Google Maps
I’m sure that by now this has been over blogged, but in case you’ve had your head in the sand today, Google has unleashed their latest beta, Google Maps.
Blake Ross commented “How has MapQuest innovated since AOL purchased it five years ago?” is his blog about Google Maps, which (once again) raises an interesting (yet usually forgotten) point. And I’m pretty sure that this is written in some business textbooks somewhere but still, early to market companies seem to constantly forget it. If you don’t continue to innovate, someone else is going to come out of nowhere and do what you do, only they’ll do it better and they’ll probably do it faster. Oh, and probably cheaper too.
The same is true of Internet Explorer. Microsoft brought IE out of nowhere and continually gobbled up market share, not only because they started shipping it with Windows but because they took what Netscape was doing with Navigator/Communicator and did it better. It loaded faster, rendered pages faster and it was free. But then once Microsoft had the majority of the market using IE, they started their slowdown. And since IE 5.0, there has been very little in the way of updates other than security patches and no innovation whatsoever. All this despite that there is still an IE development group with more than a few people.
So the problem Microsoft faces now is that people have already started switching to other browsers. And it’s unlikely that people will switch back. Even if IE matches Firefox’s feature list they will still need to “one up” Firefox, which won’t be easy to do if Firefox continues down it’s current development path.
Update: fixed incorrect spelling of Google… I had written “Goggle Maps”.
Wed, 09 Feb 2005 04:19 Posted in Technology
