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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | RE: GISList: ArcView vs MapInfo vs Manifold |
| Date: |
08/28/2002 11:00:37 AM |
| From: |
McCann, Michael J. (Mike) |
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Dimitri,
All the fuss is not about trade pubs and advertisers (which by the way, you
were off base on commenting about).
Much of the fuss, and include me in this, is that you frequently use this
list as a sales pitch for Manifold, telling folks such things as "the
obvious choice...", "Manifold is definitely the way to go", etc., etc.
Further, you blabber on about things in this business that are:
A) Intuitively obvious at an elementary level
B) Off the mark (in facts and conclusions)
C) Full of hot air
I see many of the recent postings having issues with your presentation of
issues, rather than the issues themselves. Additionally, you degrade
companies for their sales, advertising, or marketing efforts, yet you use
this list (and your time, for which I assume you get paid for) to basically
try and sell Manifold.
I'm an independent user, using products from Caliper, ESRI, and others.
Maptitude and TransCAD are excellent products and in the case of Maptitude,
cost very little more than Manifold. Although I'm satisfied with Caliper's
products, I don't sit around spewing that everyone should own them. On the
other hand, you frequently do this even when a list member is not asking
which software is better.
Like I said in a past posting, every product has a product manager,
thankfully, however, they don't spend their timing babbling away on list
servers.
-----Original Message-----
From: Dimitri Rotow [mailto:dar@manifold.net]
Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2002 11:05 AM
To: gislist@geocomm.com
Subject: RE: GISList: ArcView vs MapInfo vs Manifold
> This is just more selfserving drivel and sour milk from Manifold. You do
> great disservice to your company and associates. I have to wonder
> just what
> Manifold expects to gain from this....
Neil,
I don't see what all the fuss is about. The original posting in this thread
sought a three-way review of some products of interest to the GIS community.
I posted a response pointing out the practical difficulties, that in-depth
reviews are very time consuming and costly, and that the trade press has to
pay attention to its advertisers.
I'm surprised the latter banal assertion would stir up emotions as it did,
but I don't see how continued debate about journalistic ideals and economics
serves the GIS community. There are other lists for that.
The big issue continues to be the practical difficulty of reviewing large,
comprehensive, complex products in sufficient detail to be useful to the GIS
community. That's something we as a GIS community can do something about.
I suggest a positive step would be to follow the thread that got started
about creating a comprehensive capabilities matrix.
If several people get involved taking leadership roles there is no reason
why the task cannot be chopped up into smaller, manageable sub-tasks. For
example, you could have one person enumerate all database capabilities,
another reporting on all graphics art image manipulation features, a third
on remote sensing capabilities, a fourth on GPS interfaces, a fifth on the
capabilities of the built-in Internet Map Server, and so on.
I'd find it overwhelming to try to enumerate a capabilities matrix with many
hundreds of features, but just a hundred or so image/raster operations would
certainly be doable. All I need is a leader to assign me my part of it.
I'd bet that the different GIS vendors would cooperate in such a program in
the GIS community if a (neutral) leader stepped forth to organize it.
Surely, there are representatives of academic institutions doing GIS
research who would be interested in such a thing, or perhaps GeoComm or
other entity could help coordinate. We'd be happy to provide free licenses
to support such a community evaluation effort.
Cheers,
Dimitri
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