endless.downward.spiral - is this the beginning of the end of What3Words?
maps what3words · 14 comments · 750 words · read ~1,312 times.
Long-time readers know that I am not a fan of What Three Words. I think it is a closed, proprietary, and user-unfriendly attempt to enclose the commons. I consider that it has some dangerous failure modes.
A year ago, The Financial Times wrote about What3Words' business woes. But it looks like things are about to get a lot worse.
As reported by a user on Reddit, Mercedes cars no longer support What3words.
I was in touch with What3words customer support and they confirmed me that Mercedes didn’t renewed their What3word license so blocking the service embedded in all their products.
Now, we shouldn't necessarily trust what a random customer service agent says. Nor should we trust a single post on a forum. But if you visit the W3W cars page you'll see a list of the vehicle manufacturers they work with. 
Mercedes-Benz is still there - but clicking on the link takes you to a dead page. The links to other manufacturers work.
There's also a popular YouTuber reporting the same problem:
The pull quote from Mercedes themselves is:
The What3Words features was discontinued in December due to low usage by our customers.
OK, so one car company deciding not to use the app isn't the end of the world, right?
Well, as my friend Bloor points out:
This would be the same Mercedes Benz who invested in w3w. […] I’d say that if one of your investors doesn’t want to buy your product, then your product fucking sucks. And/or If your licence fees are so high that even an INVESTOR won’t pay them, your pricing fucking sucks.
He also shows that, apparently, a Director of W3W from Mercedes resigned late last year.
So, is it game over for W3W? Their report from July 2024 identified these risks:
Commercial risk The success of the business is dependent on the development, conversion and retention of a pipeline of commercial contracts to take the business cash flow positive and profitable. Behavioural change risk The Group has created a new addressing format, with the aim of becoming a universal standard for location referencing. A key aspect of this is acquiring and retaining a high volume of newly engaged consumers, creating wide-scale network effects and consumer behaviour change to ultimately deliver commercial contracts.
Even going by the publicly available plans the cost of a W3W lookup is about ⅓rd of a penny. I imagine that Mercedes pay considerably less than that. And yet, an investor who had 4,030,000 Series C1 Preferred Shares, have decided that their customers aren't interested enough in W3W to justify the cost of integrating it into their vehicles.
That's the commercial risk and the behavioural change risk both at once. It appears to me that they can't retain their current corporate customers and don't seem to be able to attract or keep individual consumers.
W3W only succeeds with sufficient network effects. After 12 years of operation, it is yet to reach anything approaching critical mass. Its attempt to insinuate itself within the emergency services (who use it for free) doesn't seem to have transformed into mass adoption. Its premium customers appear to be dropping it. Search and Rescue teams warn against using it.
What's left? The inherent technical flaws in the What3Words algorithm can't be fixed and the intractable commercial flaws in its business model aren't helping. The W3W financial report announced losses of £16 million, against a turnover of £1 million.
How much longer can they go on?
Oh thank god for that.
@Edent What Three Words always irritated me by being proprietary. I appreciate the substantive justifications you linked for arguing against it.
@Edent are not Jaguar Land Rover ONE company? Does this mean they now have only a single (arguably equally troubled) customer?
@Edent @IvanSanchez recently heard a talk from someone working in emergency response (both receiving, and providing location services) describe W3W as "for when you've abandoned all hope of finding someone in any other way", a service of last resort. it definitely sounds like the end is nigh
@Edent it makes me quite sad because we _should_ be able to create commercial businesses out of new geo (and/or Open Data) ideas. They've worked very hard to get commercial/marketing deals to ram an ultimately flawed package down our throats.
If I were an investor it would scare me off investing in other ideas.
@blog Good. I hope you're right. This company and the activities they engage in is representative of the worst of a type of business that takes a fundamentally good thing, and turns it into a profit making endeavour, often enshittifying the thing in the meantime.
This is similar to land owners blocking access to common land, or attempts at copyrighting happy birthday (even though I personally find happy birthday to be the worst birthday song ever, but that's a diffident post altogether)
@Edent Not looking good for them. Let's hope the fad fizzles out.
Also perhaps worth a link to @cybergibbons's blog with some good examples!
https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-suitable-for-safety-critical-applications/
I thought I'd read somewhere in the past about one pair of W3W addresses that were either side of Loch Ness at one point but I can't find that reference now.
Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications
///proprietary.geocoding.skeptic says:
For anyone playing along at home, endless.downward.spiral is on Eglinton Island in Canada. ///endless.downward.spiral
W3w always struck me as a problem seeking a solution.
@blog thank goodness for that. The sooner it is gone the better.
I’d much rather Google/Apple maps just showed your OS grid reference somewhere obvious.
@Edent Good, it has always been a "solution" looking for a problem as you've written about many times.
@mappingsupport @Edent I use WhatTwoWords
Lat Lon
And speaking of terrible technology, Terence Eden has written a post about WhatThreeWords, the frankly stupid system for sharing locations which takes a public good — maps — and turns it into a private, proprietary system which doesn’t work that well.
Honestly can't come quick enough.
I have experience of working with it as an emergency responder (for which application it is utter pants) and as a systems developer (under duress, but some of our customers LOVE it).
It's a classic case of monetizing a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
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