“Buried in the usual WWDC keynote fanfare was, I believe, the most disruptive announcement made by Apple: updated maps and mapping features for the iOS platform,” Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes for ZDNet. “Now, on the face of it, maps might not seem either all that sexy or disruptive, but the mapping platform built into the iPhone and iPad is quite a core feature that’s leveraged throughout the platform. By replacing Google’s mapping service with its own — using data from companies such as TomTom and OpenStreetMaps and others — Apple is putting itself at the center of the action.”
“However, there was more to the mapping announcement than just a change of provider. Apple also unveiled a new and highly requested feature — turn-by-turn navigation. This is where the new mapping app starts to become disruptive,” Kingsley-Hughes writes. “This has significant implications for the entire in-car GPS market. And by implications, I mean casualties. And those casualties will be companies that sell in-car GPS receivers, companies such as TomTom and Garmin.”
Kingsley-Hughes writes, “Apple sells millions of iPhones and iPads every quarter, and these people no longer need to buy a secondary device to get them from A to B… In addition, vendors such as TomTom and Garmin also earn a significant revenue from selling annual map updates. iOS users will save money here because the maps will not need updating because Apple will be handling that at their end. This saves the owner a significant chunk of change, and will hurt the bottom line of the in-car GPS vendors… But that’s not all. The existing GPS vendors are going to get hit a third way. All the big names have apps which replicate their in-car GPS hardware experience on the iPhone or iPad.” No need for those apps now.
Kingsley-Hughes writes, “With iOS 6, Apple will put an in-car GPS receiver into the hands of millions of people, and that is going to have a very serious effect on the in-car GPS market… A year from now the in-car GPS landscape is likely to be a very different place.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Imagine being a fly on the boardroom wall in Garmin HQ this morning. We can almost hear their CEO:
“We have our strategy. We’ve got great GPS devices in the market today. You can get a Garmin nüvi 1100LM for $89. It’s a very capable machine. It’ll do street maps. It’ll do turn-by-turn. It’ll do rerouting. It’ll do voice-prompts. Right now, we’re selling millions and millions and millions of turn-by-turn voice navigation devices a year; Apple is selling zero turn-by-turn voice navigation devices a year. So, I kinda look at that and I say, well, ‘I like our strategy. I like it a lot.‘”
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
