Mash-Ups
Does ESRI stand a chance again Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft in the web mapping API battle?
ArcWeb Services has an API now, in addition to SOAP. Yet I don't see in the various trade publications and blogs anything about how ESRI is develping the killer web service. Is it cause there is just too much buzz around Google Map/Earth? Google wants to create the PDF's for online-mapping (KML). Is this going to happen, or is ESRI's ArcReader, or ArcWeb Explorer something different? Or is ESRI waiting for when Google really kicks in the advertising model on and upset a lot of the mash-ups people, and everyone gets down to serious GIS applications?
posted by EWUG @ 9:38 PM
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The answers are Yes, Yes, No, and Maybe.
Yes - ESRI will hold up to Google/Yahoo/Microsoft aka GYM
Yes - There is just too much buzz about Google No - ArcExplorer
is nothing we haven't seen before. Its not mind-blowing technology. Just think of
it as a mashup of Google Earth and ArcMap.
Yes, very cool, but just the same technologies with a combined
interface.
Maybe - This is really two questions, 1) what happends when the
GYM advertising/entertainment model starts in and the API doesn't seem so 'free'
anymore? and 2) what happends when people want to do serious GIS with these API's?
(what is serious GIS is a whole topic on its own so I will leave that to another
date).
These of course are my opinions. I think ESRI's answers to these questions are best
addressed in two articles by Forbes Magazine. The first
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0605/056_print.html has been widely discussed
on various blogs. It is basically about how mapping is hot, and that mashups are
cool. The second,
http://www.forbes.com/2006/06/14/google-yahoo-microsoft_cx_rr_0615maps_print.html
says, yeah, mashups are cool, but where is the business model (Show Me The Money).
Getting to the business model of mashups is when GIS get serious. I think ESRI is
now playing serious.
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