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?
