| Essentially Google has filled a vacuum where other solutions could have existed, say, something based on the OSM dataset and non-proprietary technologies - possibly a federated set of solutions for finding businesses like cafes, restaurants or shops and such. Now, it's pretty hard if not impossible to compete with them thanks to the network effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect How could any company that's interested in being "open" compete with a behemoth that has the advantage of countless engineer-years that have been spent developing their solutions, as well as millions of participants that have given them the data, which probably cannot be legally mined and imported and certainly isn't exported? The answer is that they can't and being upset about this is probably a valid emotional response, even though it could be worded a bit better. Edit: I can't help but to think of how the industry handles DNS domains, for example, the .lv domain for my country is looked after by the University of Latvia: https://www.nic.lv/en/about-us I wonder what a similarly distributed registry of companies, for example, run by the governments of each country (which could then be integrated with the company registers) would look like. Of course, whether the quality of engineering or the overall experience would be up to par with Google's is debatable. That said, the distributed COVID contact tracing approach that we saw was a little bit like this - even if Google and Apple did a lot of work for the underlying library, each country developed their own contact tracing app and eventually all of those could interoperate. There's no actual reason why the FOSS community couldn't build something like that, but for finding companies etc. |
Competitors had decades to get a federated solution together and simply didn't. Attempts got mired in squabbling over data ownership, bickering about costs and fees, failure to agree upon an open protocol, and all manner of other nonsense that Google was able to solve by being a single player and coordinating all the moving parts internally.