I was there when Google started offering turn by turn navigation for free. Other issue was live traffic information. As you might imagine all this caused some concern among employees because that was, I think, the main source of revenue for the company.
They were already doing some other stuff like fitness wearables but they didn't seem to be leaning into it.
Main idea for staying in business, since you can't compete with free, was to go deeper into cooperation with car manufacturers to provide builtin navigation in cars. They were already doing it back then, I think, but they've seen their salvation in capturing bigger part of that market.
I was a software developer there, employed in projects pretty far from their core business, but I learned there a lot about how companies become corporations why they can and do run like a headless chicken, spilling money left and right. It's basically about survival. Company becomes a corporation when it randomly discovers a gold vein in the economy. For TomTom this gold vein was maps on portable computers. This gold vein brings in absolutely insane amount of money. Then this money needs to be spent on doing a lot of unrelated inefficient discovery work wasting huge amount of money so they have a chance of finding next gold vein before shifting sands of economy and human development burry the original one.
From what I see shared in this thread, TomTom still haven't found their second gold vein.
Maybe I should get hired there again. A lot of my friends from other jobs work there now. I never seen from the inside how corporations die.
Sadly, it's pants. It comically announces caution stationary traffic on the M25, generally after we've been stationary for 5 minutes. The navigation directions aren't as good and Google is just so much better at door to door directions to a named destination. Others will get you close to your destination and you have to work it out. Google will, more often than not, take you to the correct carpark.
With Android Auto displaying on the dash it's not even a competition.
First, the car doesn't download map data. I'm stuck with what was on the car when I bought it unless I want to pay an unreasonable amount to update it.
Second, it does download traffic data, but it's so slow that it's useless. I took its advice once and it cost me over an hour, because the alternate route had already filled up and had the disadvantage of not being a freeway.
Third, it can't navigate a path without connecting to the satellite (seemingly for traffic data, but possibly it isn't even calculating the path locally). So when I visit downtown SF, don't have up-to-date maps, and I'm inevitably behind some building blocking my southern view, it just abandons me.
Maybe this is because I don't commute by car though. If I get stuck in traffic, it's the one time that month, and I've probably got a podcast on anyway.
Apple CarPlay + Apple Maps checks all of those boxes in my car.
Of course, mobile apps have definitely caught up years ago, and I believe you that they're even better now.
You bought it. That's enough for them.
Just as a quick note, when I use Apple Maps via CarPlay on my 2020 Subaru it does display the next turn on the instrument cluster. This doesn't work with Google Maps via CarPlay, so it might be a private CarPlay API that only Apple's first-party apps can use.
The car's maps are not as up to date as Google's - they miss some road closures, do not have some businesses names so need to enter address (or can just send a location from Google Map to the car), sometimes believe a street is one-way even if it is not or try to make a turn that does not exist any more but I can deal with an occasional glitch every few months instead of dealing with the inferior UI all the time.
Of course, politics and personal interests. But sometimes it's just better to allocate resources to something where they're better utilized.
It doesn't really happen in practice, because no "visionary CEO" will say "we couldn't come up with a better idea than what we are doing now, so let's just call it a day in terms of exploring other ideas, and focus on this one product".
My current company is a retail company with both lots of physical locations and web shop/mobile app. We always try to come up with features that users can use in the physical stores, and those features get practically zero traction. Nobody is willing to say that the people who go to the stores, in a big percentage, won't use our apps, and the people who use the apps/web shop don't care about the physical stores. Every product person wants to combine these two, and I don't understand why.
(I guess, that's why I'm not in charge of business decisions :))
Because corporations are organisations (that develop some bureaucracy) and the main existential purpose of every bureaucratic organisation is to survive and grow. No corporation will just voluntarily die I think. First it will be sold, reorganized, reimagined, reinvented, downscaled, pivoted and all that good stuff.
If the stock price gets too high, they always dilute it by issuing new shares to raise money for new projects. So you're never expecting lots of appreciation.
There's hundreds of them, and also many private REITs that are unlisted with the same fundamental idea.
Oil, utilities, REITs, small business lenders, etc. all have investors expecting management to just sit there, don't kill the golden goose, and pay regular dividends.
They could also return the money to shareholders and let the shareholders invest it into startups and companies that need investment to make money. These are usually much better bets than the old company re-inventing itself.
A company is not an end in itself, it is a temporary assembly of humans to explore a gold vein. Trying to make it eternal serves the CEO, but not the shareholders.
Instead of facebook trying to create the next facebook, it should return money to shareholders and let them buy into whatever is the next big thing.
I don't really understand how one supports this claim without using decidedly non-standard definitions and grouping of revenue. If you insist on lumping together separate, wildly-successful revenue-generating products into overbroad groups by the manner in which the revenue is collected, and ignore a couple of objectively enormous revenue streams: Do you similarly feel that Apple "hasn't found a second gold vein" beyond "hardware sales"?
Youtube, Android, Google Search on iOS, ChromeOS. All of it is a moat to protect the first.
And played no small role in shaping the ecology (Android to keep abreast of mobile, Pixel to reduce hardware monopoly) to ensure that gold vein grew.
Google could circumvent this if ISPs tried this.
How would an ISP block ads coming in encrypted as normal content?
Either way that will never happen obviously; Why would an ISP “block ads”? They’re literally hosting Google hardware (specifically YouTube’s cache)
I feel like this is a dying market as well. Why would I pay $200/year to update the maps in my car's mediocre navigation system when I can just turn on Apple CarPlay/Android Auto and get the same excellent navigation system I enjoy on my smartphone?
Even so, both Google and Apple seem to predict your location when signal drops. Somehow I still get decent navigation when I am in the middle of nowhere Iowa and have no cell service. Obviously the maps are cached, but somehow it knows I'm still moving. Must be accelerometer and gyroscope? IDK
I'd really like dash HUD integration with CarPlay.
It's doubtful that TomTom's foray into mobile was 'accidental' and it's also hard to understand how much money is being spent, and the risks involved in finding other revenue streams.
When mega corps come in and suddenly make a major part of your business unworkable, yes, companies go into reactionary mode. That's normal.
They started as a small company writing random software for palmtops. Until one day they made mapping software. They didn't expect it will be that popular with people. It was popular to a degree that people were buying palmtops just to use their app and didn't care about all other software their new palmtop could have.
It's as if today, small software shop released an app that bumps iPhone device sales by +20% just because people want to use that one app event though they don't care about all other things iPhone can do. Everybody can dream of that, but nobody can plan for that. It was purely accidental.
> When mega corps come in and suddenly make a major part of your business unworkable, yes, companies go into reactionary mode. That's normal.
What I describe as running like a headless chicken started many years before I came to TomTom. I've seen tonnes of internal wiki's that were once created for internal random, ultimately abandoned projects. I even seen two projects attempting the same thing, new one didn't have an idea that somebody, some time ago in that same corporation already tried to build that.
It's standard mode of operation. In corporation you have core business that's kept tight and professional and huge amount of side activity that's just bleeding money trying to discover next big pivot.
Aren't all companies corporations?
Perhaps I'm harsh. Reading the annual report [2]. It's a great company! High management board remuneration. Great place to work. A minister on the supervisory board. Measures CO2 and environmental impact and water usage. And still... what does it say when 4400 people generate about 2 years of salary in total market cap? And where the only positive value is free cash flow (non-GAAP).
[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/tomtom/earnings/
[2] https://corporate.tomtom.com/static-files/8fd1d5d2-0ecb-47b6...
I like the questions at the end of a company since a large market I work in (insurance / life insurance) is dwindling as well. What does that do with companies? How do they communicate? What happens when the inevitable shrinking sets in and your brain drain is faster than the way you shrink? Should you ever actively terminate a company and tranfer IP / assets?
Out of curiosity, why is the life insurance market dwindling??
As long as the company provides value to shareholders and customers, why wind it down? Not everything had to be about growth, growth, growth.
Because they are selling raw map data to Google, Bing and Apple (maybe?).
Mapping isn't the hard part or the expensive part, the hardware is. Smartphones have GPS and when people started getting smartphones, the value of having a separate navigation devices went to zero-ish unless it's built in to your car or maybe some low power thing for wilderness exploration (or having a boat or a plane or that kind of thing)
Not sure if free mapping really existed as an accessible (mobile) product, considering that nearly everyone had to buy the mapdata from dedicated companies (Navteq and TeleAtlas dominated the market, Navteq was later acquired by Nokia, TeleAtlas by TomTom)
In any case, free NAVIGATION didn't exist until Google Maps came along, completely disrupting the whole industry of "casual" Navigation solutions. Hardware wasn't even the issue, companies worked out profitable compact hardware solutions, introduced different tiers from Entry to Premium and in parallel TomTom (and Wayfinder et al) started to offer Navigation as a subscription service directly and as white-label via mobile carriers, with applications for J2ME, Windows PPC, Series60 (Nokia, Samsung,..), Symbian UIQ (Sony, Motorola). They had a robust offering, quality maps and plenty of added datasets like POI, speed-information, radar-warning,... (anyone remembers the celebrity voice packages?)
Then Google opened Navigation as public beta, grabbed a huge chunk of this market and later added offline maps to grab another chunk of it (for navigation in international roaming). The quality was far below any competitor, but it was free and for occasional use totally sufficient...
Search existed before Google as well. Free maps were very inferior to Google maps and also were a loss leader for other service that’s MapQuest was trying to sell into enterprise and stuff.
Google maps was just another ad stream for Google and so was much easier to link to, embed everywhere. And had an innovative UI.
Before Google cranked up their prices Google maps got embedded everywhere. This was novel and not something that Mapquest and other existing maps promoted.
TomTom closed their sports division and made most of the staff redundant.
That said, I love my garmin watch - it's and offline device that is useful without selling all your data.
Multiple times, when in a Taxi in a foreign country, that used the usual solution of smartphone and Google maps, managed to get on time and find a tricky destination by popping up my trusted TomTom.
Presumably the TomTom phone apps do the same. Yes, they have phone apps not just stand alone devices.
to be clear here, for all readers.. you mean TomTom maps are higher quality? in what region? rural, urban or ? thx
But TomTom was just on the cusp of a small company turning into a big company.
And the savings and loan crisis was about to cause the economy to collapse.
Then TomTom got into a bidding war with Garmin over Tele Atlas.
So they ended up borrowing a whole lot of money at a really bad time.
Just as the iPhone was hitting the market, and Google and Apple were rolling out free maps and turn-by-turn navigation on smart phones that everybody already had.
I wrote about that earlier in the discussion about Etak:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13747015
DonHopkins on Feb 27, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Who Needs GPS? The Story of Etak's 1985 Car Naviga...
"Etak eventually became a part of TomTom, ensuring that its map data, some of which was first digitized back during the Navigator's development in 1984, would live on to this day."
The story of how TomTom and not Garmin ended up owning the data originally digitized at Etak is interesting. At the time, there were only two digital map companies: Tele Atlas (from which TomTom got their map data) and Navteq (from which Garmin got their map data).
From Wikipedia [1]:
"On July 23, 2007, a €2 billion offer for the company by navigation system maker TomTom was accepted by the Tele Atlas board. This was then trumped by a €2.3 billion offer from United States-based rival Garmin on October 31, 2007 initiating a bidding war for Tele Atlas. TomTom responded by upping their bid to €2.9 billion, an offer which was again approved by the board of Tele Atlas. Garmin had been expected to counterbid once again: with Tele Atlas' main global rival Navteq subject to a takeover bid from Nokia, the company had stated that it did not wish both companies to fall into the hands of rivals. However, after striking a content agreement with Navteq through the year 2015, Garmin withdrew its takeover offer, clearing the way for TomTom. On December 4, 2007, TomTom shareholders approved the takeover. The European Commissioner for Competition cleared the takeover in May 2008, and it closed in June."
TomTom (where I worked at the time) was shocked and dismayed that Garmin outbid them by €300 million on Tele Atlas, because while it made a lot of sense for TomTom to buy their own map data supplier, it would have been prohibitively complex and expensive for Garmin, who used Navteq data, to switch map data sources and retool their entire map data digestion, distribution and error correction pipelines.
TomTom was so determined to buy Tele Atlas and keep it out of Garmin's hands, that they raised their bid by €900 million.
In the meantime, Garmin renegotiated their deal with Navteq, so they didn't have to pay as much for the data, and didn't have to switch map suppliers.
The stunt that Garmin pulled off was, in my opinion, an ingenious head-fake that cost TomTom an enormous amount of money, almost a billion euros, and at the same time saved Garmin a whole lot of money by enabling them to renegotiate a better deal with Navteq, who was faced with losing their major customer if they didn't lower their prices.
But you needed a seperate bluetooth GPS device because my phone didn't include a GPS-receiver.
Strong short on TOM2
I know there is map IP as well and maybe that's their only real business opportunity going forward.
"Auto" is notably sitting in last place.
I'm surprised that you can make more money from bike accessories than from aircraft avionics, but I guess everyone needs a bike accessory and nobody really NEEDS a G1000. Plus, no FAA to send paperwork to when you want to make a new bike pedal.
Maybe if you're Garmin, and make very little aircraft avionics. They've never made much on it, since they only make a tiny piece of what aircraft use.
Boeing, Airbus, Lockheed Martin, GE (still in the game?) make enough on aircraft avionics to buy Garmin many times over. Garmin never made it into the space of high end aircraft positioning systems.
This was their first product, http://retro-gps.info/Garmin/Pronav-GPS-100/index.html and their first customer was the US Army. It replaced Army GPS systems which weighed nearly 40 pounds.
[0]: https://www.amazon.ca/TomTom-Runner-GPS-Watch-Black/dp/B00IK...
At least they are honest about it.
I am currently reading the first chapter of 21 lessons for the 21st century and it fills me up with a bit of dread. People having been losing jobs for a long time, but in the future it will get harder to get new ones due to the amount of specialization you need to acquire.
I see high amount of specialization but only after onboarding and not asked of potential candidates.
All we ask are capable software engineers, who we then train to be very specialized in what we do.
Why would you estimate so low? There are a lot of mediocre engineers, myself included, but even they are “capable” depending upon what they are tasked to do.
But from my own observations, people who are genuinely interested usually become capable, anecdotally of course.
In the future, complementary euthanasia will be part of your severance package.
Also up until 2020 they were supplying apple maps with map data.
Apparently doing a streetview kind of thing.
(I've always been surprised that Tesla didn't leverage their fleet of cars covered in cameras to build a maps product.)
This reads weird to me (non-native English speaker). How can you regrettably reach your intended impact? Is that some kind of an idiom?
1. If I could reverse time, I would decide differently getting a different outcome.
2. I am sad that this happens, but it is still the preferable outcome, compared to the alternative.
I think I 'default' to the first meaning. But in this case the second is probably more fitting.
Besides TomTom is a Dutch company so the conditions there are already pretty awesome.
As if to deny any responsibility for how the company was being run.
That's a hell of a lot of institutional knowledge just gone.
It also goes to show that when I automate, I should keep it hidden. That's because I do not receive the gains of automation. Instead, I receive more work or get laid off.
While it’s job that requires quite a bit of skill (my family member used to do that for other companies), those aren’t people you can redirect to R&D, at least not without heavy retraining.
Real reason behind it, is IMO, preparing for recession and finding nice sounding reason for layoffs.
Anytime you automate something that someone is doing manually, and you're automating it so well, there's a good chance what you build might replace the people doing it.
The saving from those roles could well be going to be reinvested in R&D and product lines.
I've worked at two jobs were in the first week I was told my goal was to automate myself so I could progress my career... Yup okay then...
I’m fairly sure this was the goal at least as far back as when ship builders switched from high-skilled artisans to carve each pulley for the sails individually and by hand, to using jigs so that low-skilled carpenters could make a lot that were almost as good for a fraction of the price.
Sounds like an interesting story, do you have a link :D
