Not that I want to get all bent about someone having a different opinion than I have, but I think that Marc is missing one important thing when he says:
Dave Bouwman completely misses the nail – that Google and Microsoft’s entry into the mapping services game is potential bad news for ESRI derives from the fact that a HUGE GIS market/opportunity has just been swiped from ESRI (being the dominent GIS vendor)…
(this is from a comment over on James Fee’s “Spatially Adjusted” blog.)
Here’s the rub – in order for ESRI to have “lost” this huge market/opportunity, they need to have been in the running to “win” it. I contend they were not for (at least) one reason: Cost.
While ESRI is the 800 pound gorilla of the GIS industry, it’s small potatoes when compared with Google & Microsoft, both of whom are awash in captial. To the tune of billions of dollars. While I’m not totally dialed into the “Google Earth / Maps” conversation, I’ll go as far as to say that getting it likely cost serveral 10′s of millions of dollars. We can see that having deep pockets is the crux of the matter by looking at KeyHole. They had the underlying technology before joining Google, yet they were not able to cause this “paradigm shift” because they could not support the infrastructure / bandwidth / data acquistion costs to give it away. And the only reason we are discussing this at all is the fact that it’s free.
While ESRI may have the kind of cash to get something like this off the ground, I expect that they would want to see a return on the investment. To date, we really don’t see how Google is making this pay. Maybe I’m wrong, and everyone else is constantly clicking on ad links, but it seems to me that ads can may work for relatively low-cost services like email or search. The main cost for these services is server cycles, disk space, and a little bandwidth (per request). Google Earth is rather different because the data that drives it is very costly (i.e. you can’t harvest it by crawling the net, or cooking up some cool algorithms). Having worked at Space Imaging, and now Sanborn (both are data providers for Google Earth), I can tell you the data is not cheap – even when buying in bulk. And it’s not a one time cost – you need to keep it current. How much flak did Microsoft take because the data on Virtual Earth covering Apple headquarters was out of date and did not show the building? (link is to a great conspiracy theory that Microsoft “deleted” Apple!).
Then, once you have the data, you need to serve it – to millions of users. Bandwidth may be cheap, but it ain’t free. Think about it like this – how much more bandwidth (a “raw material” cost to the provider) does it take for an average Google Earth session vs. the average GMail session? So – once you have the technology, you need serious cash to run it. While this may pan out in the end (I’m not a luddite, proposing that Google Earth will fail, and we’ll all go back to old-school workstation ArcInfo on a fridge sized VAX mini computers) the resources required to create the “market” and ride it out until location based search/services starts to generate big returns is beyond the reach of ESRI (in my opinion). Thus, I would say that Google and Microsoft have created the opportunity – driven by their belief that location based services will pan out for them, and in the resulting increase in public “geospatial awareness” will help the entire geospatial industry in the long run.That said, I hope that Google Earth does become one of the main data visualization tools – because I rocks – and the price is right.
Finally, I’ve heard from a few people that from time to time this site does not load – regardless of the browser being used. While it’s true it does not validate, it does work in all browsers I’ve tried, and I’ve got more interesting things to do that fiddle with it. I happen to use FireFox, and the site loads just fine for me, but if anyone does experience problems getting to the site or accessing the RSS/ATOM feeds, please let me know so I can hassle my hosting company. Email: (dave @ davebouwman dot com)
