This isn't a novel thing, as far as I can tell. A decade ago when I was working on routing of over-the-road trucking, our maps provider moved the entire United States a couple meters and it broke all our road restrictions.
The problem for us -- and likely for those in Australia now -- is that converting physical address descriptions and lat/long becomes a little more fraught. We described road restrictions as being "on the road that is found between X1,Y1 and X2,Y2." A separate layer would snap those X,Y coordinates to the road network and find the road between them. Before the move, that meant converting to "Highway 6 Southbound from milemarker 16 to milemarker 28"
But when you moved the world, X1,Y1 no longer landed on Highway 6, and instead snapped over to the frontage road. Your restriction now read as "Highway 6 Southbound, down to exit 21, around the corner to the frontage road, then down the frontage road". And your restriction that used to say "stay off this one section of road" now says "stay off the highway, the frontage road, and don't use this exit."
The ADA requires 'paratransit' service for persons whose disabilities prevent them from using accessible, non-commuter, fixed route bus service. In many cities paratransit is handed off to taxi services.
I've been pondering the same economics on car-, bike- and scooter- shares. I'd love to know if Car2Go's ridiculous little SMART cars were treated better or worse than their Benz replacements. I wonder if Lime's electric bikes get shoved off the pier less than Ofo's cheapest ones.
What you saw as a positive feature, I saw as the death of Friendster. My friend added "The Burning Man" as her friend, and I suddenly had thousands of friends neither of us had ever actually met. The activity of this pool completely swamped the output of any of the 'friends' I would actually meet up with. I had a HUGE network, but no friends on Friendster.
This wasn't entirely bad to meet up with people outside of your circles, but you needed some way to control the firehose. And, you know, I think that's still not a solved problem. I think I would be more keen on social networks filtering me feed if I had more control over those filters.
Or worse, if you accidentally find this feature, will you know what you just did? Or will you suddenly be dumped into somewhere that looks like it is still a web browser but has suddenly stopped responding like one.
It reminds me of all the old Windows users accidentally dragging their start-bar and covering the whole screen.
I'm guessing that Mrs. B. was smart to stay out of the Denver/Boulder area. The Furniture Wars were fought in those foothills. You can still see the corpses of Weberg and Levits stores all down the interstate. Jake Jabbs took no prisoners.
Now, in addition to Jake's American Furniture Warehouse, there's the whole Furniture Row business holding the territory. Now IKEA is trying to find a way in.
Whole books have been written about the Furniture Wars! It's kind of crazy.
We're changing to auto market into the cell phone market? Oh no.
"Well, I get Free Miles(tm) with the Chevrolet, but it throttles at 70MPH and the radio only plays Pandoa. Or I can get the exact same car from Crysler, with no throttling, but the miles come in bundles of 1000 and radio apps are $5/month."
Is your OS time at least battery backed? I can tell you that nightmares start when all your clocks go back to 1970 on boot, and you need a clock to validate certificates on boot...
For what it is worth, I'm pretty sure that Amazon is already doing this at their Amazon Fresh drive-up stores. When you drive up, a sign lights up to say that your order is coming soon. The experience degrades a little bit if you arrive in a car they've never seen before -- a human stops by your window with a tablet to check you in.
For me, personally, the way Amazon has captured me is more in the cart than in the fulfillment. Yes, it is nice to get things to my door practically overnight, but the fact that I can make that happen without typing my personal and financial information into a skeevy website that could be anywhere is the real value to me.
PayPal (...and Apple Pay and Google Wallet and Samsung Something and Venmo an Beanz and and and...) is the technology that should be making this friction go away, but it appears to be difficult to provide this without turning evil.
So, to your idea, I also appreciate the idea of one, trustworthy, site that would do all of that for me. The thing is, Amazon is that site, for the most part.
Although I have a lot of stories from my time there, my view of this particular event was mostly from behind a desk. I don't think I can offer much personal insight to it.
But I strongly recommend a video that covers the second race. Not to be confused with the 2009/2010 Citizen Pictures video, this one was put out by a studio in Aspen and I think was produced for the Outdoor Life Network.
The problem is that I'm not sure how one would legitimately source the video today. But if you stop by my place I'll offer you a beer and arrange a showing...? I'll look it up tonight and let you know if I can find a source.
The problem for us -- and likely for those in Australia now -- is that converting physical address descriptions and lat/long becomes a little more fraught. We described road restrictions as being "on the road that is found between X1,Y1 and X2,Y2." A separate layer would snap those X,Y coordinates to the road network and find the road between them. Before the move, that meant converting to "Highway 6 Southbound from milemarker 16 to milemarker 28"
But when you moved the world, X1,Y1 no longer landed on Highway 6, and instead snapped over to the frontage road. Your restriction now read as "Highway 6 Southbound, down to exit 21, around the corner to the frontage road, then down the frontage road". And your restriction that used to say "stay off this one section of road" now says "stay off the highway, the frontage road, and don't use this exit."