John Hanke and Jack Dangermond on the evolution of the GeoWeb.
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James Fee - jfee@weogeo.com
James works for WeoGeo helping people organize, share and monetize their geo-content.
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James Fee - jfee@weogeo.com
James works for WeoGeo helping people organize, share and monetize their geo-content.
8 Comments
Jack Dangermond demo-ing Google Earth on stage at Where: two years ago that would’ve been unthinkable. Remember going to ESRI functions where GE was the interface who’s name dare not be uttered?
Brian
Better to bend in the breeze than be blown over
Looks great! Can’t wait for ESRI to get 9.3 to the street…
But, Google is not equivalent to geospatial beyond the display of content model… the fire line projection wasn’t cranked out by anything Google created — nor was the evacuation routes determined by any process Google created… sure they were visualized in a great looking mapping app… but, Google blow over ESRI….?
Google is running away from KML (OGC’s the new steward of that concept), so, I doubt they’re going to be in it long enough to erode much of the GIS market.
We are getting RC1 of 9.3 in the mail the next few days, looking forward to setting up the PostGRESQL ArcSDE and playing around with it a bit. Looks like it may be a viable option for establishing servers at some of our remote locations. Also looking forward to Google and VE data use in ArcMap.
“But, Google is not equivalent to geospatial beyond the display of content model… the fire line projection wasn’t cranked out by anything Google created — nor was the evacuation routes determined by any process Google created… sure they were visualized in a great looking mapping app… but, Google blow over ESRI….?”
The analysis tools used to create that stuff didn’t necessarily require an ESRI product either. It seems to me – and I do not deny that I am a novice – the one feature not relatively easily to replicate in that demo was the search, which is only going to become more important if/when the Glorious Future of Geoweb presented here (where governments and private firms freely share their data and there is tons of it to look though) becomes reality.
It goes without saying if you are the most popular search engine in the world, you have quite the incentive to encourage everyone possible to put everything they can online. Almost anything Google does can be traced back to this motivation.
I think this is a smart move by ESRI. One they should have made long ago.
9.3 will either make or break them.
@AC77 I don’t think 9.3 will make or break ESRI. I do think that ESRI is close to loosing or has lost the battle for the delivery mechanism of data to the general public (not that they had much chance when going against Google or Microsoft – or that they were ever really trying to compete with them). Google and VE need data produced in GIS editing applications like those from ESRI. The content has to come from somewhere. Far better for Google and MS to let ESRI develop the software for the creation of geographic data as they have a very strong presence in this market space (at least for the foreseeable future). Now the delivery of that data to the general public is a whole other kettle of fish.
It seems to me that this relationship just replaces geographynetwork.com and geodata.gov search and index of metadata from ESRI’s Server network. ESRI gets out of the search and indexing business (which it was paid a lot for in the case of geospatial one-stop) and stays focused on its >50,000 Servers and their annual maintenance fee.
It is a smart move, but is there anything new other than a better search and discovery mechanism of the network of ArcGIS Servers?