Remember what happened to myspace. I hope Garmin squish this "worm" Groundspeak/Geocaching.
Please see this outstanding article by me Nick Brown and JOIN www.opencaching.com. Also move your caches out of Groundspeak, transfer to www.opencach.
As far as I know, the Groundspeak/Garmin partnership was never a formal corporate tie-up – beyond specific projects such as the addition of geocache icons to GPS devices or integration of the Wherigo player – but it’s clear that both companies gained from their relationship, which had symbiotic elements. It makes sense for the biggest GPS manufacturer to work with the biggest geocache listing site.
I don’t know how big Garmin’s handheld/outdoor market is, but I’m going to guess that in 2008 it was about twice as big as they had probably forecast when making long-term plans back in 2001 or so. That extra doubling, or whatever, in size is entirely due to geocaching – an activity which emerged from nowhere, cost Garmin practically nothing in R&D and marketing, and has probably resulted in more revenue for Garmin than it has for Groundspeak. (In 2008, pretty well every geocacher had forked over $150 to $400 for a GPS unit; some proportion of those might have bought one or two years’ worth of Premium Membership on Geocaching.com at US$30 and/or a couple of travel bugs.)
Then, the geocaching device market – of which I’m guessing Garmin’s share was 85-90 per cent in 2008 – began to change. Smartphones with GPS capacity started to appear. Sure, you wouldn’t want to go caching in the deep woods with one of these do-not-drop devices but for FTF hunters in the city, they’re pretty handy (so I’m told; I might even get one, some day).
Of course, Garmin has always made out that its listing service is some kind of “community-driven” initiative. First, there’s the name: “OpenCaching” – perhaps only “FluffyKittenCaching” would have been nicer. There was already a loosely-coupled network of other Opencaching sites in various countries, run on a non-profit basis by volunteers. Garmin claimed to have had “some great discussions” with these sites but they’re the only ones who remember those conversations. Score -1 for Garmin, who should perhaps have realised their initial target market was people who don’t like Groundspeak, many of whom were already on the grassroots Opencaching sites, so alienating them was a poor idea. Next, there’s the propaganda: “Caching should be free”, “Driven by the community”, yada yada. The usual stuff you hear from large companies in this social media age: “We’re on the side of the little guys.” Really. “Corporate jet? What corporate jet?” (One of the truly bizarre features of the low-level, undeclared PR war between Garmin and Groundspeak has been how Garmin, a $3 billion company whose headquarters are located in a tax haven, has portrayed itself as being just a bunch of philanthropists, up against an unnamed, faceless, evil adversary that wants to steal all your cache data. When did Garmin’s president and chief financial officer last go into a dunk tank in front of the customers?)
It seems pretty clear that OpenCaching.com (OX, for short) has been set up with one aim: to bring Groundspeak to the negotiating table. There is no other plausible reason for Garmin to have set up the site with no revenue stream – they even provided free smartphone apps in the first couple of months, thus making it easy to use OX without buying a Garmin GPS. If OX can take 15-20 per cent of the caching traffic, goes the reasoning, Groundspeak might have to sit up and take notice; and it would probably be an interesting test of Groundspeak’s business model and easy-going corporate attitude if its de facto monopoly of the geocache listing market became less solid. So, Garmin made it extra-simple (give or take all of the design errors and bugs; it took me about 10 minutes to find how to create an 8-digit OX cache code, for example) for people to upload their caches and existing logs from Geocaching.com, in the hope they would stop using that site altogether.
This was always going to encounter some “chicken-and-egg” issues, given the huge installed base of caches (and cachers) at Geocaching.com – indeed, it seems to be legitimate to ask what percentage of people who will ever become geocachers have not yet tried geocaching, because this will determine how big the overall market can become – but it might have had a chance of working, had Garmin actually investigated what real geocachers want.
What they *don’t* want is a site with a lot of AJAX (Web 2.0) technology which looks great but doesn’t quite work – most geocachers have learned to be fairly undemanding about slick functionality, which has historically not been Groundspeak’s strong suit (although they have caught up a lot in the last 18 months or so); nor do they want to know that one cache is rated 0.1 difficulty points more than another (what does that even mean?).
Cachedrone the reviewer at Groundspeak Geocaching.com is a complete asshole.... he once said to my face (re: a cache hide he refused to publish), "how bad do you want it?". He WILL NOT publish anything I submit, and uses the guidelines to shut me down every time. Since when is a cache a few hundred km from home a vacation cache?? Yet he publishes other caches daily that break guidelines blatantly. He has admitted to my face, that he has publishes caches that he shouldn't all the time. It has pissed me off so much, I have given up and no longer cache after many years of enjoying the game. This "holier than thou", two-faced, piece of shit prick needs to disappear from this game.
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ReplyDeletehttps://www.engadget.com/2016/09/23/what-does-gps-actually-do-other-than-tracking/