I remember I was at Microsoft more than a decade ago now and at the time there was a lot of concern about search and how far Bing lagged behind Google in geospatial (maps).
After some initial investment in the area I was at a presentation where one of the higher ups explained that they'd be abandoning their investment because Google Maps would inevitably fall behind crowdsourcing and OpenStreetMap.
Just like Encarta and Wikipedia we were told - once the open source community gets their hands on something there's just no moat from an engineering perspective and once it's crowdsourced there's no moat from a data perspective. You simply can't compete.
Of course it's more than a decade later now and I still use Google Maps, Bing Maps still suck, and the view times I've tried OpenStreetMaps I've found it far behind both.
What's more every company I've worked at since has paid Google for access to their Maps API.
I guess the experience made me skeptical of people proclaiming that someone does or does not have a moat because the community will just eat away at any commercial product.
After some initial investment in the area I was at a presentation where one of the higher ups explained that they'd be abandoning their investment because Google Maps would inevitably fall behind crowdsourcing and OpenStreetMap.
Just like Encarta and Wikipedia we were told - once the open source community gets their hands on something there's just no moat from an engineering perspective and once it's crowdsourced there's no moat from a data perspective. You simply can't compete.
Of course it's more than a decade later now and I still use Google Maps, Bing Maps still suck, and the view times I've tried OpenStreetMaps I've found it far behind both.
What's more every company I've worked at since has paid Google for access to their Maps API.
I guess the experience made me skeptical of people proclaiming that someone does or does not have a moat because the community will just eat away at any commercial product.