Was reading this amazing article here:
https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat
And the way Google is using Machine Algorithms to improve map detailing. What’s OSM doing for such things?
Where do we find OSM lets say 5 years from now? Will more and more companies use OSM because its cheap? or because it’s better? Will it still be able to help communities with its rich data?
Google Maps and OSM have rather different aims.
Google Maps is about making money. OSM is about making raw mapping data available to everyone, without the need to pay for the actual data.
My feeling is that the sort of techniques that you mention belong more with data consumers than with OSM itself. OSM should concentrate on what it does best whichi is capturing accurate details, rather relying more and more on best guesses by machines.
Google Maps is offered as an application, something people can use directly without any programming knowledge. And OSM is still a database - interesting for people with programming knowlegde, and a lot of time for creating their own application.
Also, Google Maps offers far more Points of Interest (POI) than OSM, as soon as you leave OSM heart land. How often do local people in Thailand, Taiwan, etc. tell me “use Google Maps” when I ask them where to find a place to stay over night, and they show it to me on their phone, with Google Maps, of course?
Some imports brought low quality data into OSM, and there is some refusal to imports due to that. On the other hand, that will prevent imports of POIs, and keep the user experience low. Some people prefer empty maps over maps with some errors…
The article is interesting, but has a big bias.
I (and probably a lot of other mappers) have found lot of places where g maps are years old without any update, and OSM are perfectly updated.
All maps (including Google Maps) has errors. If you doubt it, I’ll be happy to point out a few.
With OSM you have the opportunity to fix them yourself. Some of us prefer that over having to fight some Google bureaucrat.