'Don’t Need Your Fake Generosity': Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal Derides Google Maps For Policy Update After Exiting The Service

The battle between Indian tech companies and their western counterparts for supremacy has been brewing for some time now, but it is only in the recent past, particularly the past decade, that many growing Indian tech startups have grown into reliable tech giants.

One of the pioneers of this movement is Ola's co-founder, Bhavish Aggarwal.

Ola vs Google

Aggarwal has been on a bit of a crusade against western companies, most recently Microsoft's LinkedIn, and now Google and its Map service, Google Maps.

It was at the beginning of this month (July) that his company, Ola, opted out of Google Maps to deploy its own homegrown in-house navigating system, Ola Maps. This, according to the company, was done in order to save the company an estimate of Rs 100 crore in expenses.

Now, in a new development in the matter, Aggarwal reacted to a policy update from Alphabet-owned Google Maps.

Ola Maps On Rise

Aggarwal took to his X profile with a screengrab of the mail, which read "Hello Google Maps Platform India Customer, Starting August 1, 2024, we will introduce new updates, including reduced pricing for our core services to make Google Maps Platform more accessible to developers in India, and will accept payments in Indian Rupees (INR). We have provided additional information below to guide you through this update."

The Ola electric founder responded to this with strong words, and said, "Dear @Google, too little too late!". Further deriding the platform he said, "Reducing prices for @googlemaps, “offering to price in ₹” after #ExitGoogleMaps. Don’t need your fake generosity!"

He also added that he will be back with a detailed response on July 18 "Tomorrow, I’ll be writing a blog response and announcing major updates on Ola maps @Krutrim. Stay tuned! 🇮🇳💪"

When it comes to Ola Maps, it was in 2021 that Ola purchased a Pune-based company, GeoSpoc. This system is hosted on another one of Aggarwal's in-house systems, 'Krutrim'. It needs to be noted that the system was initially in Microsoft's Azure, before the company exited it for Krutrim.