Don’t get me wrong, I love Google Earth, but its data really isn’t up to business use. This applies to its competitor from Microsoft too. Places aren’t mapped in sufficient detail and data is often years out of date. That’s not good - roads can change, runways can be radically altered, buildings demolished, maps can go from a high level of detail to the vaguest of details, etc
Now, both Microsoft and Google have billions in the bank. Can it really cost that much to have several high-resolution satellites in a polar orbit? These are companies that shouldn’t blink at an expenditure of $100M.
I’m aware that many of the very high resolution pictures are actually taken by aircraft, but I’m not sure that that level of detail is needed.
You are joking, aren’t you? Even if the economics would work out, which I doubt, the timescale of putting satellites into orbit is many years, if not decades. Setting up a dedicated system of flights to take higher-resolution pictures on demand would be like starting a major airline without selling any tickets. Also, bear in mind that Google only bought the technology for Google Earth in 2004.
What do you mean by “the data really isn’t up to business use”? What field do you want to use this imagery in?
Wow, what a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. Sure, Google and MS have a lot of money, and the reason why is because they don’t spend it on unneccesary crap. The real question should be are there enough people willing to pay Google for more accurate map data that it’s economically viable to put up their own sats and I’m pretty sure the answer is no.
Years yes, decades, no. Add in the commercial pressure of private enterprise.
Who said anything about pictures on demand? I just said that the pictures were too old to be of real use. For instance, if I look at where I work in Google Earth, it’s still a green field. So the picture’s four years old or more.
You can’t expect it to be accurate and up to date.
So how new do you want them to be, and what businesses have this pressing need which makes the whole suggestion a viable prospect?
Also another suspicion I have is that if you’re going to rely on one satellite to take these up-to-date photos, you’re relying on the weather and light to be in your favour when making a sweep across a particular location, and this may reduce the speed at which you can create updates.
That’s very presumptious of you. Please tell me which books on economics you have authored.
Not true in the case of Google. They’ve got lots of money because their IPO was very successful. And they’re profitable.
And secondarily not true anyway. The reason these companies are succesful is that they take risks. And with their huge bank balances, they can take huge risks. Because the risks aren’t that huge to them. How much has MS spent on Vista, for instance? How much did it spend on Windows XP? How much did Google just spend on YouTube? Compare this to the Channel Tunnel, which did cost billions, but depended on loans from the banks, and is being crippled by debt repayment. Google and MS do not have this problem.
Pretty much anything which involves other places. For example, looking to set up shop somewhere, you’d want to check for nearby population centres - are they run-down etc? Far cheaper to do an initial survey with a satellite pic rather than sending people in to investigate. Or, on a personal level, suppose you want to go hiking and want to check the route? Three year old pictures don’t cut it. 3-6 months old would.
Google Earth Pro is being used by Sky News for its mapping capability at the moment. While I will admit that the viability of the data isn’t mission-critical for this particular usage, the company also offers it for defense and intel usage. I suspect that enhanced data would have to be added, should an organization want to use it for these purposes. “Optional premium data” is in fact offered by Google, but at the moment it seems only to be traffic reports.
Anecdotally, the Google Earth images of Oxford are utterly useless, and most of the islands off the coast of Thailand and Malaysia simply disappeared earlier in the year, though their topographical data is still there. That wouldn’t attract me much were I hoping to use it commercially.
I wasn’t aware that Google (or Microsoft, for that matter) were huge players in the Geographical Information market. If you are in a business that needs accurate geographical data, then there are probably specialist companies that can supply that level of information, even if it means them chartering a plane with an infrared camera on it. But it’s a bit of a stretch to say that just because you would like to be able to see near-realtime data in Google Earth Super-Ultra or whatever, Google can make a profitable business out of supplying it.
Would $100M be enough to build an accurate database of every single physical feature on the planet? How much would it cost to keep it updated?
More to the point, how much would you pay for Google Earth Super-Ultra, and how many other people are there like you who will help Google make a profit on this $100M?
As one small example, a colleague of mine regularly wrestles with geographic hotel data, and even trying to establish where a particular hotel is located can be an absolute nightmare. Different location methods can give variances of several hundred miles, and short of sending somebody with a GPS to every single hotel, the problem appears to be insoluble because the raw data does not exist. We’d pay for that type of information, but the cost of data collection is well in excess of what we can afford.
$100M should be enough to put several satellites into orbit and construct ground stations.
Running costs - on top of Google’s current infrastructure - would be very low. Income would be from advertising. To be listed, you’d have to pay. And there’d be banner ads.
The issue is the startup costs, and most organisations would have to go to the banks, and the interest on $100M would be considerable. But to the likes of Google and Microsoft, $100M is small beer. They can afford to pay it out straight off, no loans. Therefore there’s no interest to pay, and the income is almost all pure profit.
I don’t see why Google or Microsoft would have to launch their own satellites: there are plenty of satellites already that have the capability of reasonably high-res photography, and various companies that do aerial photography of western countries too (e.g. getmapping, in which HM the Queen is anecdotally an investor, had a bunch of planes doing the entirety of Great Britain) - all the companies would have to do is pay more for photography from third-party suppliers.
I think $100 million is low for the cost of a single satellite launch, let alone the cost of building and operating the thing.
And why would Google want to get in the business of collecting this data? What do they know about launching and operating satellites? If it’s a good business, presumably one of the existing satellite operators will offer it. It’s clear to me why they offer Google Earth; it’s a service they can offer that takes advantage of their massive storage and data delivery capability. There’s an old phrase “stick to your knitting” that I think applies here.
Companies outsource things they have 100% usage of all the time. My company outsources our cafeteria and security operations. You know why? We aren’t a cafeteria chain or a security outfit.
Trying to reinvent the wheel is a key phrase and it is a mighty big wheel when we are talking about space operations. It doesn’t matter how much money Google can save. They aren’t in the satellite launching business so that is what we would call penny wise and pound foolish if they thought they could save a few million by keeping it in-house.
I don’t recall suggesting that MS or Google develop space programs themselves. Plenty of companies have their own satellites. Private space launches are nothing new.
I find it amusing that the complaint is that a couple of curiosity-satisfying software toys are out of date when I routinely find actual address information (provided by Navteq) to be off by meters (or hundreds of meters) in Mapquest, Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and Info Live. (The other night Deb was sent to an address that looked suspicious to me, so I followed up the Mapquest search with a look at my county’s GIS software. I discovered that the house she needed was on a Northern extension of a road that all the other services claimed had dead-ended from the South at the main highway. It was a really foggy night and she would have been out there for an additional hour or two had she followed the commercial maps.)
A single launch alone costs between $50 and $400 million. The satellites themselves cost hundreds of millions each, depending on size and complexity. To build and launch, say, 8 would cost at least $1.2 billion.
That much invested normally on earth would bring in between $100-$200 million a year. No way are they going to get a tenth of that much from ads.
This is off by quite a bit. I worked with ICO Global Communications through NEC several years back, and their plan at the time was to launch 12 satellites and construct 7 ground stations. ICO’s main partners at the time were Hughes and NEC, two companies with plenty of experience in building, launching, controlling and maintaining satellites and receiving stations, so would be the most likely to know how and where to cut inefficiencies. Even then, the projected cost just to get everything built and in the air was over US$10 billion. ICO filed for bankruptcy in 1999 without launching a single satellite and only getting 3 of the ground stations completed.
I moved into my apartment two years ago, when there were already several shopping centers, public parks and train stations nearby. According to Google Earth, however, the entire neighborhood is non-existent.