Podcast: With Geodata - Developers, Not Consumers, Rule
By Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg
November 03, 2009
Classified Ads:
Take advantage of a special year-end sale on SPOTMaps, the 2.5 meter, seamless, color mosaic made to fit your area of interest. Save 25% off all SPOTMaps through November 10th, when you mention this ad! Click here for detailsIf consumers think of geodata (streets, POIs, etc.) as a commodity, what does that say for its future? What are the key data relationships? And what, if anything, will differentiate one offering from another? Our editors ponder these questions in light of evidence that consumers know and care little about who makes, manages and updates basemaps.
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Show Notes
Mapping for Everyone is a new ESRI Web site that gives people easy, step-by-step instructions to start making maps for free. The Web site provides tools to help you share your map with others, including an interactive map and access to spatial data and free web mapping APIs. To learn more or get started, visit www.esri.com/mapping.
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| Whether the data source is considered important or not depends on the consequences of decision being made. There's an old saying in the data industry: "Bad data drives out good data". If you know that there's a restaurant down the street and it doesn't show up on the map, or it is showing up but it closed 2 years ago, you will jump to the conclusion that "this data's bad". Experience shows that any bad experience with underlying data casts suspicion on all of it. Your basic premise that the application always outweighs the content is correct...until there's a problem in the content. Then the quality of the decision making, whether it's locating a 2 million dollar retail site or trying to find a hotel at midnight, will suffer. The difference is the magnitude of the consequences of poor data. In one case, a retailer may end up losing a 2 million dollar investment; in the other case, a consumer merely drives to the next hotel. So, the level of interest in the content provider will hinge on the magnitude of the consequences of the decision. |
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| Sadly I think you are correct. Consumer satisfaction should be a key driver in selection of data, but this is often not the case. The developers' choice of data is driven by a combination of availability, license terms, cost, and fitness for purpose, where fitness for purpose is judged by the satisfaction level of the consumer. While the broad capability of a dataset to support the desired functionality is an initial consideration the final choice of data is often made based on the other criteria. When a consumer buy a TV they don't associate the content they watch with the brand of TV they bought, but if they buy a satnav they buy the package of device+app+data. The brand on the box is what they associate with the service they receive. Most geo apps and devices currently have a single source of any given dataset, so content choice (vs app or device choice) is not an option for most geodata consumers. There's also been little to differentiate the major datasets, in terms of overall quality, so data switching has been on par with flicking between equally average TV stations, none of which are particularly satisfying. While it's true most consumers do not care whose data sits behind the app they do care if the result is that their needs are not met to their satisfaction. Consumers will generally ditch the device/app rather than report a data issue. Some vendors exploit this tendency to sell their new model/version, based on the promise that the new one will be "better". Their business models are supported by device/app sales, not data sales, so it's understandable, but I think it devalues the data and misses the opportunity to derive revenue and increase margins based on satisfaction vs box selling. So, an open question: Do developers & vendors select data based primarily on factors other than fitness for purpose because they have too few means of judging the ability of a given dataset to satisfy their customers!? |
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