Interview with Jack Dangermond

At Enterprise Applications web site there is an inverview with Jack Dangermond, founder of ESRI. This is one of rare interviews (relatively short one) and Jack talks about various topics, from philosophy of ESRI as a company to open source.

Quote about Microsoft and Google:

Microsoft and Google, and Yahoo to a large extent, are very much consumer-focused. They look at mapping and geospatial visualisation as one more aspect of search. It’s all about spatial search as an augmentation to traditional web search. This is a very exiting field; it concentrates on a global base map for visualisation and association.


 
They both become active in being able to support embeddable mapping for locator services and they are both spending between $100m - $150m, a year on developing content for that base map. The technology itself is highly optimised for fast visualisation access; it’s not a GIS system.