But, the last couple days, I was in Kansas – Lawrence, Kansas, to be precise – a little piece of Massachusetts, cunningly hidden on the eastern edge of the Great Plains. Easy parlor game: find Douglas County, the home of Lawrence, in this map of county-by-county 2008 election results.
The organizers of Kansas University GIS Day were kind enough to invite me out to keynote their event. The talk I delivered, on disruptive technology and open source, was well-received. I also got to meet up with Howard Butler and Steve Lime, two members of the Mapserver community who live in fly-over country and who drove down to Lawrence. Steve came to present on Mapserver at KU GIS Day, and Howard just came for the beer and camaraderie.
Here's the wordle of my keynote.
The folks at the KU Natural History Museum invited me and Howard over to talk about open source and their plans for open sourcing their collections-management software, Specify. They were also kind enough to give us a short tour of their holdings, which are incredible – four floors of climate controlled racks of bottles of specimens, and that was just the fish and frogs! We also got to see a coelacanth, the "fossil fish", unchanged over 40M years.
Thanks to Josh Campbell, Xan Wedell and all the other GIS Day organizers who showed me and the other presenters such hospitality.
All in all, a great trip, but *click*click* there's no place like home, there's no place like home...
6 comments:
very compelling presentation (the bit about Sun was hilarious). But i think you mischaracterize Microsoft. They are warming to open source (see the DLR or work with Mono). Now, whether ESRI grows in this way remains to be seen.
Great stuff, Paul! Having heard you speak, it's fun to imagine your delivery.
Speaking of disruption, what do you think about Postgres and, say, the App Engine Datastore? It only does points (for now), but that's good enough for putting businesses, business-y events, and money making things on a map, and the scalability and freedom from installation hassles is a compelling attribute.
Paul:
Very disappointed that you didn't begin you presentation marveling about how good it felt to be amongst "real Americans."
KU does a great job with the whole GIS Day thing. More than you can say for most of the other supposedly "top" academic geography departments in North America...
Brian
Good presentation. I have to agree with Scott that you were a bit hard on Microsoft. That could be because I'm a Microsoft cyborg, but I don't think you can entirely judge a company based on where its current profit is coming from.
You have to look at where they are spending all their money. I tend to think Microsoft is not a company to shy away from making mass investments in the short run that drain the corporate coffers so to judge them based on where the current profit is coming from is a bit short-sighted. I think OS and office are already a dead market and they know that.
I also agree with Brian.
I am disappointed that did you not bow in front of "REAL AMERICANS".
@SeanG, I think the App Engine and that paradigm of cloud infrastructure could (if it catches on, and it seems likely) render formerly standard pieces of infrastructure like the RDBMS obsolete. (Again, not in a "gone forever" sense, but in a "95% of developers don't need 'em anymore" sense.) The trade off of "almost as flexible as my old development stack, and I don't need to think about deployment anymore" is a pretty good one.
@Microsofties, I don't think MS is constitutionally capable of "warming" to open source, since their business is built on margins only available to a proprietary monopolist. This doesn't make them evil, just garden-variety rational – which is exactly the danger a disruptive shift like open source presents. It makes no sense for Microsoft to truly shift to an open source model.
@Paul:
I would agree with you that they are not constitutionally capable right now, but call me an optimist. I think their model is changing behind the scenes.
One thing I admire about Microsoft's style is that they always play a wait and see game and then catch up at the end of the game. They did that with Mac clobbering them to be the predominant pc, they did that with Netscape, and I suspect history will repeat itself.
IBM is an oddity - there profit balance sheet is surprisingly good and they are the best of the innovators yet I always thought there business practices were kind of moronic. Though they make damn entertaining ads.
I'll have to dig more into what makes IBM tick.
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