Google owns Waze because Waze was the hot driving app for a long time. It provided information like up to minute data on crashes, speed traps, would suggest more aggressive alternative routes than Google Maps. It was a superior product for quickly taking driver data and pushing it to your phone.<p>So Google purchased them because, frankly, Google Maps in the US if it wasn’t in heavy use by drivers is pointless. This move makes sense to consolidate the ad buy but I suspect it’s going to end with the decommission of Waze since most of those features have since moved to Google Maps (with the exception of speed trap reporting).
On the one hand, this isn't that bad because it's just Waze advertising division, and they are dropping Waze ads for incorporating Google Ads.<p>On the other, these things are never isolated and I'm assuming we have a few months before the next round of layoffs at Waze because of overlap with existing Google products.