Here’s an interesting development that emerged today. Google has announced a free turn-by-turn navigation product, which is placed bang square in TomTom and Garmin‘s target market. As you can imagine this has wrecked havoc to the share price of existing sat nav companies.

It’s a tough reminder that your market share can be here one day and gone the next. Innovation is the name of the game here, and unless these companies have something new and exciting that consumers will find compelling, I’m afraid it’s curtains for them. They’ll be as useful as an rv towing company in Antarctica; if there are no clients around, that’s going to spell disaster for the company.

It will be an interesting one to watch, not for sat nav companies though!