Google Maps Coordinate
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@Carnival-Boy said:
As an aside, once everyone is signed up to O365 or Google Apps, and the market has matured, what do you think will happen to prices? I think they can only go up in the long term.
Hosting prices will never go up. Not for the big enterprise players. The barriers to market entry just get lower and lower and the cost of delivering services is plummeting. There is no way to raise the price. Competitors would destroy them overnight and once trust was lost they would really be in tough shape. I think never before has the market had so much power to keep the prices down because of the subscription licensing model. With three key enterprise players in place all keeping prices super low to suppress competition and thousands of businesses wanting to get into the market themselves there is no way to raise the prices.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
But we'll soon reach a point when on-premise solutions no longer exist (except in niche situations). What happens then? Cloud office solutions are often compared to traditional utility companies (gas, water, electric). I don't know what the situation is like in the US, but here in the UK these utility industries are massively uncompetitive.
Hosted Apps are nothing like utilities. Utilities are, by their very nature, monopolies without competition. This is a physical necessity. Water, sewer, power, phones... only one provider can bring in the cables, pipes, etc. It's a guaranteed monopoly. Email is anything but. Anyone can compete with Microsoft if they want to. Heck, NTG has been a competitor in this market in the past. It's open and equal access. Not just locally but globally. The two are nearly polar opposites in this regards. Few things are less alike. What makes gas, water, etc. non-competitive doesn't exist with computing resources.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
we're likely to see just two companies "competing" in the IT utility market in the future (unless Apple and Amazon get more involved).
Although this is better than the end of the 20th century where Microsoft had a monopoly on e-mail, office apps and operating systems.
Microsoft never had a monopoly. People just perceive it that way because they felt that they had to have those things. But it was always by choice. Linux, Apple, IBM, Zimbra... options were always there and often as good or better. At the end of the 1990s Microsoft was only barely in the first place, actually. Awful systems like Lotus Notes were still huge.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I assume the business model of both Microsoft and Google is to sell their core product dirt cheap to grab market share, and make money from additional services. Like Microsoft CRM ($65 per month) and Maps Coordinate. Disagree?
And volume. Volume is huge. They make pennies per account but have massive numbers of accounts. And Microsoft, for example, hopes that it encourages people to buy Windows phones, desktop OS and other things too. They have a lot of products to sell.
But don't think of it as "this is their big strategy." Both companies do it because they have no choice. If they didn't do hosted email, someone else would and would do so without paying them. They HAVE to be big in this market or they stand to lose everything.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Hosted Apps are nothing like utilities. Utilities are, by their very nature, monopolies without competition. This is a physical necessity. Water, sewer, power, phones... only one provider can bring in the cables, pipes, etc. It's a guaranteed monopoly. Email is anything but. Anyone can compete with Microsoft if they want to. Heck, NTG has been a competitor in this market in the past. It's open and equal access. Not just locally but globally. The two are nearly polar opposites in this regards. Few things are less alike. What makes gas, water, etc. non-competitive doesn't exist with computing resources.
I don't know what it's like in the US, but in the UK anyone can become a gas and electric supplier, and there are a number of smaller competitors entering and leaving the market. Other companies own the physical infrastructure (National Grid), and utility companies effectively pay for their use - this is similar to Google and Microsoft operating on the internet, despite not owning the internet. The problem is, in order to get a decent price in the wholesale market, you need to place a huge order of gas. And in order to do that, you need a huge number of customers. It's lack of market share that acts as the barrier to entry, not physical resources. I see similarities here with hosted apps as Microsoft and Google grab more and more market share and smaller players find it harder and harder to compete on price.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Hosted Apps are nothing like utilities. Utilities are, by their very nature, monopolies without competition. This is a physical necessity. Water, sewer, power, phones... only one provider can bring in the cables, pipes, etc. It's a guaranteed monopoly. Email is anything but. Anyone can compete with Microsoft if they want to. Heck, NTG has been a competitor in this market in the past. It's open and equal access. Not just locally but globally. The two are nearly polar opposites in this regards. Few things are less alike. What makes gas, water, etc. non-competitive doesn't exist with computing resources.
I don't know what it's like in the US, but in the UK anyone can become a gas and electric supplier, and there are a number of smaller competitors entering and leaving the market. Other companies own the physical infrastructure (National Grid), and utility companies effectively pay for their use - this is similar to Google and Microsoft operating on the internet, despite not owning the internet. The problem is, in order to get a decent price in the wholesale market, you need to place a huge order of gas. And in order to do that, you need a huge number of customers. It's lack of market share that acts as the barrier to entry, not physical resources. I see similarities here with hosted apps as Microsoft and Google grab more and more market share and smaller players find it harder and harder to compete on price.
Yes, it's the same here - the exact opposite of capitalism, the farthest possible thing.... fake capitalism. It's the ultimate Orwellian dystopia. There is still a complete and utter monopoly. All you have done, the same as us, is trick consumers who see "choice of resellers" as the same as "choice." There is still one company providing the service, still one company making the money, just lots of people doing the billing on their behalf. It raises the overall costs both because no one can afford the volume that there used to be with the single vendor plus you have to pay for the existence of all of those other companies who provide no services at all. We've made utility delivery more expensive and convoluted so that we can placate a populous that doesn't know what capitalism is. It is smoke and mirrors.
Nothing similar to Microsoft and Google. They are different because:
- They are not a necessity, anyone can do without them.
- They share nothing. 100% unique services.
- You can go to different supplies, the market is flush with them.
- You can provide the service yourself without using them at all.
None of those things reasonably apply to power, gas, water, etc.
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Considering that Rackspace sells their services at just $1/user/mo and still makes a profit, I think that the volume and price numbers of Microsoft and Google show that there is nothing to worry about. Small players can enter the market very easily and offer differentiated services pretty easily.
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There are some key services that Microsoft is not offering (yet) too. There is still a lot of market position available and open markets bear many competitors. Typically three very large ones and many small ones that keep them on their toes. I don't see any fear of monopoly. Microsoft will probably be the dominant player but through low prices and better services. If they fail to do that, they will fail to retain the market position.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Hosting prices will never go up. Not for the big enterprise players.
I'll have a bet with you on that. Microsoft and Google's basic package is $5 per month. We'll see if that has gone up in five years from today (in real terms). Winner buys a beer. Deal?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Hosting prices will never go up. Not for the big enterprise players.
I'll have a bet with you on that. Microsoft and Google's basic package is $5 per month. We'll see if that has gone up in five years from today (in real terms). Winner buys a beer. Deal?
Your on. Microsoft is $4 and Google is $5 in the US. You can get Google lower with a "pay up front for a year" but it doesn't get down to $4. I expect neither to change their prices - instead they will continue to make their services more and more lavish while keeping prices uniform. That's the big play. Huge storage that almost no one uses, extra services that cost almost nothing to deliver - helps them to increase volume while not lowering prices.
Every other service (Amazon, Rackspace, Azure, etc.) have been dropping prices over time. Amazon dramatically so and forcing everyone else to follow suit. It's the new market pressure really working.
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Google Maps Coordinate is now included with Maps Engine Pro, which is $5 per month. So they obviously listened to your complaints that it was expensive and have slashed the price dramatically.
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Awesome. That's not bad at all.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Google Maps Coordinate is now included with Maps Engine Pro, which is $5 per month. So they obviously listened to your complaints that it was expensive and have slashed the price dramatically.
Maps Engine Pro was recently renamed My Maps Pro.
My Maps Pro has now become completely free. I'm not sure where this leaves Google Maps Coordinate.
So many changes, I'm struggling to keep up!
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That's awesome that it is free now. Thanks.
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Been looking for a way to print custom maps - but on 36"x 36" paper... Wonder if this'll do..
