Navteq: Don’t forget about us in today’s quote contest
Continuing in today’s theme of (less than brilliant) quotes from big company execs…
I was reading the latest installment of Mark Dobson’s excellent look into Google’s map data creation – if you are at all interested in the map data market and Google’s recent moves, read the whole series here. So far Dobson has put together the most comprehensive and insightful analysis of Google’s Map data moves I have seen.
In the comments on his latest post, he gets into a discussion with Mike Moore, who works in developer relations at Navteq. Mike takes a dim view of Google’s ability to innovate:
You seem to assume that innovation will be found in the search for advertising revenue. My personal experience is that the pursuit of advertising revenue simply is not enough of a driver to ensure a high quality product – although “good enough” is sometimes achieved.
Moore expands upon this theory this later in their e-mail exchange
In general terms, for any company with an advertising business, the customer is not the consumer or, in this dicussion, the application developer – the customer is the advertiser. Such a company is NOT a B2C company, it is a B2B company. Free-to-air radio for example, needs to keep listeners happy to generate ratings, but ratings are not the goal of the station – ratings are merely one selling tool to use with their customers.
The business plan for any such company is to do whatever it takes to keep the advertising revenue coming in. That business plan specifically does NOT allow for innovative “research and development” and “product improvement” in the underlying (I can’t think of a single radio station that also manages bands or owns a record label – although it may be possible there is one, somewhere)… instead, it is entirely focused on “reducing cost of delivery”.
So apparently, Google is not a B2C company, nor does it do much innovation, because their business model does not allow it.
Does Moore have any idea of the decisions Google made in creating AdWords? Does he know how much (short-term) ad revenue Google leaves on the table with things like Quality Score, which effectively removes irrelevant advertising? There are about 100 other examples I could provide to illustrate how silly this is. Having worked at Google, I can tell you without a doubt that the engineers and product managers working to create products are focused on only one thing: how to create the best user experience. Having worked closely with the geo team especially, I can say that their dedication to this was amazing, and they will not be happy with “good enough” products or content.
Google Maps are not perfect by a long shot, but the amount of innovation coming from the Google geo team far surpasses any other mapping provider. We shall see how this continues, but if that is the attitude coming from within Nokia/Navteq, I know where to place my bets…