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| Subject: | RE: GISList: OGC and Standards, - a response |
| Date: |
01/07/2003 11:20:54 AM |
| From: |
Dimitri Rotow |
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>
> Its quite obvious you have your opinions. A point by point
> rebuttal is not
> productuve given the positions you have taken, so I'll exercise
If the points (like those you make below) lead to reasonable discussion, how
can you not discuss them except point by point?
>
> 1. I am actually quite familiar with your product and have
> purchased it and
> subsequent upgrades since version 3.5 or so. I find it easy to use and
> quite effective for the price. However, it would be easy to say that
> Manifold's .map is reminiscent of MS Access .mdb and all the associated
> problems with holding everything into single file. It would also
> be easy to
> say the having to import a .map file to extract a component such
> as a script
> to reuse it in another .map file is stupid. I can also say that Manifold's
It would be stupid, which is why Manifold does not require you to do that.
You could use Enterprise Edition, for example, to save the script within an
Enterprise server. In Professional Edition you could also import the
component without having to import the entire .map file. [Use File -
Import - Component]
> documentation is quite lacking in examples when it comes to automating
> processes. My point is that all software has flaws or annoyances. The
That's because the examples of automating processes are given mainly on the
web page for such things, since web pages are more easily expanded after the
fact than the documentation published on CD. See, for example,
http://www.manifold.net/products/freestuff.html
> implementation of GML is not optimized for compact data storage, in fact
> most vendors use it as a lingua franca between systems and not as native
> objects. Because GML is XML, we can integrate easily into
> business systems,
> EAI, and modern information buses such as Tibco. Having designed and
> deployed many enterprise-wide systems, I can say that the proprietary data
> formats employed by GIS systems are what drives the cost of integration.
> GIS systems are that 20% of the system that ends up costing the most to
> integrate.
So, why on Earth does GML have to be so inefficient? There's no rule that
says a lingua franca has to be bloated and inefficient. If anything, when
interchanging data between systems you don't want the communications method
to be twenty times slower than it could be, given sensible engineering
design.
>
> 2. I have read Manifold's position paper and it makes sense if the entire
> geospatial market is just for GIS specialists. However that market is
> saturated with lots of powerful desktop products, Manifold included.
> Companies such as CDA (Manifold), Caliper, etc. combined don't even make a
> 1% dent in Daratech or Gartner market reports. There will always
We don't participate in either the Daratech or Gartner market reports and
they don't research our markets so they have no idea how many units Manifold
sells. As far as I know, those reports only measure a) what the GIS vendors
tell them and b) a very limited amount of their own research within
"visible" vendors, all of whom for many years have already been committed to
ESRI or other legacy vendors.
This is, by the way, apparently the same "research" report methodology that
completely cloaked the PC revolution at the time of the minicomputer
extinction event. Research firms made the rounds of well-known minicomputer
users to ask them what sort of minicomputers they planned to buy, and they
incorporated market sector reports from mincomputer vendors. That's
wonderful if you want to know how the relative share is shifting between DEC
and Data General, but it does nothing to identify the rise of companies like
Dell that wipe out the minicomputers.
The dynamics of market change happening now in GIS are very, very similar to
how PCs wiped out minicomputers. Just as in that great shift the last
people to switch to PCs were those with the greatest commitment to
minicomputers, in the current shift to GIS the last people to use modern GIS
techology will be those with the greatest commitment to older architectures.
It makes sense, since the last thing someone who has invested a few thousand
dollars per seat with ESRI will admit is that they can get all that and more
for under $250 a seat.
As for new markets, there are vast numbers of people entering GIS from
Microsoft Office markets. None of the legacy vendors have anything to sell
to those people since all of those new entrants expect a high end
application to cost well under $500 and more likely under $250. As you can
imagine, there are many more people who will buy a high end GIS application
for under $250 than will pay $1,500 to $50,000.
It's true that our dollar volumes are lower per sale, just like it was true
that a PC cost much less than a VAX minicomputer, b
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