Paul, some say that about ESRI products these days. Then again you are probably right, Google Earth or NASA World Wind will be that low end of the pyramid anyway. They seem to want that place to themselves.

uDig – “That’s not nearly as good as ArcMap, or even ArcView. Why is it relevant to me if it does not do what my current tools do now?”

PostGIS – “That is interesting, but can I connect to it with ArcMap? Talk to me when you have something works exactly like ArcSDE but is free.”

Mapserver – “That seems a little complex to configure, and there is no out-of-the-box application that looks any good.”

CIO – “What do you think, technical advisor?” Advisor – “It is all half-baked, sir.”

So James, I think we do want tools to be used by the elite. And only the elite can really appreciate the parts of the tools that are substantially better than the proprietary equivalents — the openness, the modularity, the scriptability, the configurability. There is not a lot of point in “breaking into the marketplace” when there is no per-unit incentive to do so.

We don’t want to market to the masses, they would probably think our products stink! (Not enough documentation, low consistency between products, bad “first impression” for non-technical installs.)

But, we do need to talk to the elites. They might find OSS useful, and they might actually find the community stimulating and contribute back. Perhaps the ESRI developers conference would be a better venue for an alternative forum, if one were inclined to think about such things.

I think there is a fair case to be made for more diversity in tools as you go towards the bottom of the pyramid. At the top, you basically have people making data from physical collections. In the middle you have people doing analytics both for their own purposes and to produce derivative data. At the bottom of the pyramid you have people using that data to run their business and live their life…there’s a lot more variety there than there is at the top where the basic tasks are making vector and raster products.

It’s more important to have good integration at the bottom than it is to all use the same clients. As long as we can all collaborate on the data- it won’t matter much what we do it with.

I do wonder about ArcReader though- it really didn’t take off. I was looking into this company called TerraGo who are pushing a format called geopdf. It sounds a lot like ESRiIs PMF format, except it’s actually readable with just AcrobatReader (to do much gis stuff, you need a Acrobat plugin.) I don’t if it will take off, but maybe the real bottom of the pyramid is that maps are just in everything- to googlemaps mashups on every website, to office documents, to phones…

But your CFO might fire you when you try to pay your maintenance, but that is a whole other issue.

You might see less people in the anti-ESRI camp if the overall costs were not so high for acquisition and support.

just my couple of pennies…

All true statements and I almost added it to my blog post.

Honestly when you talk to them sometimes you get that feeling.