When Google decided to take on these projects, it was already a well established web search company, one of the heavy-hitters in the internet world. However, no one else decided to tackle such a large project because Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s cofounders , would never be satisfied until they fulfilled their mission from the very beginning: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
In 2004, Sergey Brin came across a software that could take you practically anywhere on earth with real satellite imagery. This visually stunning software, created by Keyhole Inc., could take you from a high level view of the earth and zoom in to the top of your house in a few seconds. From this experience, Google foresaw the opportunity to integrate this newly created model of the world into a full user experience. Not just satellite images alone, but they wanted to add on road maps (a software acquired from Where2LLC), directions and the rest would naturally follow, especially with the addition of google’s already robust web search.
The reason why Keyhole Inc. Hadn’t yet taken the world over with their novel idea was because of funding, the sheer size of the problem and the accessibility problems for the general public. Their initial clientele was commercial real estate agents, and later CNN; these were people who were willing to fork out the high annual subscription fee and could justify investing in a top of the line computer with the fanciest software of the time. However, Google wished to make this concept useful for the average joe blow on the internet: no software install and no subscription fee. This type of geographic information is essential to many more than a small niche in real estate and news broadcasting. However, to make this happen was far easier said than done. Reasons for this were the size of the problem (>12 petabytes of images, which is 12M gigabytes) and the funding required to start-up the project (way out of the ballpark of the average web start up in Silicon Valley). Google had no initial idea how this would make them any money, but they faced the same mindset when their web search project began, captivate the world with usefulness and the money will eventually come.
Creating the framework allowed for extensions which made Google Maps one of the most useful programs in the world. These extensions are what I will write about in detail in my next post.
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