Imagine a world where all the effort Google, Apple, Microsoft and Nokia put into their maps all went into OpenStreetMap instead.
This isn't unique to Google Maps; the same goes for competing pharmaceutical companies, educational institutions, and everything else. Imagine if they were all cooperating rather than competing.
However there are also some benefits to competition. Notably, the impetus to take risks of private capital in order to build new things / try new ventures. Also, the presence of choice in the market (in this case, you can choose which maps you consider more reliable).
I'd love to see more exploration into economic systems involving cooperation and choice, instead of competition. Can we have independent organizations motivated to produce different-but-similar goods, while simultaneously sharing their efforts?
The whole problem is the incentive to innovate diminishes greatly for non-profit, single sources for most products. Thus, we have capitalism and "different commercial vendor silos" for most things, including maps.
Waving hands wildly: imagine a mapping database that was owned by the government, free to use for non-profit uses, and licenseable by corporate entities. Here's the twist though, the license fees are proportional to the government doing a certain amount of upkeep/improvement on the database, and you are free to provide the same work block instead of a fee. That way, if you can do it cheaper, it will save you money up front and if your competitor can't do that, it's a competitive advantage.
I haven't thought about this model carefully just pointing out it isn't necessarily as black and white as you suggest...
It does happen at schools, say, where the players for each team in P.E. class are picked at random, but fans get engaged with the team identity and the individual players, and team abilities depend in part on long-term shared practice.
It's hard to believe that the space programs of the 1960s would have been better had the Soviet and U.S. programs joined forces for a single space program; also, obviously neither space program was based on the direct market forces of capitalism.
The military is also not run under a capitalistic basis, and the concept of "single source" for a NATO or UN force is meaningless. It's even a stretch to say that a combined US Army/Navy/Marine operation is a "single source" given the inter-service rivalries. I'm not convinced that a single world government with its own military would be better.
That's where you got it all wrong; the same common sense argument could be used against using (and contributing to) open source software in companies, and yet the most successful open source softwares are supported by companies. The thing is, contrary to the common sense argument, there is value in not reinventing what others are already doing. That's also a great way to find technical talents who have first-hand knowledge of the tools you use.
OSM is very similar here: the data is openly reusable by anybody and any change benefits everyone.
There can be a good reason for not contributing and using OSM, and that would be because Maps is such a central product to Google that they don't want anything shared with anybody else (plus they already have a lot of data and are considered as the best in class, rightfully or not)
OSM is an interesting case. I would have thought that the sheer effort required to keep map data up to date across the world would make it severely impractical to have open map data. They seem to be doing a decent job plugging away, but I don't have any data on how good they are at getting really accurate data and keeping up to date with ever-changing road conditions.
Maybe we can't! Capitalism is pretty damn good at some problems, optimal even. But it's not flawless, and it is worth noticing and thinking about places where gains appear to be possible.
The way you get the incentives correctly aligned is to make sure that the people making the decision (i.e., the company building the service) gets reward commensurate with the social utility, such that it is in their rational self-interest to do the socially-useful thing.
At which point, they are no longer doing it without compensation.
You are right because there would be a huge boon. This could be said for many other things too, like drug research for instance.
Rather than pining over a wish, we should come up with a better open source/crowd sourcing method if we really want them.
Here you go, one method for crowd-sourcing map data:
www.openstreetmap.org
Many GPSes have "live google" functionality. I have one that allowed me to search for the nearest gas station or restaurant while on the road. There is huge value to Google from that.
Capitalism is doing much better than the other existing systems at solving the massive coordination problems of a large modern society. However, we can also tell that it is imperfect and involves some clear examples of wasted effort. Noticing this waste is valuable, even if no one has a good solution at the moment to improve on the existing system.
What's the alternative? Should we just assume that our current economic system has an optimal set of incentives that we could not improve upon?
Its been said that Maps is likely Google's most expensive product to maintain. Just think about the scope of driving every road in the world as often as possible.
It will only be replaced by OSM if OSM gets to be better than Maps on its own.