I read a recent Blog post by Mark Cuban, the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and a technology entrepreneur. Cuban discusses the issue of Blogging by newspapers, contending that newspapers should use their platform and established audience in a way that differentiates their efforts, instead of taking exactly the same approach to blogging and the Internet as others have. He relates this back to the software industry, where, “a feature that anyone can add is not a sustainable differentiation.”
I think this analogy plays well to geospatial platform provider space. It’s fairly obvious that new features need to differentiate in order to maintain market share. The innovation that’s necessary for the geospatial platform is beyond the standard tools and interface advancements that are happening on the consumer-oriented Web mapping front. It’s the extension of the core data creation, analysis and professional presentation features that will be sustainable in the long term.
