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?

W3W is a closed product. It is a for-profit company masquerading as an open standard. And that annoys me.

A brief primer.

• The world is a sphere.
• We can reference any point on the surface of Earth using two co-ordinates, Longitude and Latitude.
• Long/Lat are numbers. They can be as precise or as vague as needed.
• Humans can't remember long strings of numbers, and reading them out is difficult.

W3W aims to solve this. It splits the world into a grid, and gives every square a unique three-word phrase.

So the location 51.50799,-0.12803 becomes ///mile.crazy.shade

Brilliant, right?

No.

Here's all the problems I have with W3W.

It isn't open

The algorithm used to generate the words is proprietary. You are not allowed to see it. You cannot find out your location without asking W3W for permission.

If you want permission, you have to agree to some pretty long terms and conditions. And understand their privacy policy. Oh, and an API agreement. And then make sure you don't infringe their patents.

You cannot store locations. You have to let them analyse the locations you look up. Want to use more than 10,000 addresses? Contact them for prices!

It is the antithesis of open.

Cost

W3W refuses to publish their prices. You have to contact their sales team if you want to know what it will cost your organisation.

Open standards are free to use.

Earthquakes

When an earthquake struck Japan, street addresses didn't change but that their physical location did.

That is, a street address is still 42 Acacia Avenue - but the Longitude and Latitude has changed.

Perhaps you think this is an edge case? It isn't. Australia is drifting so fast that GPS can't keep up.

How does W3W deal with this? Their grid is static, so any tectonic activity means your W3W changes.

Internationalisation

Numbers are fairly universal. Lots of countries use 0-9. English words are not universal. How does W3W deal with this?

Is "cat.dog.goose" straight translated into French? No! Each language has its own word list.

There is no way to translate between languages. You have to beg W3W for permission for access to their API. They do not publish their word lists or the mappings between them.

So, if I want to tell a French speaker where ///mile.crazy.shade is, I have to use ///embouchure.adjuger.saladier

Loosely translated back as ///mouth.award.bowl an entirely different location!

You're not allowed to know what word lists W3W use. They take a paternalistic attitude to creating their lists - they know best. You cannot propose changes.

Anecdotally, their non-English word lists are confusing even for native speakers.

Cultural Respect

Numbers are (mostly) culturally neutral. Words are not. Is "mile.crazy.shade" a respectful name for a war memorial? How about ///tribes.hurt.stumpy for a temple?

How do you feel about ///weepy.lulls.emerge and ///grouchy.hormone.elevating both being at Auschwitz? Or ///klartext.bestückt.vermuten - "cleartext stocked suspect"?

This is a classic computer science problem. Every sufficiently long word list can eventually be recombined into a potentially offensive phrase.

Open Washing

W3W know that the majority of technical people are not fooled by their attempts to lock down addressing.

They include this paragraph to attempt to prove their openness:

If we, what3words ltd, are ever unable to maintain the what3words technology or make arrangements for it to be maintained by a third-party (with that third-party being willing to make this same commitment), then we will release our source code into the public domain. We will do this in such a way and with suitable licences and documentation to ensure that any and all users of what3words, whether they are individuals, businesses, charitable organisations, aid agencies, governments or anyone else can continue to rely on the what3words system.

I don't know how they propose to bind a successor organisation. They don't say what licences they will use. If they go bust, there's no guarantee they'll be legally able to release this code, nor may they have the time to do so.

There's nothing stopping W3W from releasing their algorithms now, subjecting them to scrutiny by the standards community. They could build up a community of experts to help improve the system, they could work with existing mapping efforts, they could help build a useful and open standard.

But they don't. They guard their secrets and actively promote their proprietary product in the hope it will become widely accepted and then they can engage in rent-seeking behaviour.

This is not a new argument

My mate Leigh wrote about this three years ago. Lots of people have criticised W3W.

Andy Allan @gravitystorm@gravitystorm.co.uk

@gravitystorm

.@what3words is bad technical idea, and ethically terrible too. But all VCs like patented economic rents so the juggernaut rolls on. #geomob

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But W3W have a great PR team - pushing press releases which are then reported as uncritical news.

The most recent press release contains a ludicrous example:

• Person dials the emergency services
• Person doesn't know their location
• Emergency services sends the person a link
• Person clicks on link, opens web page
• Web page geolocates user and displays their W3W location
• Person reads out their W3W phrase to the emergency services

Here's the thing... If the person's phone has a data connection - the web page can just send the geolocation directly back to the emergency services! No need to get a human to read it out, then another human to listen and type it in to a different system.

There is literally no need for W3W in this scenario. If you have a data connection, you can send your precise location without an intermediary.

What Next?

W3W succeeds because it has a superficially simple solution to a complex problems. It is a brilliant lesson in how marketing and PR can help a technologically inferior project look like it is a global open solution.

I'm not joking. Their branding firm says:

Edelman helped what3words frame their story to be compelling by tapping into human emotion. We also created a story for CEO Chris Sheldrick about how having an address can drive social transformation and business efficiency, securing profiling and speaker opportunities. Through paid social campaigns we re-targeted these stories, getting through to the decision makers that mattered most. We articulated their purpose narrative and refined their strategy to engage investors and excite the media.

It takes too much time to refute all their claims - but we must. Whenever you see people mentioning What3Words, politely remind them that it is not an open standard and should be avoided.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Your periodic reminder that W3W is a closed and proprietary system, with opaque licencing, hefty pricing, and poor internationalisation.
It does have a very good PR team though.

BBC News Technology

@BBCTech

Three-unique-words 'map' used to rescue mother and child bbc.in/2FBnJ5O

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