Does free beat good?
More than any other company, Google has trained consumers to expect valuable Internet services to be free. Basically, its ad-supported, online search bankrolls the company’s forays into other industries, including connected car services. “If they offer a free service, that makes it difficult for other companies to offer paying services that might be a little bit better. People will go for the free alternative,” Bonte argues. Mark Fitzgerald, senior automotive analyst for Strategy Analytics, doesn’t necessarily expect Google’s free navigation to destroy the market for premium services. “While Google’s navigation service doesn’t quite measure up to the average PND or embedded app, it will soon,” he says. “The only correlation we have is that there’s still a market for stand-alone digital cameras, even though every phone has it, because a camera does it better.” Free phone-based services will continue to erode the market, Fitzgerald thinks, but they won’t obliterate it. Broadening the mar
