Because W3W's main strength is PR. Their system itself is really not that useful (or innovative, or difficult to create), and there are several free and open alternatives. But you don't hear about them without hearing about W3W.
If the alternatives are so great, why aren’t they being adopted? Surely a truly superior alternative could gain traction despite W3W’s publicity; we see new systems supplant older ones all the time in other areas.
If you identified a substitute that was clearly superior in every way to W3Ws, that would also be helpful. So far every one that's been identified here has faced usability or other objections.
Because there are dozens of competing standards and none is clearly superior to the others, because it boils down to being a really, really simple problem: Encode two numbers. (That's also why there are so many standards - it's simple so everyone wants to bikeshed).
There will be no "truly superior" solution, just one that has optimized for different properties.
Plus codes aka Open Location Codes are the biggest "modern" one that seems to have seen some adoption mainly because Google is pushing it (example: "VXQ7+QV Washington DC" or "87C4VXQ7+QV").
Otherwise, decimal coordinates are pretty universal (example: "38.88948,-77.03527" or "38.88948 N, 77.03527 W").
What3words (example: "///jugendliebe.rechtsschutz.mauerreste" or "///cabin.flops.gravel") has other advantages and disadvantages, but running it as a closed project (and the requirement to ship megabytes of databases) kinda killed the project before it started. But even without that showstopper it wouldn't be clearly superior vs. other systems, including the old and proven "two numbers, written as numbers", which is good enough and works almost everywhere.
> If the alternatives are so great, why aren’t they being adopted?
As I stated: "Their system itself is really not that useful". Take the example of "give emergency services your location".
The requirements with W3W are: Cell connection, GPS signal, data connection, some sort of (presumably W3W-made, closed source) app. You use the app to convert your GPS coordinates to words that you tell them which they convert back to something usable.
The requirements without W3W are: Cell connection, GPS signal and any GPS app. You tell them your coordinates in decimals.
Sure, they will tell you that communicating GPS coordinates correctly is harder than communicating three words correctly, but good luck coming up with a situation where this makes any difference.
There's also the scenario of "their app will send the words to emergency services automatically", which is pointless because the app might as well send GPS coordinates.
My point isn't that we should adopt other systems, it's that we should ignore W3W. Even a strictly superior version of W3W would be hard-pressed for use cases. It's just not something the world seems to need, which is exactly why PR is their business plan.
If their system isn't useful, then they won't have customers for very long. The problem will sort itself out, and they won't have a business worth defending anymore.
On the other hand, if it is useful and customers are willing to continue to pay for it, then ISTM they have a good reason for wanting to protect their invention.
The point is that their system is not really more useful than the alternatives. But once you convinced a country through your PR, they'll be locked in and the cost of switching to something marginally better (and less costly) may not be worth it. So no, just that they have customers is not proof that it's the best option.
Also, "if it's not useful, it won't have customers for long" is quite obviously wrong. See e.g. essential oils, homeopathy and so on.
> If the alternatives are so great, why aren’t they being adopted?
It's ridiculously easy to create an alternative (30mins: [0]). Having an alternative adopted takes a considerable amount of friction.
We don't always end up with the most superior in the real world anyway. (Bash, & C are hated on, but are still commonly used everywhere. MIME is a truly awful format, but runs the world of email.)
There may be an alternative, but Geohash is not it. Geohashes look like "u4pruydqqvj", which is questionably useful for situations very different from situations where you'd want "pinks.haunted.graves".
It would be better if we took geohash and transformed it into words organized from a dictionary. Because the closer things are the more they share a common prefix.
