Having read the article I think it's using a great little leverage point: Do you have a website with a map? Does the map not work anymore? ("Yikes, will my map stop working," people think)
OSS doesn't have to win big popularity battles; the little cases here and there just add up over time. Soon it's in the background of everything, even proprietary software, because it's so useful that migration and contributions to the source code make sense.
Just in the past decade Kitsap County (just across the water from Seattle) has renumbered 300k addresses. Google Maps is buying their address database from a vendor that rarely pulls this publicly posted data, thus leaving Google a few years behind (except for spotty user corrections). OSM comparatively gets this data right from the county every week, which is great since they're renumbering 30k more addresses currently. Google will take a few more years to get any of this data if they stick to their current operational model.
When nobody uses Google Maps, Google Maps will never have good street/address data. In developing countries there's no official government office to get this data from, just user data.
OSM has a share-alike clause, which would require G to share all their own data with everyone.
Isn't that the entire point of open source technologies? If a platform is open source, then you can make whatever custom changes you personally need and make it work for your particularly scenario.
Downloadable maps, archivable maps, platform independent maps, faster loading maps, more accurate maps, more niche data centric maps, and fail-safe maps are all examples of maps that a particular person needs in a particular setting at a particular time.
It is not software for the masses, just software for the massive number of little things you could possibly need.
Google Maps experience with offline downloaded maps is 100% quality and absolutely not "sub-par" or "frustrating".
When you open apps like Hangouts, Google Maps, etc. on low-bandwidth connections, they immediately try to sync an onslaught of data before making the UI responsive based on the existing offline state. Data that could take hours to sync at 5kb/s.
There's no reason I haven't have a text-only messaging conversation perfectly well on a 2G network. Except when Google tries to sync 50MB of pictures from a conversation I haven't even selected yet, and all of my 500 contacts' profile photos, before I can do anything else.
Incidentally, this is why everyone outside of North America uses WhatsApp.
One strange thing I've noticed over the years is there's a difference on Android vs Apple -- can't count the times I've gone to the wrong place following the Android tablet in the car only to have to pull up the address on the iPhone to get there. When they first put the tablets in the cars I was using the navigation and it took me into the alley between the houses and "you have arrived"...in their backyard. Not very helpful.
Honestly, though, I rarely use navigation unless I'm feeling really lazy or going somewhere complicated enough that I can't figure out how to get there by just glancing at the map. 100% don't use navigation on the stupid tablet in the car.
Google Maps keeps notifying me of "you are at X, would you like to review it?" So it can't make useful notification anymore either.
Selecting areas to download is more of a hassle than with OSMAnd, and the map data requires more storage space. I've also frequently experienced severe degradation in the detail of the voice prompts for turn by turn navigation when the phone doesn't have a data connection, where the phone only saying "in a quarter mile, turn right" without giving me a street name or exit number, let alone lane information.
Anywhere you go far from a city will lack a network.