I work for Esri, a pretty large GIS company. From where I sit, I think W3W's idea could be implemented better in less than a week, and then plugged into existin

I work for Esri, a pretty large GIS company. From where I sit, I think W3W's idea could be implemented better in less than a week, and then plugged into existing GIS workflows as needed. I suspect some large company or consortium like OGC will eventually build something similar using a geographic coordinate system like WGS84 instead of Mercator, and release it as an open database (perhaps with an open API and an open-source reference implementation). At that point W3W would only continue operating because of vendor lock-in to their proprietary named grid cell database. (Disclaimer: Opinions are my own. I don't speak for my employer.)