[OSM-talk] Marketshare <iPhone Google Maps Hits 10 Million Downloads in 48 Hours>

Paweł Paprota ppawel at fastmail.fm
Thu Jan 3 22:46:46 GMT 2013


Hi Johan,

On 01/03/2013 10:53 PM, Johan C wrote:
> I´m quite surprised that so few OSM´ers are interested in discussing
> the approach to gain market share for OSM. After my first posting mid
>  December now Waze is in the news, with up to 30 million users:
>
> http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/02/is-apple-plotting-a-route-to-a-waze-acquisition-rumours-on-the-road-point-to-yes/
>
>  Any more ideas to the strategic issue of increasing market share for
>  Openstreetmap?

What market are we discussing here? Waze looks like some "social" 
application which does not actually do too much but is nicely put 
together and promoted, probably also got some funding from venture 
capital and now it's "cool".

My thoughts about OSM in this context:

1. OSM platform (database, osm.org and related services) is an 
*extremely* complex project from the technical perspective. I have been 
working for several hundreds man-hours in the past 3 months of my own 
time on a new History tab (more interactive etc) and I can tell you that 
this is one of the more complex projects I've ever worked on.

2. OSM (again - platform) is understaffed and underfunded to compete in 
any real way with such services like Waze, not to mention Google Maps or 
Bing where you have whole armies of engineers, designers etc.

3. Power of OSM is in the community but I agree that from strategic 
point of view OSM (osm.org/platform) needs to have more features, be 
more social, better-looking etc.

After 3 months of hard working on a new big feature for osm.org I can 
tell you that there is no way that OSM (platform) can compete with all 
these new hip services without having more contributors and/or having 
technical staff or contractors working around the clock. This stuff is 
simply too big, too complex and when you add new features it will 
consume even more maintenance time of the admins/developers - something 
has got to give. My guess is that some time in the next few years 
everything will blow up unless there's major change in how the OSM 
platform is developed in maintained.

The problem as always is money. I personally would be willing to work 
full time on the OSM platform but I need to eat and pay my bills like 
everyone else so I will soon need to go back to a regular job to earn 
money and my OSM related work will suffer - no new features. There is 
probably more people like me who would gladly get involved full time but 
who is going to pay for that?

Paweł



More information about the talk mailing list