> Their focus on monetizing everybody with advertising hurt their products in the long run.
Absolutely. Just look at Google Maps these days. Google Maps used to be the only map app I'd use for everything. Now it is so littered with ads once you zoom in that I find it useless for anything other than directions.
This is not a new trend for Google, the advertising company that occasionally builds things.
There's also a big problem with accuracy in GMaps. From what I can tell they put some effort in within the US, but in the two countries I've lived in, GMaps is sufficiently inaccurate that I have to use other maps.
For example: About a third of the streets that show on GMaps for my previous town don't actually exist - they're paddocks. Every other map is correct: HERE, Apple Maps, OSM, TomTom, etc. As Google notoriously has no support, there's no way to get it fixed, so I simply had to instruct everyone coming to visit me that they needed to download and use a different map software in order to find me.
Absolutely. Just look at Google Maps these days. Google Maps used to be the only map app I'd use for everything. Now it is so littered with ads once you zoom in that I find it useless for anything other than directions.
This is not a new trend for Google, the advertising company that occasionally builds things.