In the mid – to – late 1990’s a partner and I were trying to launch a consumer digital mapping product that used the USGS DRG’s as the base maps and included support for a NMEA signal from a handheld GPS so that you could see your location in real time on the DRG. Amazing, but it still required a laptop computer – a huge limitation for an outdoor recreation product, but not for the Keyhole team, who were not concerned with real time navigation, in the beginning.
As soon as the aerial mapping firms saw our product they did not hesitate to buy the software and the maps. We had fun for a year or so, but our vision was too small, unlike the Keyhole team led by John Hanke, who were building a world scale imagery viewer. We knew there was going to be a digital mapping revolution, driven in part by the availability of GPS. We just didn’t think big enough which of course has never been a problem for Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google.
The author is not very kind in his portrayal of Esri and Jack Dangermond. Bottom line – the Esri legacy code was too slow for the “globe to your face” seamless zooming that the Keyhole team was building. Had Jack realized that the consumer digital mapping market was a different beast, he might be the $50 billion man today, but it was not to be.
blog.lidarnews.com
