Monthly Archives: June 2013

Waze, the FTC and Google’s Map Dominance

Bloomberg Interview 62413Waze is turning out to be the media gift that keeps on giving…I was asked to comment on Bloomberg West about the rumored FTC review of Google’s acquisition of Waze; my fourth Waze related interview. Kinda looking forward to talking about something else. The interview is linked here.

As the saying goes, I am not an anti-trust expert;  I just play one on TV. I can’t comment on what is or isn’t an anti-trust violation from a legal perspective.  From a practical perspective though, I am not convinced that the Waze acquisition turns Google Maps into more of a juggernaut than it already was. Said another way (and as outlined in my last post),  Google was already the mapping superpower; adding Waze strengthen that but the fact was pre-existing.

A lot of the anti-trust talk seems to have been started by comments by Waze CEO Noam Bardin at an AllThingsD conference where he said:

“We feel that we’re the only reasonable competition to [Google] in this market of creating maps that are really geared for mobile, for real-time, for consumers — for the new world that we’re moving into.”

Those words are more aspirational than factual.

Removing Waze from the field does not eliminate competition for Google. What it does do is to take a creative alternative off the market; someone who was rethinking the game and aggressively growing a map product that wasn’t a carbon copy of Google but something different, with a different value for the user.  Whether Waze could have built themselves into a big competitor or become the baseline for some other acquirer will never be known but that was the potential of Waze.

There are plenty of alternatives, just not many creative alternatives.  And that creativity is what’s going to be needed to push Google in this market.

 

Beating the Block: How to take on Google Maps

June 17, 2013: In November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, symbolically ending the Cold War. Two years later, the Soviet Union dissolved, leaving the United States as “the world’s only superpower”. In the decade that followed, no other country could come close to the military power of the U.S.

Notwithstanding, in January, 1997, the US Air Force launched the B-2 bomber, the most advanced military bomber in history. It is capable of penetrating deeply into Soviet airspace…combatting a threat which no longer exists.

I thought of that when Google bought Waze last week.

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Blocking Strategies: Why Google Bought Waze

The RayduhsJune 12, 2013: After weeks of rumors, Google finally won the Waze Dot Race, paying an estimated $1B for the Israeli-based traffic start-up. Since Google already has traffic, maps and a team, the move has been described as a “blocking” move; a move to keep Waze out of the hands of Google’s rivals who might want to use it to build competitive service in the mapping, navigation and traffic markets.

If it is a blocking move (and I think that’s a good partial explanation. For more talking head stuff, see here), it begs the question of what precisely are they blocking…what do they want to tie up, away from competitors, that is worth that much money?

What they’re not blocking: The Waze app.

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