A tale of two approaches, part II

Things have moved since my previous post: even though ESRI doesn't want to be geodesign, that is high on their agenda in their business partner conference this week. And since where 2.0 among many others hail location services as the next big thing, it's no surprise Wired quotes Jack Dangermond as pushing handhelds for onsite design as I imagine it:

(photomontage aizolnai)

High on ESRI's agenda was also cloud computing, with ArcGIS.com coming soon to a screen near you. Will that leave us in dire straits, rebuilding all our web apps yet again? Nooo, Marten Hogeweg and Victoria Kouyoumjian take pains to explain how their GIS integrates with the web. Moreover OpenSpirit, Safe Software, WeoGeo and many others help integrate data and apps on the web, I meant cloud, rather than reinvent the wheel...

(mock road sign after this news item)

In other words as mentioned in closing my last post, isn't it better to link together what works best for each user, rather than add new tools and workflows detracting from core business tasks? At oilelefant we garner business partners such as EzDataRoom to store remotely very large yet instantly retrievable datasets, allowing small operating companies and agencies to store locally or remotely only what's key to their business:

EzDemo

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