Sell Your Garmin Stock
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My advice? If you’re holding onto any Garmin stock, drop it now.
I’m not saying that because the Google Maps navigation is better. In fact, the Garmin unit probably has a slight edge right now. The Garmin text-to-speech is definitely better (you can understand what it’s saying much easier than with Google Maps) and the nüvi does a better job of knowing where you are. I’m saying that because Google Maps keeps improving – which is essentially what Google does with everything.
I bought Vicki a first-generation Garmin nüvi about 4 years ago. The one I got in January has a slightly better onscreen keyboard, and the display seems a little crisper, but that’s really about it. Oh, and the new one is black instead of silver. They have essentially done nothing to improve their product in 4 years.
Google Maps, on the other hand, seems to update itself about once a week. New software with bug fixes, added features, new map layers, new map data, all sorts of things. Google just never quits tinkering, implementing small-but-significant improvements over and over again. In the 2 or 3 months since I installed it on my phone, it’s grown by leaps and bounds, evolving from an interesting (but not really usefull) app into a serious rival against a product made by the company that has practically owned the GPS receiver market since Day 1.
But the real reason why Google Maps is going to kill Garmin runs a little deeper than that.
Let me give you an example:
A typical route I have to drive takes about an hour and twenty minutes to get from Point A to Point B. When I use nüvi to navigate me between these two points, she picks a route that goes through a dense urban area, and with all the stoplights and traffic it takes almost two hours to make it where I’m going – even with nüvi on the ‘fastest route’ setting. And yet, if I drive the same route the next day, nüvi will send me the same way. It should have figured out from yesterday’s trip that the route it prefers is a lousy one that takes a lot longer, and run me through the countryside instead, but it doesn’t. It can’t learn.
Google Maps learns. It doesn’t seem to be using my individual results to adjust routing yet, but Google is implementing user data to improve routing, and the way the software is evolving it won’t be long before it personalizes that data to the routes I routinely drive. The capacity for feedback is built into the system, and over time that’s going to result in an infinitely better system.
Oh, and Google Maps is free with the phone. If I would have paid for the Garmin nüvi, it would have cost me almost $400. That’s almost four hundred bucks for a product that isn’t significantly better than a competing product you can get for free. That pretty much nails the coffin shut, doesn’t it?
- Ken
I want one of the Android type phones, but I’m not paying an extra $30/month for the service you need to make it work. I’m sure that many folks have enough uses to make it worth the money, but I don’t.
I wouldn’t pay $400 for a GPS either. The $125 deals will do all that I really need. If I’m lost, they tell me where I’m at. They will estimate my time to destination close enough to be handy, they’ll tell me what lane I should be in, and they’ll tell me when I’m getting close to an address. That’s all I want.
I’m sure that the Android is better and probably a lot more fun, but I’m so sick of a monthly payment for every bit of technology that comes out that I would rather just buy what I need and be done with it.
I guess I’m bitter about the whole Android thing. They’re really cool, but I can’t justify the cost – yet.
We got David a cheap Tom Tom at Walmart the week before, not so much for the routing aspects, but he likes it because it announces the street names a bit ahead of him, giving him time to maneuver to the lane he needs to be in…
I can see where you’re coming from, but it’s a simple case that Google and it’s oodles of cash can beat Garmin. Also IIRC the maps are held on the central server, then fed out to the phone as required. I’ve compared a TomTom (horrible thing) and my telmap Navigator on the Blackberry, and the TelMap was more up to date, and directed me around traffic! Also all the data I can eat is rolled in to my mobile contract, so it’s not like I have to worry about extra costs.
Of the major ones, Garmin is actually one of the best in the UK! Maps are nicely up to date, and they are a hell of a lot easier than TomTom, despite TomTom being the thing everyone wants!
Rick, I see the Google vs. Garmin thing as being kind of analogous to Google vs. Yahoo. Like Yahoo, Garmin had all of the market share, and essentially quit innovating. Also like Yahoo, Garmin saw their market dominance as an opportunity to cash in, not as a chance to earn goodwill. Both Yahoo and Garmin demonstrated they were willing to sacrifice user experience in order to squeeze every last penny they could get out of their userbase. As a result, people fled Yahoo in droves as soon as a reasonable alternative was available – and I think the same thing will happen to Garmin.
I’m not saying Garmin will be going out of business in a year or anything, but like Yahoo, they’re going to be increasingly irrelevant in the tech sector, and their stock will reflect that.
[...] old friend Ken Thomas recently did an article that sung the praises of the Google Android as a GPS device. The Android is a very impressive phone, but in my view it’s still a phone, not a GPS. I [...]