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Comment by jastanton | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm among the minority of people who use google maps just to look up directions, see traffic, and look up nearby businesses, and that's enough for me. The one feature I don't see though is the ability do traffic estimations which was convenient.

I know the team will get there, I cannot fully support their decision to disable old maps but I can understand it. Most of flame in that thread is unfortunate and unnecessary and reminds me of this comic where in the first panel someone introduces a new feature, the customer complains and moans, and say the first version was good enough, then the next panel they introduce yet another version and it's the same behavior as the first panel, they want the one that is just about to get taken from them, always and forever.

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You're in the majority. That's how these product managers make these decisions, they look at the data and if a feature is used <1% of the time they kill it because, they say, they need the interface to be as simple as possible.

The problem with that is a statistical logic one. The majority of people will use a rare <1% feature occasionally. When the feature isn't there the user finally realizes how dumbed down the product is and that it doesn't fit their needs. Even if it fit their need for years it let them down when they needed it most. The PM will respond that it wasn't worth it to have the feature uglyfying the interface for years just so it was available that one time.

The biggest complaint I'm seeing is that a specific feature is removed from the new version.

I too previously had a complaint about the peg man being removed. It was impossible to find the street view I needed without that.

But, peg man is back, right?

Yes, and that's when I started using the new version. So I understand the complaints about features missing. If there were no peg man I'd probably be pretty frustrated using Maps.

The new googles maps has traffic estimates, can show traffic, and it's pretty straightforward to even change your departure times (and show what the traffic will look like when you do).

It pops up when you query directions.

What I'd actually likes as a feature is an output telling me WHEN to start my trip based on the lowest travel time due to traffic. Would be wonderful to have a histogram by hour for journey times based on traffic prediction.

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