Geographic Exploration – The New Fad?

David Maguire has written another blog post and he gives us his thoughts on Google Earth, MSN, Yahoo! and others who have entered the GIS arena. Personally I’m glad to see he gets why the others have been successful (ease of use, global data, branding) and he lets us know what concerns he has for the future of these system. I tend to agree with him that once you get past the hype, these are very basic programs or APIs, but we need to keep in mind that most of these are either beta or version 1.0 of their releases. ESRI needs to move the bar forward so that there is a gap between the hype and their products. Sounds like David or Jack will make an announcement at ESRI about their plans. Hopefully the ArcWeb Services team will be on stage at that point or even a new product.

Good to see a strategic blog post by David. Do you disagree with him? Just blog about it because I’m sure he’d love to see feedback from the users.