Mapbox have products that people want to use. Mapbox GL is an astonishing product almost entirely without competition, and their routing is also top-notch.
It remains to be seen whether 200+ employees and sunk costs is a sustainable business; it's an audacious bet on their part that it is. But Mapbox without doubt has the foundations of a very sustainable business within it.
Mapzen never had the revenue, and never looked like it was trying very hard to get it, presumably betting that its Samsung parent would keep the tap running (and, to their credit, being aggressively open-source so that their work wasn't wasted when the day came that the tap was turned off). A bunch of the stuff they did was technologically really fascinating and valuable, such as Who's On First (their geocoder), but never got to saleable product stage. Commercially Mapzen hobbled themselves for geocoding by their laudable insistence on being a 100% open solution: you simply can't do worldwide, reliable, saleable address-level geocoding with open data yet.
Note too that there are a bunch of less noisy players within the OSM ecosystem - Geofabrik, Thunderforest, Graphhopper - who do work which is often as interesting and performant as the Silicon Valley companies, yet with a much lower profile. If you're looking for alternatives following the Mapzen shutdown, I'd commend all three.
I totally agree that Mapbox has great products. There's no doubt there. My doubt is whether or not the market is big enough to support the development of such products.
My thesis is that "geo services" ventures need to be subsidized or else they can't sustainably exist at prices that developers are today accustomed to pay for.
>But Mapbox without doubt has the foundations of a very sustainable business within it.
Are you sure about that? The world is littered with failed companies with amazing products that couldn't find enough people to sell them to. Just because you have a lot of people who want to buy your $100 bills for $50 doesn't mean you have a strong business.
It remains to be seen whether 200+ employees and sunk costs is a sustainable business; it's an audacious bet on their part that it is. But Mapbox without doubt has the foundations of a very sustainable business within it.
Mapzen never had the revenue, and never looked like it was trying very hard to get it, presumably betting that its Samsung parent would keep the tap running (and, to their credit, being aggressively open-source so that their work wasn't wasted when the day came that the tap was turned off). A bunch of the stuff they did was technologically really fascinating and valuable, such as Who's On First (their geocoder), but never got to saleable product stage. Commercially Mapzen hobbled themselves for geocoding by their laudable insistence on being a 100% open solution: you simply can't do worldwide, reliable, saleable address-level geocoding with open data yet.
Note too that there are a bunch of less noisy players within the OSM ecosystem - Geofabrik, Thunderforest, Graphhopper - who do work which is often as interesting and performant as the Silicon Valley companies, yet with a much lower profile. If you're looking for alternatives following the Mapzen shutdown, I'd commend all three.