While I don't normally like to kick people while they're down, I am going to make an exception in this case.
I am sick of people thinking their tiny little feature tweak is a startup.
I am also sick of people thinking that computerizing things that people have been doing for tens/hundreds/thousands of years is innovation. It isn't.
If you have an idea for a startup, but your startup could be killed by huge company XYZ if they add one feature, you don't have a startup. If you try to pursue it anyway and finally XYZ Co adds it to their product and crushes you, this should be no surprise. Building a startup in face of such a scenario is an enormous risk, one that'd I'd bet almost never pays off. You should've known better than to waste your time and money.
I have no pity for you.
I am being harsh only in the hopes that more people will learn to respect this hard truth and actually invest their time and brainpower into something more productive and likely to yield returns.
Agreed that "landmark intelligence" as a concept has been known for thousand years but still couldn't be demonstrated technologically till RouteGuru team did it in 2007. Can we figure out the reason?
Can't there be something novel in solving this problem which makes the solution (or perhaps the process) innovative? If it looks like a small feature to you it's your choice.
Adobe holds the patent for Menu based navigation for UIs. That also is just a small feature on a web page. Why does it make sense?
And many a times it's not the concept or technology but the regional strength that's worth taking the biggies head on. Have you ever heard about "Baidu" in China?
Google has still not been able to crack the markets in China/Japan/Korea/Taiwan etc is a big testimony for that.
I urge you to read the post to understand the reason for raising the voice again. The essence is much away from what you have taken it as.
Of course it's possible that it's technically tricky to do. But it still has a small surface area in the UX, making it a "feature" at best of existing mapping systems.
And thinking you can outcompete Google on a "technical" innovation is folly.
I read the ENTIRE post. I always do before commenting.
I guess I am not seeing the same "essence" you are.
I have been doing startups for 15 years and I have seen this type of thing happen so many times. The founders are always shocked when XYZ Co adds the feature and crushes their advantage.
My point is to stress to people that doing something a huge co does but slightly differently is rarely a strong foundation for a startup, and a huge risk to take. People discount the value of the rest of the ecosystem.
Also I used to be more ideological and think that the better mousetrap wins, but frankly it rarely happens.
With whole lot of due respect to your experience, I'd still like to say a few things:
1. If a small feature is tricky to do and has a lot of strategic importance for a bigger platform, it makes complete sense to go for it and also protect the IP for it. We did just that.
You may be aware that Microsoft ended up paying huge money to Ric Richardson for his obvious technology which could have been thought of by 1000s of people before. It's just that he implemented it earlier and protected it as well.
2. >> And thinking you can outcompete Google on a "technical" innovation is folly.
We still feel that our solution is better than Google's even today. It may sound little finicky but we can prove it as well.
3. We were always aware that Google would do it some day. Yahoo did it earlier and we were cool. Microsoft is still struggling to achieve it. We just got hurt because G guys talked to us earlier and their official story looks too hollow.
Let me also confess that we have filed for a patent already and that many people guided us that we can potentially allege Google to be infringing on our patent. But because we still don't have it granted, we're just raising the genuine voice against the pain that RouteGuru hasn't been patronized anywhere despite the fact the Google has admired us for this innovative solution and learnt from us as well.
I am not a big software patents guy, so I don't really like the idea that you can patent this type of thing. Thus I don't like to encourage behaviors whose exit strategy is patent troll, but that's another story.
Your solution might be technically superior, but the less-technically savvy way (ugc or such) is still as useful. Also clearly streetview is designed with the idea of becoming the ultimate landmark-based navigation.
I will yield that I know jack squat about the mapping industry or about what your company does (as that wasn't really what your post was about).
I was just using your post to illustrate a point about something I see happen frequently. It saddens me to see so many people's startups get (predictably) crushed.
While I don't disagree with you, and felt the blog post came across kind of whiny (cultural difference, perhaps), you aren't really responding to his point. He's not sad that he has to compete with Google. He's sad that Google's taking credit for thinking of implementing landmark-based navigation, and is claiming that he or his team met with Google reps a while and that at the time they praised his idea as innovative.
Fair enough, and I didn't talk about the "idea stealing" too much.
But again I have to say that it's pretty obvious thing to do. Even if the GMaps guys were heads-down and no one at Google had thought of it (which I doubt), clearly tens of thousands of people have thought "why can't map directions say turn at gas station X instead of turn at street X".
As someone who lives in an area with lots of missing street signs, I know I thought about that years ago, and I imagine tens of thousands of others have as well.
I've joked about maps and GPSes giving "country directions" for years now. "Turn left where the old store used to be and drive on until you get to where the tornado hit" kind of stuff. It's landmark-based navigation, albeit a jokey one.
I am sick of people thinking their tiny little feature tweak is a startup.
I am also sick of people thinking that computerizing things that people have been doing for tens/hundreds/thousands of years is innovation. It isn't.
If you have an idea for a startup, but your startup could be killed by huge company XYZ if they add one feature, you don't have a startup. If you try to pursue it anyway and finally XYZ Co adds it to their product and crushes you, this should be no surprise. Building a startup in face of such a scenario is an enormous risk, one that'd I'd bet almost never pays off. You should've known better than to waste your time and money.
I have no pity for you.
I am being harsh only in the hopes that more people will learn to respect this hard truth and actually invest their time and brainpower into something more productive and likely to yield returns.