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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Subject: | RE: GISList: Re: Effective Standards |
| Date: |
04/30/2003 04:35:01 PM |
| From: |
Dimitri Rotow |
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> And you just happen to work for Manifold. What a coincidence!
> -CN
>
Not at all. Would it be likely that I would point out more modern, better
value approaches than ArcIMS if I worked for ESRI? :-)
By the way, you asked a specific question to which I owed you the courtesy
of an accurate reply. It's an utterly silly thing (political correctness
run amuck) to think that someone should somehow feel obliged to refrain from
mentioning a product they well know answers the question just because it is
made by their employer.
> > systems (see Dimitri's last paragraph). It just depends. But Mapserver?
> > Compared to what?
> >
>
In terms of completeness, I should point out that there are rapidly emerging
other software packages besides Manifold that use the power of modern
approaches (eg, applications integrated with web serving capability for
lower cost, higher performance and usually lower life-cycle costs) to do web
serving in GIS.
Microsoft's $250 MapPoint, for example, probably is powering more "geography
enabled" web sites than any other software today. GIS purists will insist
that MapPoint really isn't a GIS, but if you look at the content of many
"Internet map server" sites these days it is clear one can do many such
sites with MapPoint. For example, there are lots of vehicle tracking
applications done with MapPoint.
Another example might be Caliper, which certainly has a better
price/performance approach to map serving than ESRI.
Now, I'm not saying that you can use MapPoint or Caliper in all situations
where you can use either ArcIMS or the Minnesota mapserver, just as there
are no doubt things you can do in MapPoint or Caliper that cannot be done in
ArcIMS or MMS. But, to get back to the original theme of this thread
(standards), one thing Microsoft absolutely has achieved with MapPoint is to
get probably 100 times the audience of ArcIMS and MMS put together to think
in terms of Microsoft standards for geography-enabling web sites. In our
little world of GIS here on this list we have people who automatically think
"ArcIMS" as a "standard" but out there in the real world when 100 times as
many people think "Microsoft," well, I'd have to say that in terms of sheer
numbers if 99% of users think the way they do then Microsoft is well on its
way to establishing a more genuine "standard" than that adoped by 1% of the
users.
Microsoft accomplished that with a well-crafted product sold for such a low
cost that few people would try to reinvent the wheel from the ground up.
For that matter, if you look at the sheer quality and professionalism
evident in a commercial product like MapPoint it's clear that in comparison
the "open" stuff seems, well, somewhat rough around the edges and behind the
times. No wonder if the commercial stuff is fairly priced ($250 for
MapPoint is a great deal), people would rather buy the commercial stuff than
re-invent the wheel with open source.
Let me emphasize once more that I'm not "against" open source... whether or
not open source software makes more or less sense than commercial
alternatives has to be considered on a case by case basis and varies from
user to user. However, in the case of GIS applications and map servers I
think that for most people in most applications there are commercial
products that make more sense than MMS.
Cheers,
Dimitri
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