Simon’s Blog

[rant]
Am I the only one that isn’t even remotely impressed by the current wave of “innovation” going on around mapping at Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps? Surely, this can’t really be what passes for innovation in the field of software development in 2005.. can it?

Let’s be clear what Google and Yahoo! have done from a technical point of view. They’ve built graphical front ends (and some APIs) to mapping data provided by Navteq. That falls into the category of software engineering known as “trivial”. The idea of tiling images and pre-fetching them over the Net as a way to provide a responsive system was slightly interesting from a technical point of view in 1999 (back in the days when even loading images into relational databases was a technical achievement). But not now. And the truth is, my car’s GPS satellite navigation system has a far superior interface to this same mapping data than developers at Google and Yahoo! have managed to produce.

At least Google’s interface to the data is useable, even if it is underwhelming. But what the hell have Yahoo! done?! I spent a few minutes with their Flash map interface and found it really difficult to use. It’s clear that a lot of developers need to learn to think more about what it takes to build a great interfaces.

Now, I know there are a whole bunch of “influential geeks” that are pretty impressed by these mapping systems (I wonder if these people have used good in-car sat nav on a regular basis). They seem to think the web systems by Google and/or Yahoo! are innovative in some way, and believe there’s huge potential for “exciting” (aka lots of people clicking on ads) mash-ups. I’m not sure they understand how the general public think/perceive computer systems. I’m of the opinion that it will take a lot more than some distinctly average mapping systems running in web browsers to get consumers excited.

I should say, I’m not meaning to criticise the individual developers who’ve worked on these systems. I just wish the search engine companies would aim a bit higher; there are much more interesting problems to work on.
[/rant]

Rant over. Normal service will now be resumed…