| From the Publisher
By Roland Mangold Creation or Conflict
Which side are you on? There have been several industry "incidents" which lead me to wonder are we (the collective body of the remote sensing, business geographics, GeoTechnology, digital imagery community) ever going to come to some agreement on the way in which we should approach the mass market of clients that today's technology has given us easy access to?
The banter between William G. Fry and Roland Mangold in the July EOM Letters Department concerning the differences in the capabilities of aerial data and high-resolution satellite space imagery leads us to the much forgotten question, what does the marketplace want? I must agree with Roland that "we all need to get off our high horses, technical and otherwise" and face the business era that we are in, which is one where while you are thinking of an innovation and refining it someone else is taking that innovation (albeit not perfect) to market.
The industry disagreement concerning technology quality versus speed to market continued at the recent ASPRS Soft Copy Meeting in Virginia and was clearly expressed with the last panel session of the meeting entitled, "The Future of Soft Copy and Photogrammetry."
The members of the panel were: Roland Mangold, publisher, EOM; Lawrie Jordan, president, ERDAS; Clay Ansell, director, NIMA; and John Palatiello, executive director, MAPPS.
In the words of one of the esteemed panel members, "I always wanted to know that would happen if a fist fight ever broke out on a panel." Then later on in response to audience questions, one panel member said to another, "Well, let me lob that grenade right back at you." What was all this conflict about? It was about technological accuracy versus market needs. The NIMA and MAPPS voices want to be very careful concerning technological accuracy, relative accuracy, and the absolute accuracy of remotely sensed data. The ERDAS and EOM voices want to provide high quality products to the mass market of users who are not interested in the greatest accuracy possible but who want to work with what Lawrie Jordan calls "intelligent maps and intelligent images in 3D."
The panel conversation continued to deteriorate as the audience became involved asking such questions as, what was the ASPRS opinion on sacrificing the technical quality of photogrammetry products versus the commercial needs of the marketplace. Fortunately, Cliff Grieves who closed the session was in the audience and responded with great diplomacy to the questions while being very honest on the ASPRS position. He simply stated, "The role of ASPRS must change. Traditional mapping is changing because science (new triangulation methods) has brought forth these changes. There will, however, always be a need for standards. Most standards reflect on what the practitioner can or cannot do. Mapping professionals must listen to the user. We listen to cartographers, not users. Users don't usually care about the same things cartographers care about." I must agree with Mr. Grieves that over the years we seem to have developed a profession where we are guilty of being inwardly focused pretending to know what the user wants. The user today does not know good product or not-he just knows if it helps solve his problem. The conflict between visionary product developers and technical gurus continued for one hour and 15 minutes.
And that is the crux of the real and much larger debate. Are we going to remain in conflict about the technical accuracy of products or are we going to move into a creation era during which we learn about the needs of our future users? This is a question that would be well placed in our satellite data provider companies, with our value added services companies and with our aerial imagery providers. There is an enormous misconception concerning the amount of imagery (in any format) available in the world. There are many who believe that the new high-resolution satellites will provide great deal of data immediately. Coming from nine years of service with a major satellite provider, I can say with great conviction that there is barely enough imagery of the world to be taken with 1-meter imagery (which will be like trying to cover the Earth with "little fingernail sized" pieces of data). Even with the eminent launch of three to six high-resolution satellites it will still take several years to collect the type of data library that would allow rapid access to data anywhere in the world.
And what are we doing about this? It seems we are still reviewing the same old argument (which was the topic of conversation when I entered this industry nine years ago). I am fearful that this industry will develop strategic alliances too late and we will have lost our opportunity to develop mass market products together. Just exactly who needs to draw together to move this industry forward in a big way? We all do, satellite data providers and processors, value-added services providers, aerial and photogrammetry companies, and professional marketers.
None of us, individually, have enough data access to serve the mass market. Who is the mass market? Individuals who don't even know yet that they want intelligent images or maps. These are buyers who will enter the large retail chain computer and software stores to peruse the shelves looking for products to help them solve their problems including, a need to look at the basic lay of the land for real estate purchases, commercial or residential; graphic artists interested in low-cost background imagery for their developmental needs; and students with an interest in looking at imagery on their home computer for school projects.
The focus for the mass market must be on good quality, low cost ($19.95-49.95) products where land copy prints can be run inexpensively on the buyer's color printer. Of course, this is quite a sweeping statement about product needs. I believe these products could easily be developed in order to allow for different packaging which would attract a variety of audiences with the guts of the products being similar. Unless we join imagery and data forces we will never have enough information to create these mass market products.
The question remains, are we going to continue in conflict concerning the rightness of our technical capabilities with data products or are we finally going to join together in a creation process where we begin to satisfy the market where those users are rushing to the store shelves and to the Internet daily looking for solutions to their problems?
I believe today the answer is apparent since I wrote this article for a publication which mainly serves individuals in our industry (who still need convincing that the way to the mass market is through strategic alliances between companies who are willing to share their data capabilities and develop products which have the potential to be low cost, high volume products). If these type of products from our industry were already in mail-order magazines like Lands End, Signal and Wireless I would have to find something else to cast my viewpoint about (which for those of you know me know that would not be difficult). About the Author:
Shawana P, Johnson is the CEO of Global Marketing Insights Inc., a marketing and sales consulting firm and may be reached at the Global Marketing Insights Inc. office, 6000 Lombardo Center Dr., Suite 310, Cleveland, OH 44131; Telephone: 216-642-1446; Fax: 216-642-3080; E-mail: [email protected]; Web: http://www.globalinsights.com Back |
