It's a different way to price products - they charge per user. So, if your little startup starts growing, they bring in a bit of cash and have opportunities to up-sell with the other products in their line.
If my startup grew past 5 team members, I would personally just move my private repos to GitHub and start paying them. Bitbucket provides a great free service, but I'd probably never pay for it.
You just might reconsider (and that is what bb is banking on), at the end of the day having to police the number of repos you can have is a pain(esp in a startup, where people are seemingly forever going off to hack away on random stuff). Sure bb isnt as pretty--current redraw notwithstanding--but unlimited repos is very handy indeed. just saying. Inline commenting was missed (we moved from gh to bb a few months ago), but i see that has been released too.
They fuzz the numbers displayed - everything internally uses the real upvote/downvote count. It's so bots can't figure out if they've been flagged or not.
Amazon and Steam work the same for me in Canada/Latin America - have to use a local card. That said, I've still been able to make some purchases without switching. I've long given trying to understand the nuances of it.
Bad phrasing on my part - I mean to say that I don't know of any similar way to configure a private Mac app store. I feel like the concept could be a great way to manage distribution.
Apple's maps are really good. Google's maps are much better, generally, though.
There are places where Apple has an advantage over Google, but Google has been pouring resources into Maps for a long time.
Garmin, TomTom, Navteq, etc. won't be nearly as good as Apple or Google because they aggregate sources.
They aren't unusable, and are better than if you rely on a dedicated GPS. But they can still be improved. Apple doesn't seem to be weighting proximity for search as effectively as Google (unsurprisingly).
Honestly, Apple is the new #2, but they've got a mountain ahead.
I'd say it was, or at least as ready as it could have been. Problem is that everyone is behind Google on Maps. They're on Mars, everyone else is playing with baking soda and vinegar at Cape Canaveral.
Apple would have to acquiesce to Google on a lot of fronts to get better maps features (that are a major improvement in many places), and get stuck working on something that could never compare in perpetuity. Launch or die, right?
It's about the timing of the decision, not the underlying rationale for the decision to move away from Google Maps at the cost of user experience.
Gruber says only:
>If Apple had stuck with Google Maps for another year they would have been forced to renegotiate with Google in a situation where both sides at the table would know that Apple ... had to agree to whatever terms Google demanded to extend the deal
Does Apple somehow have less leverage in the past? They can always use App Store gatekeeping as leverage. Perhaps Gruber is implying that Apple's antagonism towards Google's ally Samsung means it will receive unfavorable terms?
Even if Apple has to pay a bit more one would think it would be worth it given that Apple has lots of cash and the risk of shipping a poor maps implementation is losing further marketshare to Android.
The original Google Maps was pretty bad. Mapquest beat it much of the time. There was one road in my hometown, and none in many countries.
Google devoted enormous resources to acquiring data (petabytes worth), processing it, correcting it, to give us the product we have today.
Even though Apple acquired some neat companies that made data look good, they obviously underestimated how much data was required to make it useful. No amount of QC could have prepared them, frankly.
The upside is that Google has been fairly closed with their map products. They're miles ahead of Apple, who will need every partner they can find to close the gap. Hopefully it will give the data providers a bit of leverage to get refinements back out so it can be used in endeavours other than showing where the nearest pizza joint is.
It's going to be a great release.