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Are giants, knocking the business GIS door?
Maneesh Prasad
Director, CSDMS
Email : maneesh.prasad@gisdevelopment.net
The use GIS as mainstream analytical tool is
gaining importance. The “Windows Reveloution” coupled with high speed conputing
facility available on PCs made the complex and high end machine dependent GIS, a
user friendly desktop mapping and analysing tool. Predominantly ruled by ESRI,
Intergraph, Autodesk and MapInfo and other client specific GIS software
developers, it has now becoming hunting ground for software majors like
Microsoft and SAP AG.
Exciting! Yes.
The
Microsoft’s journey in the quest of business GIS which started with Exel 5.0,
which had elementary mapping feature called Dynamap, is now reaching it’s
milestone. Build on the success of Expdia Streets 98, build for consumer users,
MapPoint 2000 has been developed with business users in mind.
The
functionality of MapPoint includes finding virtually any street address in US,
creating and annotating maps which can be imported into Office documents,
plotting database information and analysing business and demographic
information. It will be an ideal business mapping companion to Microsoft Office
and useful to anyone who wants to locate business information on the map or
analyse geographic aspects of their business. MapPoint has four years of
demographic data for 1980, 1999, and 2003. The data includes population
household sizes, household income, median pupulation age and population by age.
Microsoft plans to make all these available for USD $109, the price at
which it is difficult to get any digital data in India, less to talk about any
GIS engine. The pricing of this product is revolutionary, especially for small
and medium sized business and mapping communities. Besides this, office
compatibility is also being cited as the key. The GIS user base is set to wide,
the nature of growth which till now was more or less vertical will from now see
a horizontal growth. Microsoft plans to launch MapPoint for United Kingdom as
it’s first international version, with other European countries to follow.
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