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Hi, I graduated college with an undergraduate degree in Geography, specializing in GIS. My professional background is software development, and a few years bac
by vitovito 15y ago
Hi, I graduated college with an undergraduate degree in Geography, specializing in GIS. My professional background is software development, and a few years back I transitioned into user experience design.
I'm wondering what, specifically, you're looking to "revolutionize." ESRI's suite is ugly, complicated and crash-prone compared to, say, Manifold, but Manifold has little traction in the market. It's like Word and OpenOffice.
GIS is a super-broad product category that support everything from photogrammetry to spatial analysis (think demographics, computing safety of bike paths, lines of sight for signage) across both vector and raster data with arbitrary reference points (did you know that most geographic data sets aren't globally georeferenced?).
Making a web-based clone of Powerpoint as an excuse to reinvent Objective C and Cocoa in JavaScript is comparatively easy. Your statement makes me skeptical that you know anything about the market at all.
- stray 15y agoWell to be fair, revolutionizing a broad product category sometimes means introducing a technically inferior product that is usable by a wider range of people. ESRI's stuff is just horrible. I've consistently used ArcGIS as an example of a bad user experience for the past decade. So I support anyone seeking to ease that particular pain point.
- scottdw2 15y agoThat's the problem. The GIS market is too broad. The ESRI products ate inaccessible to most people. They cost too much, and are too difficult to use. Precisely because they are targeting professional cartographers. Raster algebra isn't something normal people need. I don't want to create a product for highly trained cartographers. I want to create a product for me (someone who wants to create simple information graphics).