Although I usually talk myself back into objectivism by the end of it (and I’m sure that’s how this post will turn out), I do always think about the consequences of various things. A truly free market, for instance. An article about Google Maps being sued in France because they’re offering their service for free, so competing services can’t charge.
I think this small company has a point. The two offer pretty much exactly the same services to businesses, only Google does it for free. Google’s able to do it for free because they’re okay with making a loss, even massive losses if necessary. Bottin Cartographes, the guys suing, say that Google just wants to kick everyone else out of the market and then maybe they’ll start charging once there are no alternatives. Which’ll give them a monopoly.
Much like if Asda decided to give away all their products for free, paying for it out of their past profits and reserves, until every other supermarket decides they just can’t compete and go under. Then Asda could start charging £100 for a can of beans to start making their money back. You’d pay it because there’d be no where else.
Of course, they’d never do that because they’d just lose too much money far too quickly. But for Google giving away their data in an API only costs them a bit of bandwidth. For a company that makes billions of pounds a year from advertising, Google could probably go forever before they’d run out of money and have to start charging for their services.
That’s not a possibility though. There are other companies that too can give away their maps and data for free. Yahoo, although faltering, can still offer the same service. Bing maps, Maps.com, Mapquest. I’d say there’s enough competition in these waters. All of them giving the same service and all of them embracing revolutionary business models.
So, once again, I guess an unregulated market seems to stand on its feet. And it looks like Bottin Cartographes are going to go the way of every other business that refuses to innovate.
Another problem though is exactly that, how do the innovate? You need fresh blood that isn’t afraid to try quirky things. No discredit to the people at Bottin, I’m sure they’re good at what they do, but maybe they just don’t understand how things work around these parts. So they have to go job hunting for those people, and the prime place to get their from is universities.
Therein lies the problem… It’s no secret that Google and Microsoft, and more and more so Apple, try to get as many graduates as they can. Google especially, with them hiring more engineers than they actually even need, just so they have the whole ‘class of 2009′ set, I guess. Students know that when they actually get to Google they’ll probably get mundane customer service jobs, and maybe not see any code for a good few months, but who cares? It’s fucking Google! The enticement is just too much for them.
And that leaves none left for the smaller start-ups, or people like Bottin that really need a new a revitalising wave.
My first though to combat that was that maybe businesses that need the graduates could sponsor them, paying for their tuition fees on condition that when they graduate they come to work for them for a reasonable rate (considering they just paid for your schooling) for a certain number of years or something. Free tuition and a definite job at the end of the course would be something I’d snap at.
But at $38,925 a year, I doubt a start-up could afford that much for one kid, who could fail horribly and not be able to work for you or even pay the money back. It’d be a huge risk that no one but these big companies could afford – and they’re exactly the opposite of the people that should be getting these graduates.
A lesser investment could be something strongly advertising jobs around campuses. Or even just being in close contact with the university’s employment centre. I don’t imagine that a cool company like Twitter or Tumblr, even though they’re not big high rollers, would have a problem getting the right employees. But not all businesses can be that cool. There needs to be professional businesses that maybe just inherit a boring reputation. How would they entice students to work for them when they’re competing for them with Google?
