Does the GeoWeb Need a Bailout?
December 9th, 2008by Sean Gorman
About the Author: Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users.
Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this authorWith the news hitting the papers today that the Big Three are going to get a $15 Billion bailout – I had to ask the question does the GeoWeb need a bailout? Detroit has a broken business model and the GeoWeb needs a business model, so I figure we are in similar circumstances.
Joking aside I’m curious how various GeoWeb companies have been feeling the economic crunch. I’ve been waiting for the shoe to drop on our sales pipeline, but surprisingly we’ve only had one prospect put a deal on hold because of the economic climate. Are other start ups seeing similar trends or have we just been lucky thus far? I doubt we’ll get much insight, but does anyone have scoop on our Big Three (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft)? The few cuts at Google have been widely publicized – especially the shuttering of their virtual world – Lively. Yahoo! has been making cuts for a while, but recently announced laying off an additional 2,000 employees. Microsoft has been laying off in much smaller numbers – most recently removing 40 employees from recently acquired aQuantive? None of this is GeoWeb specific, and I am very curious if anyone has scoop along those lines. I’d have to guess there is a much bigger focus on revenue generation, and building community and eyeballs has decreased as a priority.
So is it sink or swim time for the GeoWeb? Find a business model or go home? Will this result in consolidation in the market place? More start ups turning to government dollars to keep the lights on? Will all the government bailout funding to broken business models (financial and manufacturing) mean a down turn in innovation? Capital markets have dried up, VC’s are skiddish, many customer budgets are frozen, and no bailouts for SMB’s or start ups etc. etc. Or does this mean leaner start ups focused on revenue generating products “that matter“?
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December 12th, 2008 at 5:55 am
Don’t Bail anybody out!!
Bailing someone out means taking from someone else that did not over gear themselves.
If you want to help anybody out do it through reduced taxes, healthcare, and debt counseling. Not through corporate molly codling. Let those companies die and new ones will form where the old ones crumble. It’s called evolution. We are not feeding T-Rex’s in Cages now are we?
I have a small business that I started with nothing as I could not secure bank loans and overdrafts etc.
I have built it up to be successful and spawned two other businesses.
I am dam sure when (if) it comes to bailing out anything to do with my business it will be me that is doing it for myself and I will be stronger for it.
n.b.I am looking for part time “project based” developers paid on completion of the project that have experience in the Geo-web space with JavaScript and database experience to work on projects around Google earth.
I Live and operate my business in South Africa and we have not been affected by the downturn as much as the US.
Please send CV and links to examples of what experience you have and I will be glad to help you get through the tough road ahead.
Mark
December 12th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Don’t Bail anybody out!!
Bailing someone out means taking from someone else that did not over gear themselves.
If you want to help anybody out do it through reduced taxes, healthcare, and debt counseling. Not through corporate molly codling. Let those companies who traded recklessly or who did not evolve with the changing time die and new ones will form where the old ones crumble. It’s called evolution. We are not feeding T-Rex’s in Cages now are we?
I have a small business that I started with nothing as I could not secure bank loans and overdrafts etc.
I have built it up to be successful and spawned two other businesses.
I am dam sure when (if) it comes to bailing out anything to do with my business it will be me that is doing it for myself and I will be stronger for it.
n.b.I am looking for part time “project based” developers paid on completion of the project that have experience in the Geo-web space with JavaScript and database experience to work on projects around Google earth KML and the Chart API
I Live and operate my business in South Africa and we have not been affected by the downturn as much as the US.
Please send CV and links to examples of what experience you have and I will be glad to help you get through the tough road ahead.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Sean, you should learn something about software and GIS before you write such utterly stupid blog posts.
GIS is booming. There is more demand for it than ever before, and those companies which are creating modern GIS software have more business than ever. Living fossil legacy companies, which create obsolete GIS software that does less and cost 20 times more than modern software are getting killed by modern competitors, especially so since tough economic times encourage legacy buyers for the first time to think about moving to more modern software. That’s how competition helps new entrants evolve industries forward.
Oh, and all this moronic “geoweb” stuff doesn’t work for real-life GIS, either. That may not have been obvious to script kiddies and Ponzi-scheme web investors, but it has been painfully obvious for years to people who actually do GIS. Real-life GIS buyers want high performance, full-featured, bigtime, professional GIS software at a desktop price.
So wake up and learn something about modern GIS software, and how people actually use it. In modern times, GIS users expect to have fully 64-bit GIS that runs multicore with the latest Windows edition and that fully integrates rasters, vectors, spatial DBMS and every format imagineable and they expect to buy that for around $300. Modern GIS companies that provide such stuff are making tons of money.
All those living fossils that are trying to charge thousands of dollars a seat are going to go out of business, just like anyone dumb enough to try to sell a cassette tape player in a world of iPods. You’re not going to wring your hands and suggest that there should be a bailout for cassette tape player manufacturers, are you? How about suggesting that anyone dumb enough to try to sell one of those old-fashioned “brick” luggable portable phones should be bailed out because they can’t compete with a modern cell phone? Or maybe you think guys who bet the farm on a revival of 5.25″ floppy disks should get a bailout too?
December 12th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Wow – I’d heard the tales of your attacks Dimitri. Good to see reality stacks up to legend. FYI I’m talking about the GeoWeb not GIS. The GIS business model is well established – whether it will stand the test of time in the future is another debate. Glad to have your opinion along those lines.
If it was not completely obvious my tongue was planted firmly in cheek when it comes to a bailout. Really just curious as to how the economic down turn is affecting folks in the community. Glad to see in at least two cases it is still going well.
I will now go back to writing my next utterly stupid blog post.
December 12th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Look, let me say that while I do indeed find your posts dumb almost beyond belief I admire your sense of graphics arts style. If you have had anything to do with the samples at FortiusOne you are to be complimented, as they are both beautiful and effective. Presenting information with such cartographic elegance, good choice of color and sophisticated restraint is rare. I’ve copied them to my friends in design and engineering departments as examples to be emulated.
But, frankly, your reply to my comment was totally unfair and evasive in the same way that makes your posts ultimately dumb, a paradox from what is obviously an intelligent person.
This “tongue in cheek” bit I can see now in retrospect, but it is off the mark given the news of the day, the words you chose for your headline and first paragraph, as well as the news of layoffs at MapInfo and TeleAtlas. Anyone in the geospatial community will have an impaired sense of irony based upon empathy with their peers who are enduring those layoffs, especially in upstate New York where very few jobs are to be had.
Most have also heard the reports circulating through the GIS community that some legacy companies are sounding their federal contacts about the possibility of special assistance, so this too lends a certain tangibility to the possibility of bailouts.
I suppose I should have detected the irony you intended. But I’m not the only one who missed it, as the other poster also missed it and the editors of directionsmag.com, who cited your blog post as the first discussion of a bailout in the industry, also missed it. But I accept your intent and wish I had seen it. Let’s move on.
I also think your attempt to make an artificial distinction between what you call the “GeoWeb” and “GIS” is totally lame, especially dumb, and more than just a little hypocritical. You can’t benefit from all this GIS stuff you are attempting to do and then deny it.
You’re not at all shy about describing yourself and your “GeoWeb” riff in your about page at http://blog.fortiusone.com/about/ – it’s clear you mean “GIS” lock, stock and barrel in what you have going, and just as clear you want the “web” imprimateur to avoid being judged by the same tough reality-based standards normally applied to GIS. After all, even ESRI doesn’t get away with taking money just for waving their hands about.
I can’t blame you for that evasive interplay of web stuff and reality-based GIS, as it is a time-honored strategy to confuse lightweight investors or customers by prefixing a “web” word in front of whatever lame thing they’ve cobbled up if it cannot stand on its own. Been going on that way since the dot com era pioneered it, after all.
But for all your “GeoWeb” ambiguity, this talk about “bridging GIS and the web” or “delivering lightweight GIS functionality” or the visual evidence of delivering cartographic displays that convey the information content of data sets (as you show) all boils down to simply doing a lukewarm job of delivering GIS functionality but using a web-centric approach to do that. In fairness, you do point out it is “lightweight.”
But because it is an attempt to make money by doing GIS things for value, everything I wrote in my comment applies with even greater force to the GIS activities you appear to describe as “GeoWeb” stuff. Be it “GeoWeb” or “GIS” my post responded to the questions you posed as well as to the general theme of bailouts in this time of recession.
Recessions have a way of sharpening people’s intention to get good value for their money. During recessions people cut out the nonsense and are less forgiving of smoke and mirrors and want to see real functionality, maximum performance and maximum capability at the lowest possible price. They’re not going to pay for weaker stuff just because it is delivered in a timeshared manner via the web. Can’t blame them.
I think you realize that. Based on your comments, “So is it sink or swim time for the GeoWeb? Find a business model or go home?” I think it is clear you have the insight to realize that telling people that whatever it is in the “GeoWeb” it is not enough.
Likewise, as plenty of investors who have been fleeced by web promoters are starting to realize, people who actually buy products that solve serious problems involving geospatial information have in mind something more than the loose talk one finds in the web GIS world. Real buyers want more than whatever consumer web trinket a high school script kiddie can mashup in between bong hits. It is no accident that despite the collectivist ardor for a return to time sharing via webstuff that people who have invested into “geo” web fantasies are losing their shirts.
It’s just like the original dot com crash, when it became clear that just being on the web didn’t make it smart and didn’t automatically result in the survival of something that otherwise had no business reason for being and no way of making profit.
This return to time sharing that seems to be a common chord in your “GeoWeb” talk is also strikingly backwards from a technological perspective, because a thousand people sharing one processor is not going to be remotely as fast as a thousand processors devoted to a single user as happens in the modern desktop. There’s a reason people abandoned time-sharing many years ago, you know.
I apologize for the “utterly dumb” comment by the way. That was rude.
December 13th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Sounds like Dimitri is like many others who talk big (and rude) behind their avatars. For someone so informed and judgemental you seem to have a lot of time to trash-talk blogs that you find ‘utterly dumb’. If you’re as insightful as your perceive yourself to be I figure you’d be in demand and too busy to waste your time writing responses that are longer than the blogs themselves. That to me sounds … what was the word you used?
I do agree that the ‘dinosaurs’ don’t see the writing on the wall and I eagerly wait for their day to come but until then when you find this magic GIS package you mention for $300 please let us know.
December 15th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Hi Dimitri – thanks for the compliments on GeoCommons and Maker. We’ll have more to show soon and look forward to your thoughts on it.
best,
sean
December 15th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Colin, if you don’t find my comments insightful you are free to ignore them. The last thing I want is that someone benefits from my insights who does not respect them.
Speaking of which…
“I do agree that the ‘dinosaurs’ don’t see the writing on the wall and I eagerly wait for their day to come but until then when you find this magic GIS package you mention for $300 please let us know.”
There are plenty of those. If you are doing GIS and you don’t know who they are, you are burning bushels of money unnecessarily for low price/performance, a risky thing to be doing in time of extreme recession.
In case you haven’t read the news, heads are rolling and the first heads to get lopped off are those who are burning cash for no good reason. If you are part of some organization, at a minimum you need a very credible story how you are going to wring more productivity out of less cash and how you will end the bleeding from recurrent maintenance fees that get you nothing.
I suggest folks not yet plugged into the new technology do their own homework, as they’ll respect what they learn all the more and the process of exploring new possibilities will be useful in itself as a learning experience. It will also lead to being more informed, so when you make the case to your management how keeping you around is a key part of getting more for the organization’s money, you’ll be believed.
December 17th, 2008 at 12:45 am
Well considered response Dimitri. You do have some good points. I was expecting to see you come back over the top but you took the high-road and made some insightful comments.
As an aside here in Canada we’ve thought ourselves somewhat immune to the recent vagaries of the US economy but the day of reckoning is drawing nigh. It makes me wonder how many GIS initiatives will become unnecessary luxuries in the not to distant future. Seems like the real envelope pushers of late have been on the API end with Google, AJAX and such. Hard to know how things will play out when the dust settles sometimes between the ‘dinosaurs’ and some of the open-source applications that held so much promise a few years ago.
As far as those not in the know doing their homework it just seems so far out of the reach of comprehension of some ‘average’ GIS practitioners. I’ve started to see a trend of some people stepping away from GIS as they feel they simply can’t keep pace with the evolution of the technology and don’t see their place in the ‘new world order’. GIS dinosaur practitioners?
December 18th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
“I’ve started to see a trend of some people stepping away from GIS as they feel they simply can’t keep pace with the evolution of the technology and don’t see their place in the ‘new world order’. GIS dinosaur practitioners?”
Well, I don’t think users are to blame but their GIS vendors sure are if they are not doing their jobs keeping up with technology. Your GIS vendor should be doing that for you.
A second factor is that some entrepreneurs who really don’t have the chops or resources to create big-time new GIS solutions are spinning fantasies about new things that end up beating users to death because those fantasies just aren’t real. In neither case is it really the users’ fault.
Let’s consider the first factor, GIS vendors not keeping up with technology:
Users want their GIS package to keep getting faster, higher capacity, more reliable, more capable, easier to use, better connected to related technology of the day and always becoming a better deal, offering better price/performance. That’s the deal and any GIS vendor wanting to sell product better be able to do that for their customers.
All that can be accomplished in a way that doesn’t victimize users if the package keeps up with technology. The problem is that some vendors aren’t keeping up with technology and instead are trying to solve their own political and competitive market problems by victimizing their users.
Let’s take a technology example: it’s been five years since basic PC technology went 64-bit and multicore. The easiest, most reliable and lowest cost way to get more capacity and performance out of that 64-bit desktop hardware that you’ve probably already paid for is to run 64-bit GIS applications in 64-bit Windows. That takes no change whatsoever in how users approach what they are doing, no new learning whatsoever except to sit back and enjoy faster performance with greater capacity and more reliability in your application and in Windows. If your GIS vendor does their job then your gain is transparent to what you are doing.
Likewise with the multicore thing. These days a quad core processor is about the same price as a dual core, and it is almost impossible to buy just a single core any more. The new Core i7 systems can effectively give the performance of 8 threads/cores at just a slight cost increment over a quad core. But can your GIS package take advantage of those cores?
If your vendor is doing their job you don’t have to change anything about how you operate your GIS package, because the performance gains from running multicore in 2, 4 or 8 threads and the performance gains running 64-bit is transparent to what you are doing.
Another technology example might be CUDA: if your vendor supports CUDA you get supercomputer speed just by plugging in some $200 card and not have to make any change whatsoever in how you do GIS. It’s the vendor’s job to make it possible to take advantage of that new technology in a transparent way, not your job to suffer because they can’t figure out the obvious.
Let’s take a politics/marketing example: Suppose your GIS vendor doesn’t know how to compete on the desktop anymore. Like most users, you just want to keep doing things the way you know how, using those shapefiles or whatever, keeping the workflow going as it’s been – you just want it faster and more reliable and lower cost.
Well, suppose because your GIS vendor doesn’t know how to compete with better pricing on the desktop they announce you are going to have to drop all that and re-write everything you are doing to revolve around a server-side product, say, like ArcGIS Server. Wonderful. Now you’ve got to change everything about the way you do GIS and learn a whole new suite of skills based on the speculative prospect that cobbling up a bunch of new and likely custom systems running server-side instead of on the desktops that everyone understands just might be… what? As fast as the experience you are giving up? Less costly? ..what? What’s in it for you? Zigging every six months when whatever geodatabase format is supposed to be zags?
It’s clear why the vendor is pushing you that way, because they want to keep you locked in their silo so they don’t have to compete with more agile, more modern players. But if there’s nothing in it for you but transition pain and then an uncertain future, well, in that case it is not GIS dinosaur practitioners that is the problem, it is the negative effects on perfectly hip, rightfully self-interested GIS users by dinosaur GIS vendors that is the problem!
It’s your vendor’s job to keep up with technology on your behalf. If they aren’t doing that, sure, it’s a hassle to experiment with other vendors. But it sure beats heck out of the consequences to you if your GIS vendor falls behind the power curve and expects you to make up the difference by putting your cash and your job at risk.
How about that second factor, entrepreneurs spinning fantasies that don’t do squat for real GIS but end up torturing users who buy into those fantasies?
Well, there’s no end of that going around. It starts with people who have psychiatric problems about Windows who talk nonsense about GIS users dropping their drawers and getting their, um, wallets cleaned out by teams that want to do endless Linux development using open source with the GIS user’s money. Yes, if you step into the wonderful world of endless software development using “free” software you too will end up feeling like you can’t keep pace with the evolution of the technology.
You’ll feel that way because in truth you won’t be able to keep up. One of the many fantasies of open source development is that it is “free,” when in truth few things cost as much as folks doing their own software development. When people write their own code they’ll need a huge budget to keep up with the massive software output that can be accomplished by a large, full-time professional team hammering away night and day in pursuit of personal wealth.
Another set of fantasies arises from the confusing nonsense one encounters on so many “geo” web sites written by people who don’t actually do any GIS. Go read any of the ezines and you’ll wonder why the columnists rant on about iPhones and such in supposedly GIS ezines.
You could forgive yourself for wondering if you are missing evolution somehow for not realizing that GIS as you know it is ending because everyone is going to click away at some consumer geolocation mashup on their iPhone, as if a tiny screen like that is just the most perfect thing in the world for maintaining, say, your county’s parcel map.
Well, the reason those columnists write idiocy about iPhones instead of sensible, detaild discussion of GIS is that they don’t actually do any GIS and in most cases would have no clue how to actually launch a GIS package or do anything productive with it if you sat them down to a computer keyboard. So instead they write drivel about industry trends and dumb consumer toys that they can play with.
But that has nothing at all to do with the evolution of GIS technology, so GIS users shouldn’t blame themselves if it doesn’t do anything for their core problem of doing their GIS work faster, more reliably and at lower cost.
One last thing: one of the truly awful factors that led to the dot com crash and is now leading to a geo web crash is that there is very little barrier to entry to cobbling up a web site that does some geo mashup thingy wiht Virtual Earth or Google Earth. Low barriers to entry mean anyone can appear to be playing but it also means that just about any goofy idea can appear to have traction when in fact it is darned near useless to real life GIS practitioners.
Creating real GIS applications is extremely difficult. Users are rightfully demanding, and to satisfy those demands anyone proposing to launch a new GIS software package better be prepared to finance a team that can create tens of millions of lines of code in a sophisticated effort that will continue non-stop for years. It is tens of millions of lines, by the way, because even if your actual package is only a million or two million lines of code you are going to have to write it and rewrite it in a continuous evolutionary process to keep it fresh and powerful during the several years it will take you to get traction. Very few have the resources to do that.
That is phenomenally much more costly and more difficult than appearing to do something via the web. At the same time, even after the dot com crash there’s a lot of easy money to be made fleecing investors with web stories. After all, everyone wants to invest in the next Google, but few are the investors who realize that Google has lost billions of dollars at everything it has done except the original simple innovation of doing what are in effect text classified ads in a search business. So they are quick to glom onto things that make no money but which have a Google panache.
Whenever I’m at investor conferences it is inevitably the case that I’ll run into some guy who wants to “invest into the next Google Earth.” You should see their faces when I ask “why would you want to lose billions of dollars as Google Earth has lost?”
So yeah, given all the above I can see how some folks might worry about keeping pace. Don’t worry. Do what you need to do and if your GIS vendor can’t keep up, dump them and hire someone who can do the job you need. If something sounds totally dumb, like some ezine columnist telling you that geotagging on the iPhone is, like, the most wonderful thing he or she has, like, ever heard of, tell them you’ve got real business to take care of involving city parcel maps or whatever and you’re just looking for a lower cost, more reliable, real life way of getting that done.