endless.downward.spiral - is this the beginning of the end of What3Words?

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/02/endless-downward-spiral-is-this-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-what3words/

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?