Not necessarily since AC is crowd sourced. As has been discussed elsewhere, AC is only as valuable as the user supplied information. AC doesn't provide content, only a vehicle to relay and aggregate content that we provide. Garmin is certainly smart enough to realize this and has a vested interest in encouraging us to continue to provide our content to them for free.
I am a software developer and I know a competitive kill off when I see one.
Garmin chart products start at $2000 and go up from there. That is where they make their money. One of the whole reasons why people don't have to pay $10,000 for Garmin system is because of things like AC. In several respects AC competes directly with Garmin. Also, just from a "corporate responsibility" standpoint, big companies don't like open forums where everybody is free to express their opinion. Ever tried to be a member on MSN? Its all about control and censorship. It is the opposite of AC.
I think what we see happen shortly is:
- No more guest logins. #1 priority kill the guest logins. All users will be forced to register as "Garmin users". That alone will kill off the product.
- Block support for competing products. The #2 priority will be ending support for Garmin competitors. That means support for Rose Point, MaxSea, Nobeltec, Polar Navy and other competitors will be ended.
- De-webify it. #3 priority stop web support for AC. Garmin doesn't want you doing plotting on the internet (which is free). They want you to use their proprietary, expensive hardware devices. Therefore they will limit and aim to eliminate AC's web interface and try to migrate it to Garmin devices.
An important consideration here is that Garmin is NOT a web developer. They have no web development staff and do not have any significant web products other than a few minor phone apps. They view the web as a low-cost competitor. That means the only people who can develop AC will be their existing core of developers. I can tell you from past experience, companies do not like having rogue groups of developers in companies they buy, because those groups usually become non-productive and expensive after the buyout. Usually they keep the top 5% of the developers and merge them into their organization, and fire the bottom 95%. If this happens to AC, it means development will stop and basically the product as it currently exists will stop being maintained; I think it is highly likely this will happen.
Laypersons think you can just boss around developers or just "hire" people to do web development. I have seen companies blow hundreds of millions making that mistake. Programming is HARD. Since Garmin has no web group, the chance they will either want to, or be able to maintain is free web app is virtually zero percent chance.