Thursday, April 26. 2007

Product Life Cycle Insight

Gene Roe offers up an interesting look at laser scanning (pdf) as the next big thing for surveyors in the most recent American Surveyor. He notes that it fits into a pattern of disruptive technologies that have provided significant results for that discipline including GPS and the Internet and clearly thinks its worth exploration by today's practitioners. (I agree, but base my thinking solely on the fact that two smart guys from Daratech, Tom Greaves and Bruce Jenkins, started a practice built on that market in 2003.)

Most interesting to me is the discussion of commodity pricing where Roe cites a product life cycle model from Windermere Associates (noted by Clayton Christenson in his work on disruptive technologies). The "Buying Hierarchy" suggests that products go through four phases as they mature: functionality, reliability, convenience and price. In short, when one product offers functionality that others to do not, it has the edge. When two or more products offer that functionality, the decision point moves to reliability and so on, until in the end, buyers can assume the end products are essentially similiar and thus price is the only distinguisher. At that point, goes the theory you have a commodity. Roe points out that's basically "Wal-Mart."

Now, I think back a year or so and recall Gary Lang of Autodesk making the argument that it was time to open source MapGuide (the "new" MapGuide, aka MapGuide Enterprise if from Autodesk and MapGuide Open Source if from OSGeo) in part because Web mapping software was a commodity. I thought then this was a fair statement and within the context above, it seems even more reasonable. I'll point out that the "convenience" phase was when buyers simply bought the Internet Mapping solution from their existing GIS software provider because it was "more convenient."

As I think about geospatial products I can see some heading down to the commodity phase - desktop GIS for one, some data products for two. What's more interesting and perhaps indicative of where we are as an industry: what's distinct on functionality right now? ArcGIS Server comes to mind quickly. So does a watermarking product I saw recently. What else?

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I think you have the ArcMap/ArcServer distinctiveness reversed. ArcMap might be "boring" because it has been around for a long time, but it still has functionality that is not easily duplicated in other products. The same is not true of ArcServer. Much of what ArcServer offers is already available in MapGuide Open Source, and most of the bits that aren't (globes, services to globe clients) are easily replicated by stitching together World Wind and MapGuide OS. ArcServer is DOA, landing with a plunk in the midst of an already heavily commoditized server geospatial marketplace.

#1 Paul Ramsey (Link) on 2007-04-26 18:08 (Reply)

While there will always be a market for sophisticated tools for spatial data creation, editing, and modelling, the much larger, faster growing segment will be in the more general visualization needs and basic spatial analytics (buffers, intersections, distance measures, etc.) Link this already-commoditized server functionality to consumer front-end interfaces, and there are rich possibilities for end users to do spatial analytics without even knowing they're doing "GIS". Oracle (and presumably Microsoft in the near future) have a significant financial incentive to mine this geospatial-without-GIS vein, while at the other end of the spectrum, you have a site like "Hey, what's that?" that's providing line-of-site analysis in a fun, user friendly context with exactly no "GIS" software in the background.

The diminishing returns of the "GIS" acronym set in about two years ago and those unwilling to acknowledge the semantic winds of change will have a very awkward marketing problem on their hands quite soon.


Brian

#2 Brian Timoney (Link) on 2007-04-26 19:25 (Reply)

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In reply to	[ Top level ]#1: Paul Ramsey on 2007-04-26 18:08 #2: Brian Timoney on 2007-04-26 19:25
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