This Week’s Hangout:: Season 3 Premier with Brian Timoney
Well as promised, season 3 of Hangouts with James Fee premiers tomorrow at 1pm PST. The last time Brian joined me we talked about portals but this time we’ll catch up on all the new spatial news from the past few months. The new broadcast time is going to be 1pm PST every Friday. As before, all the shows will be archived on YouTube and this blog. Go to the Google Hangout event page to find out more.
SpatialTau v2.5 - Google Maps Engine to Esri and CartoDB
SpatialTau is my weekly newsletter that goes out every Wednesday. The archive shows up in my blog a month after the newsletter is published. If you’d like to subscribe, please do so here.
So you probably heard the news last month that Google is ending support of Google Maps Engine.
Maps and location information are valuable tools for businesses — whether it’s helping people find your store locations or identifying sales opportunities across town. To help our Maps for Work customers continue to get the highest impact from our products, in 2015 we’ll focus on helping customers deliver location information via our Maps APIs and shift away from selling any non-Maps API products. We’ll support our Maps for Work customers through their contracts and work closely with them and our partners through this transition.
I first learned about it via CartoDB through their CartoDB on Google Platform post. Seems like a great service from CartoDB and probably one that is very similar to the users of Google’s Maps Engine. Last week though Esri got in on the action.
In coordination with Google, Esri has prepared a special offer for Google Earth Enterprise and Google Maps Engine customers and partners looking to transition to Esri software.
Details have been slim but it appears to be a consulting service to help people migrate their data from Maps Engine to ArcGIS Online. I’m sure other companies are going to jump in and offer services to migrate the data either to other Google cloud services or other online mapping platforms.
But what is the big picture here? Why did this happen? Clearly only Google really knows why they terminated support but I can think of one of two scenarios.
- The market for hosted GIS solutions isn’t that big. Google probably had visions of millions of companies using and paying for Google Maps Engine but in the end the effort to continue to improve the service wasn’t worth the revenue coming in. Users leverage Google Maps API but store their information in other locations. Traditional users use Esri or homegrown utilities and new mapping users use other hosted solutions (such as CartoDB or Mapbox). The Google Maps for Work has more upside for Google because it uses their standard products and is easier to share with other Google Services. Small companies such as CartoDB and Mapbox can make money with such small number of customers and large companies such as Esri make up the difference with ELA sales. Hosted GIS is a disappointment and a sideshow for mainstream tech companies.
- The market isn’t using Google Maps Engine. While people have dipped their toes in the product, no body is really using it for production work. The Esri/CartoDB/Mapbox solutions are more powerful and better supported. When it came time to put their money down on Google Maps, they choose to go elsewhere.
So which one is it? Probably a little of both as I think the market isn’t mature enough and I think people didn’t use Google Maps Engine. The Google Maps for Work seems much more like a Google service and coupled with the announcement that Google Earth Pro is now free, Google is leaving the traditional GIS market to Esri.
Will this be a new source of revenue for CartoDB? Most likely and one that could be substantial (hopefully). For Esri I can’t imagine this moving the needle enough to make a financial impact. But the big win for Esri is removing a service that was a compeditor for ArcGIS Online which they view as a key to their future product plans.
Win for CartoDB and Mapbox and win for Esri. Probably win for Google too as they can focus on Google Maps for Work. Esri and the others have products to replace Google Maps Engine, will companies like them more than Google? We’ll have to see.
SpatialTau v2.5 - Google Maps Engine to Esri and CartoDB
SpatialTau is my weekly newsletter that goes out every Wednesday. The archive shows up in my blog a month after the newsletter is published. If you’d like to subscribe, please do so here.
So you probably heard the news last month that Google is ending support of Google Maps Engine.
Maps and location information are valuable tools for businesses — whether it’s helping people find your store locations or identifying sales opportunities across town. To help our Maps for Work customers continue to get the highest impact from our products, in 2015 we’ll focus on helping customers deliver location information via our Maps APIs and shift away from selling any non-Maps API products. We’ll support our Maps for Work customers through their contracts and work closely with them and our partners through this transition.
I first learned about it via CartoDB through their CartoDB on Google Platform post. Seems like a great service from CartoDB and probably one that is very similar to the users of Google’s Maps Engine. Last week though Esri got in on the action.
In coordination with Google, Esri has prepared a special offer for Google Earth Enterprise and Google Maps Engine customers and partners looking to transition to Esri software.
Details have been slim but it appears to be a consulting service to help people migrate their data from Maps Engine to ArcGIS Online. I’m sure other companies are going to jump in and offer services to migrate the data either to other Google cloud services or other online mapping platforms.
But what is the big picture here? Why did this happen? Clearly only Google really knows why they terminated support but I can think of one of two scenarios.
- The market for hosted GIS solutions isn’t that big. Google probably had visions of millions of companies using and paying for Google Maps Engine but in the end the effort to continue to improve the service wasn’t worth the revenue coming in. Users leverage Google Maps API but store their information in other locations. Traditional users use Esri or homegrown utilities and new mapping users use other hosted solutions (such as CartoDB or Mapbox). The Google Maps for Work has more upside for Google because it uses their standard products and is easier to share with other Google Services. Small companies such as CartoDB and Mapbox can make money with such small number of customers and large companies such as Esri make up the difference with ELA sales. Hosted GIS is a disappointment and a sideshow for mainstream tech companies.
- The market isn’t using Google Maps Engine. While people have dipped their toes in the product, no body is really using it for production work. The Esri/CartoDB/Mapbox solutions are more powerful and better supported. When it came time to put their money down on Google Maps, they choose to go elsewhere.
So which one is it? Probably a little of both as I think the market isn’t mature enough and I think people didn’t use Google Maps Engine. The Google Maps for Work seems much more like a Google service and coupled with the announcement that Google Earth Pro is now free, Google is leaving the traditional GIS market to Esri.
Will this be a new source of revenue for CartoDB? Most likely and one that could be substantial (hopefully). For Esri I can’t imagine this moving the needle enough to make a financial impact. But the big win for Esri is removing a service that was a compeditor for ArcGIS Online which they view as a key to their future product plans.
Win for CartoDB and Mapbox and win for Esri. Probably win for Google too as they can focus on Google Maps for Work. Esri and the others have products to replace Google Maps Engine, will companies like them more than Google? We’ll have to see.
SpatialTau v2.4 - Planet Geospatial without Planet Geospatial
SpatialTau is my weekly newsletter that goes out every Wednesday. The archive shows up in my blog a month after the newsletter is published. If you’d like to subscribe, please do so here.
So I did this late last year.
While traffic was very stable, the code was old and patched together with twine. It was ugly, hard to manage and couldn’t parse feeds very well anymore. It was time and I think 99% of people understood. We get our news from Twitter and Facebook these days. I gave a link to the Planet Geospatial OPML List and let everyone download it and use it with their own RSS reader. But the list itself is old, most blogs are dead and hasn’t been updated in over a year. I’d like to change that.
So I’m setting up a GitHub repository where we can collaboratively update Spatial IT RSS feeds and use them however we wish. But before I do that, I’d like to clean up the OPML. I thought about just uploading it and letting everyone hack at it but it’s so out of date I’d like to make a pass at it first. What I need though is your help.
If everyone who reads Spatial IT/GIS blogs can forward me their top 5 (you can do more or less of course) blogs I’ll grab the RSS feeds from them and create an updated OPML list that everyone can use on GitHub. Just reply to this email and send me your top blogs. I’ll update everyone on the process next week!
SpatialTau v2.4 - Planet Geospatial without Planet Geospatial
SpatialTau is my weekly newsletter that goes out every Wednesday. The archive shows up in my blog a month after the newsletter is published. If you’d like to subscribe, please do so here.
So I did this late last year.
While traffic was very stable, the code was old and patched together with twine. It was ugly, hard to manage and couldn’t parse feeds very well anymore. It was time and I think 99% of people understood. We get our news from Twitter and Facebook these days. I gave a link to the Planet Geospatial OPML List and let everyone download it and use it with their own RSS reader. But the list itself is old, most blogs are dead and hasn’t been updated in over a year. I’d like to change that.
So I’m setting up a GitHub repository where we can collaboratively update Spatial IT RSS feeds and use them however we wish. But before I do that, I’d like to clean up the OPML. I thought about just uploading it and letting everyone hack at it but it’s so out of date I’d like to make a pass at it first. What I need though is your help.
If everyone who reads Spatial IT/GIS blogs can forward me their top 5 (you can do more or less of course) blogs I’ll grab the RSS feeds from them and create an updated OPML list that everyone can use on GitHub. Just reply to this email and send me your top blogs. I’ll update everyone on the process next week!
SpatialTau v2.3 - GIS Agility
SpatialTau is my weekly newsletter that goes out every Wednesday. The archive shows up in my blog a month after the newsletter is published. If you’d like to subscribe, please do so here.
Work in the spatial field long enough and you’ll reinvent yourself over and over again. I’ve been cleaning up my old blog and it is amazing to me to see how much .NET/VB6/Oracle I used to do. Heck I used to be a big proponent of GeoDesign but not so much anymore. I remember the first GeoDesign Summit as a good time but the latest pictures from 2015 seem to show things have changed.
A lot of what we experience clearly affects how we approach our work as we move along in life. All that fighting ArcSDE has helped me approach PostGIS better. All that fighting the Esri WebADF has helped me work with Node.js better. All that expended capital on GeoDesign has taught me not to be involved with company sponsored community efforts. None of it is lost though, it all helps built the future as to what Spatial IT becomes.
The news that Google is shutting down Google Maps Engine definitely caught people’s attention. But Google Maps API continues on and working with maps doesn’t really change. All that capital spent working with Google Maps Engine can just be rolled into the Google cloud platform easily and off you go. Years ago such an announcement would have had people jumping off the cliff but it’s just how applications work these days.
Being a GIS developer (whatever that is) has been a crazy ride. Every year you learn new languages, new libraries, new server technologies. That’s why I feel like we’re so lucky to be working in this space. The past year has been Node.js and Angular.js while this year is shaping up to be React and Go. It’s that change that is exciting, fresh and keeps us all working hard. Let the good times roll!