What's happening with Google Maps is reminiscent of IE6: a beautiful product appears, light-years ahead of the competition, and free. The competition in question, being light-years behind, and non-free, promptly dies.
Then the beautiful product gets frozen in place, and its team "locked up in a dark dungeon" (Spolsky, 2004), which creates a huge opportunity for (open) alternatives.
OpenStreetMap + Leaflet is to Google Maps what Firefox was to IE6... but there is still a very long way to go.
Exactly. The problem is, Google has all these employees they need to keep busy, which translates into "upgrading" or redesigning products whether they need it or not. Products always suffer from this pattern.
It turns out that Google isn't smart enough to avoid the same mistakes made by the companies it supplanted.
Then the beautiful product gets frozen in place, and its team "locked up in a dark dungeon" (Spolsky, 2004), which creates a huge opportunity for (open) alternatives.
OpenStreetMap + Leaflet is to Google Maps what Firefox was to IE6... but there is still a very long way to go.