Geospatial: Context and Opinions
June 24, 2020
DarkCyber spotted a sequence of tweets published by that well managed, completely coherent, and remarkable outfit Twitter. Twitter disseminated brief emissions from Joe Morrison who uses the handle “mouth of Morrison.” Love that Twitter thing!
The write up in Quibi style chunks is about geospatial technology. As it turns out, mobile devices and smart gizmos output geographic coordinates. These are useful to many.
The observations in the stream of tweets explain that geospatial is mostly a bad idea. DarkCyber says, “Ho, ho, ho.”
Two warrant highlighting, but you may find other faves in the list.
Let’s begin:
The most successful and ambitious mapping project of all time, Google Maps, is an advertising platform. There is no “geospatial industry,” only industries with spatial problems.
Yep, the Google. Nevertheless, one must give the GOOG credit for buying Keyhole, morphing an intelligence operation into a cog in ad sales, and then building a large scale geospatial data vacuum cleaner. Remember the comment about capturing Wi-Fi data: “Wow, no idea how that happened.” Does that help you jog down memory lane.
The second emission we noted is:
In geo, you either die a hero or live long enough to make the majority of your revenue from defense and intelligence.
This is sort of accurate. Including law enforcement might be a more accurate characterization of where the money is, however.
These earthworm emissions are amusing; for example, “ESRI is a petty, anti competitive bully”. Are any lawyers paying attention? Also, big companies use open source software and don’t give back. No kidding? Ever hear of code cost reduction?
Worth a look. More context, explanation, and details would add some muscle to the tweeter bones.
Stephen E Arnold, June 24, 2020
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