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
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