Related link: http://hobu.biz/index_html/google_phenomenon

Howard Butler has some thoughts on how the old GIS businesses, especially ESRI, fit into the brave new Google Maps world.

I especially like one of his notes on how the audience for these tools is changing:

From my involvement in the MapServer community, I know that there are typically two audiences for web map development. Those that are coming to it from the GIS side (and understand all of the data issues), and those that are coming to it from the web development side (and understand scale, deployment, and usability). In MapServer, the ratio has gone from mostly GIS folks to mostly web developers learning GIS as they develop an application.

We’ve had some fun recently publishing Mapping Hacks and Web Mapping Illustrated. We aimed both of them at outsiders learning mapping while doing other things, and that approach seems to have attracted the reader interest we were looking for.

I guess we’ll have to see how similar trends play out on the software development side of the business.

How much are you willing to learn to get a map?