Map Viewer / Portal products are in decline - and no wonder as they are really fighting a losing war against the vendor-made builders and APIs that enable non-developers to build single-topic maps instead of the behemoth map portals.
And this move is quite rightly so - I liken this process to the original move from GIS file systems to spatial databases - a lot of GIS analysts fought against it for a long time with excuses around performance and ease of use, when the real reason was of course their loose of control on the data.
Let's face it - map viewers/portals have not brought us (geospatial industry) any favors, as a matter of fact I believe they are the reason it has taken so long for the mapping / location intelligence to become mainstream; in the end they were just a clone of a desktop super user tool on the web (with less features and functionality) and almost impossible to use by most standard users!
The main reasons why I believe map viewers might not have more than 2-3 years left in the markets:
1) map viewer audience was GIS analysts and later maybe IT analysts - these guys just cannot build easy usability apps for common users - it is the same as getting a mathematician teaching math for kindergarten, the knowledge gap between analysts and users is wwwaaaayyyy too wide.
2) Geospatial vendors (Esri, Google, Intergraph, Nokia etc) are providing more and more out-of-the-box functionality within their product suite and these are targeted specifically for single topic map use (user story driven approach anyone?). Why buy another product when you already have everything you might ever need?
3) performance and usability - all single topic web apps work much faster than a map viewer as it has all the additional baggage included within. Also single topic maps are very easy to use by anybody - no training or manuals needed, just a neat search engine to find the specific map (in your region, or for your device) you are after.
Short blog this time I know, but what do you think?
And this move is quite rightly so - I liken this process to the original move from GIS file systems to spatial databases - a lot of GIS analysts fought against it for a long time with excuses around performance and ease of use, when the real reason was of course their loose of control on the data.
Let's face it - map viewers/portals have not brought us (geospatial industry) any favors, as a matter of fact I believe they are the reason it has taken so long for the mapping / location intelligence to become mainstream; in the end they were just a clone of a desktop super user tool on the web (with less features and functionality) and almost impossible to use by most standard users!
The main reasons why I believe map viewers might not have more than 2-3 years left in the markets:
1) map viewer audience was GIS analysts and later maybe IT analysts - these guys just cannot build easy usability apps for common users - it is the same as getting a mathematician teaching math for kindergarten, the knowledge gap between analysts and users is wwwaaaayyyy too wide.
2) Geospatial vendors (Esri, Google, Intergraph, Nokia etc) are providing more and more out-of-the-box functionality within their product suite and these are targeted specifically for single topic map use (user story driven approach anyone?). Why buy another product when you already have everything you might ever need?
3) performance and usability - all single topic web apps work much faster than a map viewer as it has all the additional baggage included within. Also single topic maps are very easy to use by anybody - no training or manuals needed, just a neat search engine to find the specific map (in your region, or for your device) you are after.
Short blog this time I know, but what do you think?