Comment Re:Not to burst anyone's bubble, but... (Score 1) 189
Recently I sat down to train some local government transport planners in some ArcView based software we wrote. Actually, most of the time was training them in ArcView 8 because they had little GIS experience.
You could see their eyes light up when they started to realise what they could do with it. "Hey, we could plot vandalism incidents on bus shelters! We could look for patterns in our accident reports!" Forget our code for now - just having mapping software on their desks was a revelation.
True, this wasn't in the most high-tech part of Britain, but I'm convinced there is a huge market for simple GIS that is as affordable as Word and Excel, and can just be on those people's desks.
Many companies and local authorities still have "GIS teams" that are off in some other office and charge a lot of money per map. It's like an old Computing Bureau again.
Open Source is not naturally accessible to these people. But the huge untapped market really is there. Further, they really need standards and interoperability - and OSS is much more likely to deliver this in *reality* than commercial vendors. (Ask yourself why ArcGIS 8 can't natively read MapInfo format files. They have a fully modular system for dealing with different formats. How hard can it be?)
You could see their eyes light up when they started to realise what they could do with it. "Hey, we could plot vandalism incidents on bus shelters! We could look for patterns in our accident reports!" Forget our code for now - just having mapping software on their desks was a revelation.
True, this wasn't in the most high-tech part of Britain, but I'm convinced there is a huge market for simple GIS that is as affordable as Word and Excel, and can just be on those people's desks.
Many companies and local authorities still have "GIS teams" that are off in some other office and charge a lot of money per map. It's like an old Computing Bureau again.
Open Source is not naturally accessible to these people. But the huge untapped market really is there. Further, they really need standards and interoperability - and OSS is much more likely to deliver this in *reality* than commercial vendors. (Ask yourself why ArcGIS 8 can't natively read MapInfo format files. They have a fully modular system for dealing with different formats. How hard can it be?)
