Friday, April 6. 2007

MashUp Startups Respond to Google My Maps

Over at her ZDnet blog, Donna Bogatin pulls together some posts from the likes of Platial and Plazes regarding Google's potential "disruption" in their plans with launch of My Maps on Wednesday night.

The posts there, and here at APB, can be summarized as "no, we are ok, we have our niche." Bogatin sums up that many of Google's great disruptive ideas don't pan out.

I can't help but think that even though we are in this Web 2.0 world, it's no so different than the old "third party" problem with desktop software. When I started my career everyone used AutoCAD and had heard of its biggest AEC developer Softdesk. Eventually, Autodesk acquired softdesk. At one time Autodesk had perhaps dozens of third party apps for mapping. Then it introduced AutoCAD Map (I think it's back to that name again). Now there are ... can you name one? (I can, but that company is a client of mine.) ESRI acquires partners now and then and at the same time seems to maintain a rather large and diverse third party population. I saw 2,500 as the going number. But, most of ESRI's third party developers, it's my sense are building vertical specialty apps for specific vertical businesses. That may be true for Autodesk too, but I'm less aware of it.

Many of the mashups that are being (potentially) disrupted by My Maps are horizontal. At some level, and I appologize in advance is this is too simplistic) they are "put dots on the map" (for one reason or another) apps. Horizontal features will in time migrate to the core of software. Someone with an MBA can tell us why, I'm sure. And, those in this space, developers and their funders, had to see this coming, didn't they? Especially since Microsoft and Ask had offered such tools for some time? Especially since there are dozens of commercial and freebie apps to do the same thing? This is just another step forward in race we've seen before, just with different technology and perhaps different markets ("social" is now a market for mapping).

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google at 08:18 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

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The thing that I think is too often missed, is in the idea that the "social" conceptual metaphors of these applications are becoming redefined through each step forward in their creation - and sometimes through mistakes made, or elegance acheived.

The idea that we can create a technology that enhances social awareness of the values added by mapping or observance, whether private or personal, allows us to see the world in a unique way that transcends our living solely at ground level - both physically and psychologically. With that, may come an awareness that improves our sociological values, collectively, in how we view the planet and others around us - our governments, nature, our needs toward our own inherent sense of survivability in a world that we otherwise feel powerless to make change.

The idea that new vertical markets are somehow in any kind of threat, to me, is a ridiculous assumption - when we're only just scratching the surface of the creation of whatever vertical markets will manifest in time. To think otherwise, in my mind, is simply defeatist in nature - something that Newton would have probably very quickly had a quip to in response.

If we deny the fact that this is just the beginning, then how will be encourage our younger generations to become involved, to become interesting - to become passionate? This is the time to look forward, not in the now or the past. This is a time to be entirely wrapped-up and passionate about the everything involved in these discussions. And it's a beautiful time to do so, as the paradigm will shift either with our input, or without it in the end.

#1 Daniel (Link) on 2007-04-06 14:45 (Reply)

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