Thursday, June 28, 2007

The "dark side" poll - neck and neck!

Well, after my previous post where I reported that the rebel forces had pulled ahead, the Empire did indeed regroup and pulled ahead slightly today, but at the time of writing the two sides of the Force are locked in a deadly embrace - 119 votes for the dark side and 119 votes against, with 28 don't knows.
Thanks also to the various people who have emailed me with advice! I should point out by the way, to allay the concerns of some correspondents, that I am exploring a lot of possibilities right now. I am definitely interested in the "neogeography" space and what Google, Microsoft, Yahoo et al are doing there, and there could be opportunities either with the big guys themselves, existing startups leveraging their technology, or in doing my own startup. There are also interesting opportunities in the open source arena. And last and perhaps least (but not necessarily!), there are opportunities with the more established geospatial companies.

So the topic of this poll is really more along the lines of should "going to the dark side" be one of the options that gets into my shortlist for serious consideration? But thanks for all the votes, the poll is on my main blog page if you haven't voted yet and would like to!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

From a pure business standpoint you can hardly justify not including ESRI in your shortlist of opps to consider. However, there is a lack of serious competition in the industry right now with Mapinfo and Smallworld pulling back into their respective domains leaving ESRI as the "Microsoft" of GIS. Could you possibly lead the development of the new Apple of GIS? That would be stellar!
On the other hand if you do join the dark side, perhaps they could finally get versioning to work properly!