How Google Maps Went from Zero to One

Never Lost Again The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality

I first heard about this book from a book-summary article on a WeChat public account. Back then there was only an English edition, so when the Chinese edition came out, I bought it right away. After seven years of studying GIS, finishing the whole book got my blood pumping.

Summary

The book tells the long history of Google Maps in detail: from Keyhole getting started in 1999 with a team of 24 people, to Google buying it in 2004, all the way to today’s product with a billion monthly active users.

The Startup: Keyhole

The product started out as nothing more than a technology for zooming images seamlessly. Combined with digital maps, it created a new kind of product experience. But from 1999 on, it kept running into the same problem: there was no way to commercialize it or make money from it. Everyone who saw it thought it was cool at first, but then what? At the time, the leader of the mapping field, Esri, had hundreds of thousands of clients and $300 million in revenue. But founder John Hanke saw three fatal weaknesses in Esri: it was complex, it had no data, and it was slow. So EarthView’s competitive strategy was something ordinary people could use, with unified data and a smooth experience. Then, after all the hardships of the early startup days, with customers ranging from Nvidia to real estate agents to CNN, it finally became a hit and was acquired by Google for $30 million.

Google Maps 1.0

In the years we fought side by side at Keyhole, we may have built something remarkable, but now we were heading into unknown territory. If we didn’t have a plan, lots of Google employees would come and tell us what to do, and our team would fall apart. All 29 people were critical to the company’s success. John couldn’t find a single person he could do without. It was a wonderful feeling, and everyone at Keyhole felt it. It was a rare and beautiful realization, the kind you remember forever.

1. John made keeping all 29 people a precondition of the acquisition.
2. Before joining, the author, Bill, was asked whether he wanted to be a PM or a PMM (product marketing manager). Bill had been doing both. In the end, on John’s advice, he stayed off the technical track: his title was nominally “PMM,” outside the technical reporting line, but he still did both jobs, PM and PMM.
3. To compete with MapQuest (a web map service), which held 2/3 of the map search market at the time, they needed to combine Keyhole’s satellite data with the in-browser map rendering technology of another map team that Google had bought even earlier, the four-person Where2Tech. So this was a merger of two teams.
4. Then came the merger with the Google Search team. The head of Google Search was Marissa, and her report Bret had previously been in charge of Where2Tech, while the heads of other Google departments wanted to split Keyhole up across their functional departments. The outcome: John’s title was “General Manager of Keyhole,” the original Keyhole team still reported to John, and John reported to Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s VP of Product Strategy. Meanwhile, Bret and Google’s original maps team still reported to Marissa. This may not have been the best arrangement, but at least it was a clear one, and it avoided needless tangles.
5. Google had also had an address search project since 2002, Google Search By location, which used structured search to link address text to geographic locations.
6. So Google Maps was made up of three teams in total: Keyhole, reporting to John; Where2, reporting to Bret (who in turn reported to Marissa); and Google Local, reporting to Marissa. Marissa wanted John to report to her, and John didn’t want that, so the relationship between them was rather tense. In fact, this tension ran through the Keyhole team’s whole time at Google, and Marissa was part of the reason they eventually chose to leave.
7. But everyone stayed professional. Tense relationships were one thing; the project still moved forward at full speed. From Keyhole’s acquisition in October 2004 to the launch of Google Maps in February 2005 took only four months, which would have been impossible without very efficient collaboration. On February 8, 2015, its first day live, Google Maps got 10 million page views, and on April 4 it started offering satellite maps.

Google Earth 1.0

After Google Maps launched, Microsoft, Yahoo and others rushed into the market, and the competition raised the importance of maps inside Google.

Drawing on his experience and thinking in the mapping industry, John wrote several emails to Brin, Page and Schmidt laying out the strategy and tactics for Google Maps. At the same time, from press reports about Microsoft, John worked out how Microsoft was partnering with aerial and satellite imagery providers and at what prices, and assessed what those providers were capable of. Under the plan John drew up, Google should speed up the release of its own version of the EarthViewer software; the three teams, Keyhole, Google Local and Where2 Tech, had to become one; and Google had to put serious effort into building up its own data. He also listed the most important map service providers. By the summer of 2005, every Google employee had received an email: Google was creating a new product line, Google Geo, and the three earlier teams, Keyhole, Google Local and Where2 Tech, would all be merged into it. John became the head of this new product line, and Brian McClendon, formerly Keyhole’s VP of Engineering, became the person all the engineers reported to. John reported to Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s VP of Product Strategy. The problem of his relationship with Marissa, which had troubled John all along, was now completely gone. Marissa was out of the picture, and however unhappy she may have been, there was nothing she could say.

The new team started building a desktop map client, with more satellite data, more powerful search, tools for measuring distances and adding labels, and more. That became Google Earth.

After that, the story is about going from 1 to 100, until October 2010, when John announced he was leaving Google and Marissa took charge of the Geo team. Then in July 2012, Marissa left for Yahoo. I was curious what John did after leaving Google. He founded Niantic and made a game with Nintendo: Pokémon GO was his! What a cool person.

Reflections

As a graduate in GIS (Geography Information System), I know Esri all too well. From my first day at university until now, the tool I’ve always used is their ArcGIS, and Google Maps was a must-have case study in my freshman intro course. So while reading this book, I often felt deeply drawn into the story.

While reading, I kept thinking about this: in every intro lecture, I felt that geographic information and location touched every part of life. But after graduating, I found myself asking what practical value the field had, beyond producing geographic information management systems that are hard to use and that nobody uses. After I started working, I also saw industry WeChat accounts asking: navigation, ride-hailing and review apps are all location-based services (LBS) at heart, so why did none of them grow out of this discipline?

After reading how Keyhole positioned itself and overtook Esri, I understood. But maybe the two products were simply positioned differently from the start: one for ordinary people, one for experts, so their audiences and reach were different too. Each found its own core pain point in the market.

Second, the process of fitting into Google shows a problem every big company has: wherever there are people, there’s politics

Finally, I admire John: at any point in his life, he can start over and do what he wants to do.

The office-politics part of the summary draws on this article: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/UCsoJLzdIfT-DaZ622dWOQ, the translation was just too hard to understand 😷