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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Subject: | Re: GISList: Compressed Terrain Data |
| Date: |
01/07/2003 11:20:56 AM |
| From: |
Cameron Crum |
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So I guess my obviously rhetorical question would be after all this....why don't
you make the Manifold product open source and give it away? Like you, we have
spent years developing software (in a different but related industry) and this
new compression technique came out of it by necessity. We believe that the
product is a higher quality product than what is available for free and its size
makes it attractive to people who need large amounts of this type of data on
their machine. In my line of work, I frequently do work in the field on a laptop
and simply can't spare an extra few gigs of space just to store all the terrain
data I need. Also, the quads will certainly be affordable at $0.50 per quad. I
believe this meets all your criteria for GIS...high quality, affordable, and
professional.
Cameron
Dimitri Rotow wrote:
> > So, assuming you have been churning away at this capacity (and it is
> > pretty nice, $13.5M per year gross) for seven years, and have never sold
> > to the same person twice, that would put the total number of users at
> > 385000. Right in the meaty part of the "hundreds of thousands" figure
> > you are so vociferously disputing.
> >
> > One would think having "only" hundreds of thousands of users was a bad
> > thing, the way you talk :)
>
> I guess it is to the likes of Microsoft :-) but very appealing for us. As
> you've pointed out in your analysis one doesn't really have to sell very
> many units before the money starts piling up in worthwhile amounts.
>
> Look, my whole intent in all of this is trying to change the mindset of the
> GIS industry, to help people wake up to what is going on around them. I
> lived through the annihilation of minicomputers in the late 1980's and I
> could see the real pain that the extinction of minicomputers caused for my
> friends who were working in those companies. I also saw the
> self-marginalization of a lot of really talented technical people as they
> responded to the PC challenge by turning away, by cocooning themselves in
> UNIX dreams, by finding refuge in ever-dwindling sales of very expensive
> stuff to ever smaller numbers of minicomputer buyers.
>
> I don't want that to happen to the people I know in GIS. There is a lot of
> accumulated experience and ideas that I would like to see transferred to the
> new wave of products and methods. Part of that is waking people up who are
> in GIS today to think about the big scale of what's really going on. That's
> necessary if the people who read this list are to migrate to a central role
> in the GIS world of tomorrow, instead of it being defined by the people who
> read the MapPoint and DeLorme lists. If you think I'm kidding ask yourself
> how it is that today all those people who learned in UNIX to say "directory"
> and write paths with a "/" character now get to live a life surrounded by
> "folders" and writing paths with a "" character instead, because it was the
> DOS and Windows masses who ended up setting the standards 94% of the world
> uses. [For the record, I am one of the guys who still wishes I could write
> paths with a "/".]. If you ignore the masses, better be ready to practise
> saying the word "pushpin" a lot.
>
> Anyway, part of that mindset in GIS that needs to be changed is the
> expectation of small unit volumes sold at stratospheric prices. That's a
> formula for marginalization and for keeping out of the mainstream. I was
> writing in opposition to the "hundreds *or* thousands" phrase used in the
> previous posting (not "hundreds of thousands"). That the phrase would be
> used by an experienced GIS person shows how small the expectations are for
> unit volumes in classic GIS, where it is still routine to have packages that
> sell only a few hundred units for $50,000 or $100,000 each. We need to
> change that to where all of us *expect* hundreds of thousands of units and
> where the high-volume attitude I'm preaching is business as usual for
> everyone, not a radical exception. That is the way to get reach into
> mainstream markets. That will be good for GIS and very lucrative for
> everyone reading this list regardless of how those higher volumes get
> divided up into our personal revenue streams.
>
> As they say, "A rising tide lifts all boats," so let's get out of this small
> numbers thing and start pushing GIS out into mainstream numbers. The first
> step in that process is that we GIS people reading this list lead the pack
> in demanding affordable, high quality, professional GIS applications
> delivered at the price/performance ratios people take for granted in
> mains
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