absorb the signal coming from overhead (e.g. trees), its in the middle of the US which means there's always going to be 4 or 5 satellites with a line of sight to your phone.
I think this is a naive take, the glib view of a worker with no practical insight into company operations and decision making.
It's doubtful that TomTom's foray into mobile was 'accidental' and it's also hard to understand how much money is being spent, and the risks involved in finding other revenue streams.
When mega corps come in and suddenly make a major part of your business unworkable, yes, companies go into reactionary mode. That's normal.
> It's doubtful that TomTom's foray into mobile was 'accidental'
They started as a small company writing random software for palmtops. Until one day they made mapping software. They didn't expect it will be that popular with people. It was popular to a degree that people were buying palmtops just to use their app and didn't care about all other software their new palmtop could have.
It's as if today, small software shop released an app that bumps iPhone device sales by +20% just because people want to use that one app event though they don't care about all other things iPhone can do. Everybody can dream of that, but nobody can plan for that. It was purely accidental.
> When mega corps come in and suddenly make a major part of your business unworkable, yes, companies go into reactionary mode. That's normal.
What I describe as running like a headless chicken started many years before I came to TomTom. I've seen tonnes of internal wiki's that were once created for internal random, ultimately abandoned projects. I even seen two projects attempting the same thing, new one didn't have an idea that somebody, some time ago in that same corporation already tried to build that.
It's standard mode of operation. In corporation you have core business that's kept tight and professional and huge amount of side activity that's just bleeding money trying to discover next big pivot.
No, a corporation is a specific type of business arrangement. For example, you can have a limited liability company (LLC) that is wholly owned by an individual.
TomTom started as a small software company named "Palmtop Software" and was doing exactly that. Random software for palmtops. I'm not sure, but I think they might have changed their formal business structure along with the name once they discovered that they created killer app for palmtops that makes customers buy palmtops as fast as they were made so they can use just their app on them.
TomTom is such an interesting story in technology and finance. Went from zero to $ 10B+ between '05 - '07 [1]. Everyone you knew had one, used one, loved one. Then the sudden boom in mobile phones and mobile internet and the financial crisis. Total crash of the stock. Pretty much subsistence without any proper profits since '09-'10. Not enough IP to get bought, a few licensing deals here and there. Always falling revenue. No profits. Pretty much a zombie corporation employing 4500 people.
Perhaps I'm harsh. Reading the annual report [2]. It's a great company! High management board remuneration. Great place to work. A minister on the supervisory board. Measures CO2 and environmental impact and water usage. And still... what does it say when 4400 people generate about 2 years of salary in total market cap? And where the only positive value is free cash flow (non-GAAP).
They pretty much lost because free (subsidized) alternatives like Google Maps became available, pretty much the same story as Netscape. It probably didn't help that their maps were also incredibly expensive, €100-200 for western Europe in 2005 money.
Something that most commenters are missing is that TomTom's most revenue comes from B2B deals, which are mostly deals with automotive companies for car screens experience and also providing maps data for products like Bing Maps.
This week I've been trying Android Auto out in a rental car. I'm not impressed so far. Google Maps has worked okay, but Spotify has not. I don't know where the line is between Android Auto and the Jeep Cherokee interface, but the turn by turn directions are super quiet compared to the music with seemingly no way to adjust. Squarely on the Jeep UI side, I've been using the car for 4 days and still haven't figured out how to turn the radio off but keep the screen and turn by turn directions running.
While I haven't tried it, Osmand recently added support for Open Street Maps on Android Auto. I'm hopeful the experience is decent, but not willing to pay for it at the moment.
Is that true? Not saying you are wrong but is it just an anecdote? I anecdotally know lots of people that just use their car GPS and don’t bother with CarPlay/AA
As far as I know, most cars that support CarPlay also support Android auto. I can’t imagine car manufacturers wanting to pay licensing fees to TomTom unnecessarily.
False. People greatly prefer CarPlay if they are iPhone users, and already people are refusing to buy any car that doesn't support it.
Phone holders are over.
Even as early as 2017, the majority of car buyers already wanted CarPlay in a new vehicle and one-quarter of buyers said it was a "must have". That was five years ago. I'm sure the numbers are much higher now.
As a data point: I'm european and my next car will have Carplay, no doubt.
On the other hand I currently use a phone holder because my car doesn't support Carplay and nobody in their right mind would get a new car just because of this missing feature. That's why the phone holder is such a popular solution. It's a slow process, but I have no doubt that most people will insist on Carplay / Android Auto whenever it's time to get a new car.
Could be more of a US thing, sure. I don't have data at hand right now about CarPlay adoption in Europe. From this list, though, it certainly looks like European carmakers have very robust CarPlay support:
I like BMW’s nav idrive better than the CarPlay integration and use it instead of google/apple/wake.
First because it uses the whole screen and heads up display and CarPlay doesn’t. But this is probably something that could be done with better integration.
Second because CarPlay takes over the phone and I want nav to keep running while I use the phone for other things. I know that I shouldn’t, but at stop lights I’ll read texts, HN, etc. with an active nav, I have to switch away from it while I use the phone. With the car running the nav, I can use my phone for whatever I like.
All I use Apple Maps for is to send directions to my car.
It’s kind of nice to just have a dedicated nav in my car.
Netscape disbanded as a company in 2003. Why is TomTom still here?
I like the questions at the end of a company since a large market I work in (insurance / life insurance) is dwindling as well. What does that do with companies? How do they communicate? What happens when the inevitable shrinking sets in and your brain drain is faster than the way you shrink? Should you ever actively terminate a company and tranfer IP / assets?
Small Nit - Netscape was broken up into pieces and sold to Sun Microsystems and AOL in 1999 for $10B. Thank Mike Homer for the great timing and resolve to get out while the getting was still good.
For who? Genuinely curious, I didnt even know Netscape has a server division. Was it punishment for the team working there because it broke their potential, or was it that AOL got ripped of because Netscape server tech was horrible?
Late 1990s/early 2000s acquisitions just always sound so wild to me! Insanely wasteful, or just even bizarre. Tons of old/traditional corporations trying to merge/buy their way into completely unrelated markets, oe in this case cash rich new megacorps like AOL that had immense potential just squandering insane amounts of capital with almost 0 RoI. Crazy times!
The Netscape Server products were amazing. High performing LDAP multi-master systems years ahead of its time, a calendar and email product that we used at companies years after Netscape was no more.
It was tragic that so many amazingly talented engineers ended up resting and vesting at AOL for years - but, at least they all scattered to the winds a few years after that and went to see other companies.
Less people with dependents (partners, kids)? Less people care or put thought into what happens after they die? Also anecdotally many/most peers I talk to about this say their company provides life insurance, I then point out the difference between this and actual term life insurance for when/if they change companies: “oh huh…”
Don't forget that life insurance used to come in a different form, "whole" life insurance (instead of term life insurance) which doubles as a savings/investment vehicle. This has changed a lot: people have other alternatives that are popular (401(k)s are basically everywhere), and life insurance companies are no longer able to offer the same kind of terms, especially given the ultra-low-interest-rate environment of 2008 to present.
This sounds like pure speculation, which is fine, and I appreciate your comment, but would also like to hear from the poster who made the original comment since he works in that industry.
Thanks Ted. In the Netherlands it’s a combination of a few market trends. 1. A trick insurers pulled in the 90s and consumers never forgave us for (lending money in the late 90s for leveraged stock investments with massive cost loading; still ongoing litigation). 2. Mortgage rules changing making a certain type of life insurance ineligible for interest deduction (you used to be able to pay 5% interest, get that interest as income tax deductible thus returning 50+% of that interest and still get 5% interest in your deposit!) and 3. the very low interest rates making products generally less interesting.
Most insurers here have closed their books, with only a few products open for sales. A few larger insurers and hedge funds are buying portfolios in order to hopefully gain benefits of scale. There’s basically two ways of making money: better investment returns usually via more risky investments and cost savings. Since many of these products stem from 70s-90s IT modernization and cost saving is a real activity.
Let me be the first to say that hardcore capitalism isn't my usual purview. And that exactly the diversity of stakeholders is why I like this question.
TomTom obviously offers no value to shareholders (no dividend policy, history of losses, perhaps except those searching for volatily). It's 49% owned by the directors with a 51% float. It clearly offers some value to customers since it has revenues. However, the revenues have been falling for a decade and most auto manufacturers seem able to procure these materials in-house.
It has value to 4500 employees who retain gainful employment at TomTom! But the financial metric to measure value added for those employees is lacking: TomTom is worth nearly nothing. Society would be better of 'cancelling' TomTom and letting all employees go to companies with higher added value to society. They could be teachers, nurses and researchers at companies that further the technical boundary. Instead, they are working for no value at all except their salaries. It's sad. (: Hyperbole.)
Plenty of people working for negative value except for their salaries and whatever wins they provide company owners in the negative sum games they engage in.
Mapping isn't the hard part or the expensive part, the hardware is. Smartphones have GPS and when people started getting smartphones, the value of having a separate navigation devices went to zero-ish unless it's built in to your car or maybe some low power thing for wilderness exploration (or having a boat or a plane or that kind of thing)
Not sure if free mapping really existed as an accessible (mobile) product, considering that nearly everyone had to buy the mapdata from dedicated companies (Navteq and TeleAtlas dominated the market, Navteq was later acquired by Nokia, TeleAtlas by TomTom)
In any case, free NAVIGATION didn't exist until Google Maps came along, completely disrupting the whole industry of "casual" Navigation solutions.
Hardware wasn't even the issue, companies worked out profitable compact hardware solutions, introduced different tiers from Entry to Premium and in parallel TomTom (and Wayfinder et al) started to offer Navigation as a subscription service directly and as white-label via mobile carriers, with applications for J2ME, Windows PPC, Series60 (Nokia, Samsung,..), Symbian UIQ (Sony, Motorola).
They had a robust offering, quality maps and plenty of added datasets like POI, speed-information, radar-warning,... (anyone remembers the celebrity voice packages?)
Then Google opened Navigation as public beta, grabbed a huge chunk of this market and later added offline maps to grab another chunk of it (for navigation in international roaming).
The quality was far below any competitor, but it was free and for occasional use totally sufficient...
Search existed before Google as well. Free maps were very inferior to Google maps and also were a loss leader for other service that’s MapQuest was trying to sell into enterprise and stuff.
Google maps was just another ad stream for Google and so was much easier to link to, embed everywhere. And had an innovative UI.
Before Google cranked up their prices Google maps got embedded everywhere. This was novel and not something that Mapquest and other existing maps promoted.
As a marathon runner, I know TomTom mainly for its sports watches. But I feel they've been fading away slowly. Garmin is still the champion in that area, but both must be taking a hit with all the cheap chinese knock offs. At the end of the day, you don't even need a high end sports watch unless you're a high end athlete. Reliable location tracking and good battery life is all you need, every other information can be derived thereof (avg speed, pace and distance). Only if you're into extreme activities you'll need something like a high end TomTom or Garmin (like 35+ km run in a hot day, or an Iron Man).
That explains it. I recently had to download their activity upload app, but it was nowhere to be found on their website. Eventually I found a binary somewhere on the internet and it worked, and their upload infrastructure is still running it seems. As long as I can get the activities from my 8 year old TomTom Runner to my Strava account, I'm good.
Garmin is vulnerable to disruption by cheap Chinese competitors at the low end of the market. They're now trying to move beyond selling individual devices to build an ecosystem with multiple types of devices connected to online services. And their latest devices are starting to provide something like a little AI fitness coach on your wrist, which is valuable even to ordinary people not into extreme activities. So far the execution is a little clumsy and buggy but the potential is huge.
As the owner of several TomTom devices, who tried a smartphone and google maps as an alternative, my experience is that the maps are of higher quality and the navigation recommendations better.
Multiple times, when in a Taxi in a foreign country, that used the usual solution of smartphone and Google maps, managed to get on time and find a tricky destination by popping up my trusted TomTom.
Navigation is all about the DATA. If it worked better (or worse) in a certain location, it is solely because they have access to quality data. Quality data costs a lot. Companies like NavTech used to literally drive cars down the road (think Google street view cards) and capturing everything (speed limit, number of lanes, boundaries, etc.) but they were bought by Nokia a long time ago. Not sure what is what these days. You can get pretty good data these days by leveraging free government data and things like OpenStreetMap. Routing is quite simple with good data. The harder part is conversion to narrative directions. How many times have you been given instructions to "continue to stay on XX for 500 feet" only to be told to "stay straight to continue on XX"? (Source: Worked for MapQuest for many years)
I really liked how TomTom's voice navigation was a lot more "vocal"/directive than Google, and for me that was a real benefit (maybe its niche, but they were at least differentiated there) but then some years ago (when they changed to a subscription service AFAIR) they changed the software and it was no longer "easier" to navigate with than Google (who had lots of other benefits incl. being free). Wonder if they have some sort of niche benefits as a navigation device now? Offline maps was good but Google's had that for a long time too.. Also, isn't Google and Apple Maps location tracking much more accurate in cities than TomTom devices because they don't just use GPS but also use cell tower triangulation as well as nearby wifi hotspot detection? And do people know (from their annual report) how much revenue comes from devices vs. licensing maps? (I'm sure device sales are close to non-existent compared to licensing deals)
Guess it depends on the location? We used it to drive through rural Canada and if we had followed any of the many wrong ways it tried to send us, we would be very dead.
I have TomTom as the built in nav for my car (2021 model). It's awful compared to Google maps and we live in a highly urbanized area so maybe it's just bad in general. Seeing the company's continual decline comports with my experience with their main product.
yup, I still use one too. it's great, way better than google maps. But I'm guessing it's a hard pitch to get people to even try a dedicated device for something they already have in their pocket, for free.
I won't buy another TomTom device, but I pay the ~£20/yearly fee for the mobile phone version because the maps are so much better than Google Maps and don't need an always-on data connection.
I had an iPhone 3G without a data plan and TomTom was one of the only companies that offered a navigation application that worked completely offline. If I recall correctly TomTom also provided the maps data for Apple Maps initially and perhaps still does to some degree.
I worked at TomTom in Amsterdam from 2007-2009, and had a fun time and learned a lot working with some smart people at a great company that treated us well and had good leadership.
But TomTom was just on the cusp of a small company turning into a big company.
And the savings and loan crisis was about to cause the economy to collapse.
Then TomTom got into a bidding war with Garmin over Tele Atlas.
So they ended up borrowing a whole lot of money at a really bad time.
Just as the iPhone was hitting the market, and Google and Apple were rolling out free maps and turn-by-turn navigation on smart phones that everybody already had.
I wrote about that earlier in the discussion about Etak:
DonHopkins on Feb 27, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Who Needs GPS? The Story of Etak's 1985 Car Naviga...
"Etak eventually became a part of TomTom, ensuring that its map data, some of which was first digitized back during the Navigator's development in 1984, would live on to this day."
The story of how TomTom and not Garmin ended up owning the data originally digitized at Etak is interesting. At the time, there were only two digital map companies: Tele Atlas (from which TomTom got their map data) and Navteq (from which Garmin got their map data).
From Wikipedia [1]:
"On July 23, 2007, a €2 billion offer for the company by navigation system maker TomTom was accepted by the Tele Atlas board. This was then trumped by a €2.3 billion offer from United States-based rival Garmin on October 31, 2007 initiating a bidding war for Tele Atlas. TomTom responded by upping their bid to €2.9 billion, an offer which was again approved by the board of Tele Atlas. Garmin had been expected to counterbid once again: with Tele Atlas' main global rival Navteq subject to a takeover bid from Nokia, the company had stated that it did not wish both companies to fall into the hands of rivals. However, after striking a content agreement with Navteq through the year 2015, Garmin withdrew its takeover offer, clearing the way for TomTom. On December 4, 2007, TomTom shareholders approved the takeover. The European Commissioner for Competition cleared the takeover in May 2008, and it closed in June."
TomTom (where I worked at the time) was shocked and dismayed that Garmin outbid them by €300 million on Tele Atlas, because while it made a lot of sense for TomTom to buy their own map data supplier, it would have been prohibitively complex and expensive for Garmin, who used Navteq data, to switch map data sources and retool their entire map data digestion, distribution and error correction pipelines.
TomTom was so determined to buy Tele Atlas and keep it out of Garmin's hands, that they raised their bid by €900 million.
In the meantime, Garmin renegotiated their deal with Navteq, so they didn't have to pay as much for the data, and didn't have to switch map suppliers.
The stunt that Garmin pulled off was, in my opinion, an ingenious head-fake that cost TomTom an enormous amount of money, almost a billion euros, and at the same time saved Garmin a whole lot of money by enabling them to renegotiate a better deal with Navteq, who was faced with losing their major customer if they didn't lower their prices.
Heck I own the TomTom Australia iPhone app, which I bought when visiting my parents who live out of mobile reception range. The maps were already much more accurate than Google when it came to rural tracks.
Maybe this is just my consumer perspective but I feel like TomTom really missed on a pivot to other GPS-related products that Garmin has successfully nailed. 10-15 years ago both companies were known mainly for car sat-nav systems but Garmin now has an incredibly diverse product line with well-liked fitness watches, bike computers, exploring/off-grid satellite communicators, marine charts, aviation, etc. Whereas TomTom seems stuck still selling the same handful of automobile satnav products which are surely squeezed to a tiny consume base between smartphone apps and feature-rich car screens.
I know there is map IP as well and maybe that's their only real business opportunity going forward.
I'm surprised that you can make more money from bike accessories than from aircraft avionics, but I guess everyone needs a bike accessory and nobody really NEEDS a G1000. Plus, no FAA to send paperwork to when you want to make a new bike pedal.
>I'm surprised that you can make more money from bike accessories than from aircraft avionics
Maybe if you're Garmin, and make very little aircraft avionics. They've never made much on it, since they only make a tiny piece of what aircraft use.
Boeing, Airbus, Lockheed Martin, GE (still in the game?) make enough on aircraft avionics to buy Garmin many times over. Garmin never made it into the space of high end aircraft positioning systems.
Flew yesterday in a Cessna 172 with G1000 glass cockpit for the first time. It's a pretty sweet product so hopefully they find more success in avionics.
I bought my first Garmin device more than 20 years ago and already back then they were the go-to source for consumer handheld GPS location/mapping devices.
Tomtom did try to enter this market with a series of GPS watches [0] some years back but the garmin watches were better in nearly every way and dominated the market quite quickly.
Garmin seems to be nailing it. I've recently got more into golf & snorkeling and Garmin have attractive devices for both those random activities that I could definitely see buying at some stage.
> Regrettably, this will have an intended impact on approximately 500 employees in our Maps unit, equivalent to around 10% of our total global headcount.
At least they are honest about it.
I am currently reading the first chapter of 21 lessons for the 21st century and it fills me up with a bit of dread. People having been losing jobs for a long time, but in the future it will get harder to get new ones due to the amount of specialization you need to acquire.
On the other hand, I work in autonomy role at an automaker and we have need for a bunch of people in mapping technology, so they may be well positioned to move to technician roles in related areas. Creative destruction doesn't always have to wipe out the value of "old" skills.
Why would you estimate so low? There are a lot of mediocre engineers, myself included, but even they are “capable” depending upon what they are tasked to do.
IMO the trend of loss of jobs to automation or offshoring is unsustainable and we are already seeing the cracks forming in the fabric of society due to it. Maybe that is why some people are trying to "reset" the way the world works.
> I am currently reading the first chapter of 21 lessons for the 21st century and it fills me up with a bit of dread. People having been losing jobs for a long time, but in the future it will get harder to get new ones due to the amount of specialization you need to acquire.
In the future, complementary euthanasia will be part of your severance package.
I'd imagine some mix of legal liability, pr issues, and the fact that Teslas only traverse a minority of the planet would mean it would just be another map & not disruptive to google or apple maps.
I worked for TomTom ~12 years ago, they had some of the best dev from all over the world. The one issue I found was they had all indpendent teams which are bit disconnected and not sure what everyone were doing in total.
Recent presentation about one of their automation tools https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh5fV8TVlSo Like other map providers they record where user actually drive and adjust the map. Steven Coast (founder of OpenStreetMap) explain how that is now sufficient to even start a map from scratch.
"The main provider of map data is TomTom, but data is also supplied by Automotive Navigation Data, Getchee, Hexagon AB, IGN, Increment P, Intermap Technologies, LeadDog, MDA Information Systems, OpenStreetMap, and Waze."
I think they are threading a fine line here. They regret that they had to make these plans. Or, note to investors: we are firing people but it was expected.
Are announcements like this always done in this strange mixed-voice style? The first para reads like it's a third party that's reporting on the event, then in the third para they use the word "our", and it's on their website of course.
At my first job I found it exceptionally odd that the CEO (who was charged with properly running the company, obvi) would phrase his quarterly reports to the board as if he was just an outside auditor, eg. "you're going to have a problem here" "you're won't have revenue to cover expenses" "your company is not running well"
As if to deny any responsibility for how the company was being run.
Sounds like he was trying to deny ultimate (as opposed to any) responsibility, which seems fair enough given that the board was his boss and had the power to fire him
I thought TomTom was just another Kodak, Blockbuster, or RIM. Didn’t realise they were still trying to make things, surely Google and Apple own the car market now?
Damn. And instead of reinvesting and furthering R&D, product lines, and more - they're just chopping 10% (or 450 people).
That's a hell of a lot of institutional knowledge just gone.
It also goes to show that when I automate, I should keep it hidden. That's because I do not receive the gains of automation. Instead, I receive more work or get laid off.
This sounds like they’re firing people who manually edit and fix maps.
While it’s job that requires quite a bit of skill (my family member used to do that for other companies), those aren’t people you can redirect to R&D, at least not without heavy retraining.
Real reason behind it, is IMO, preparing for recession and finding nice sounding reason for layoffs.
Yeah, they're probably keeping the people who allow them to automate and are laying off the people who, otherwise, need to do the work manually / semi-manually when there is no automation.
Anytime you automate something that someone is doing manually, and you're automating it so well, there's a good chance what you build might replace the people doing it.
It's not clear from the article what the 500 people are doing - they could be doing manual data entry or map validation tasks which are made redundant by the new "automated mapmaking platform" built by others (developers/engineers etc).
The saving from those roles could well be going to be reinvested in R&D and product lines.
Most company's right now want to automate all skilled labor away as quickly as possible. CEOs don't want innovation, they want a saleable product with the highest profit margin and the least risk. Removing people was always the goal.
I've worked at two jobs were in the first week I was told my goal was to automate myself so I could progress my career... Yup okay then...
I remember hearing much the same words (cf. “My job is to make myself redundant”) in 2004.
I’m fairly sure this was the goal at least as far back as when ship builders switched from high-skilled artisans to carve each pulley for the sails individually and by hand, to using jigs so that low-skilled carpenters could make a lot that were almost as good for a fraction of the price.
> when ship builders switched from high-skilled artisans to carve each pulley for the sails individually and by hand, to using jigs so that low-skilled carpenters could make a lot...
Sounds like an interesting story, do you have a link :D
I can recommend the book "Better, faster, cheaper - history of manufavturing" which covers this topic among basically manufacturing going to the, literally, stone age.
It is, but the gains to this innovation are captured almost entirely by your employer and not by you. Maybe if you're lucky you have a tiny ownership stake in the company, which if you are very lucky maybe entitles you to a tiny percentage of those gains.
It's also an indicator that quality of maps isn't necessarily viewed as a differentiator by the TomTom organization. If I suddenly had a sufficiently-good automated product and hundreds of domain experts, I'd work to have the domain experts refine the automated product, hopefully turning my (just pulling numbers out of thin air) 97% quality automated solution to a 99% quality solution. Those incremental gains on the tail are often tremendously valuable for customers.
I was there when Google started offering turn by turn navigation for free. Other issue was live traffic information. As you might imagine all this caused some concern among employees because that was, I think, the main source of revenue for the company.
They were already doing some other stuff like fitness wearables but they didn't seem to be leaning into it.
Main idea for staying in business, since you can't compete with free, was to go deeper into cooperation with car manufacturers to provide builtin navigation in cars. They were already doing it back then, I think, but they've seen their salvation in capturing bigger part of that market.
I was a software developer there, employed in projects pretty far from their core business, but I learned there a lot about how companies become corporations why they can and do run like a headless chicken, spilling money left and right. It's basically about survival. Company becomes a corporation when it randomly discovers a gold vein in the economy. For TomTom this gold vein was maps on portable computers. This gold vein brings in absolutely insane amount of money. Then this money needs to be spent on doing a lot of unrelated inefficient discovery work wasting huge amount of money so they have a chance of finding next gold vein before shifting sands of economy and human development burry the original one.
From what I see shared in this thread, TomTom still haven't found their second gold vein.
Maybe I should get hired there again. A lot of my friends from other jobs work there now. I never seen from the inside how corporations die.