[Published March 16th 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20061127141948/http://www.bitgain.com:80/blog/show/5]
While driving from my home town (Hoorn, The Netherlands) to Amsterdam, I saw a lot of cars with the small TomTom device mounted (with Velcro, mind you) on top of the dashboard. Although it looks a bit amateurish, many people really seem to like the driving directions it gives.
I wonder whether companies like TomTom, or its rival Garmin, can uphold the outrageous pricing level of their products. The avarage TomTom device costs a whopping EUR 600 and for what? The components inside the device cost no more than $80 I guess. And of course TomTom must license the map data from Navteq or TeleAtlas, and they have to finance expensive marketing campaigns (also in the US since a few months).
I'm always a sucker for scenarios in which a whole vertical market gets beaten by a killer app. I think the GPS device market runs such a risk. Bear with me for a moment:
- The TomTom software adds no spectacular value to their hardware. The software is not really "deep" in terms of richness in functionality, it offers limited interaction with the user or access to external systems. I don't say making software easy-to-use is easy, I really mean in this particular case that the actual navigation software is not extremely difficult to make. Put otherwise, Open Source software like Linux, JBoss, Apache or MySQL probably consists of many more lines of code.
- Cloning the TomTom or Garmin hardware is also not difficult. A Chinese factory can design and manufacture a generic device with an LCD or OLED screen plus a GPS receiver in a matter of months. They should embed a real-time operating system (e.g. RTOS) into the box so we don't have to pay licenses to anyone.
- Based on public domain map data a basic driving directions application can be created. The first version will suck, it can't find anything but at least you'll see the roads, lakes, rivers, cities and villages happily scrolling by.
- Now it's up to the community around our Open Source GPS box to enrich the map data. Just by driving around we'll know whether a crossing is really a crossing or a fly-over without on or off ramps. We'll discover roundabouts (where our basic map still displayed a crossing). Does this sound silly? Companies like Navteq and TeleAtlas do exactly the same, they have hundreds of cars on the road every day to fine-tune and update their map data.
- The data collected during your trip is written to a flash disk and can be transferred to an on-line database with a few clicks. After uploading the data you receive an update of the complete community map database. Give and thy shall receive! Because our generic GPS box is open, people can write all kinds of additional applications like a bluetooth connection for their cell phone, radar detectors and news tickers. The box could offer USB connections to attach e.g. a bluetooth receiver.
What would this mean for companies like TomTom and Garmin? Well, for sure their pricing comes under pressure. And such a device would just be a whole lotta fun to hack together.