[7952]

Google are only a small part of the spatial data capture world. They provide amazing access to a few datasets and completely ignore others. Location searches are laughably bad unless you are looking for a hotel. They do not even come close to providing comprehensive topographic mapping.

[guimarin]

I think that traditional topographic mapping is not very useful from a business standpoint. When there are more, or a critical number of the autonomous vehicles from Google deployed in the wild, I fully expect very high resolution 3D maps from all the LIDAR and other data. That will be incredibly cool.

[7952]

Traditional topographic mapping is still hugely useful in many niches. Try laying a 100 mile pipeline, or building a factory, or organising search and rescue without traditional topo mapping. I would agree that it can be obtusely formatted and wildly expensive.

High resolution 3D modelling is already available in much of Norther Europe. It is very cool, but surprisingly difficult to actually make useful. In most applications comic book style generalisations actually work better.