Opinions I have formed about the “geospatial industry”
Two geography degrees meant I saw a lot of ESRI. In fact I won a national award and was flown out by them to meet Jack in San Diego. Everyone at ESRI I interacted with were all wonderful people. But their software is just brutally corporate and slow to respond to market changes.<p>FOSS GIS software is pretty good but suffers from the usual lack of budget. Nevertheless, I’ve been able to push robotics + GIS packages for QGIS with ease. Reaching out to my ESRI contacts about “where’s your indoor and outdoor robotics suite offerings” received a response of only crickets.<p>As for Google Maps. The biggest tell is that there’s almost no geospatial capability in the software. They don’t want you to analyze and understand. They just want you to consume “where is X”. It’s a standard Google vector for ads approach.<p>I’m going to rant for a long time if I don’t stop here so I’ll leave it at: stop teaching so damn much ESRI and start teaching way more programming. The biggest regret of my education was that I was mostly taught how to use Geospatial tools rather than how to make my own.