Zitat des Tages von Jack Dangermond:
GIS started on mainframe computers; we could get one map every five to 10 hours, and if we made a mistake, it could take longer. In the early '90s, when people started buying PCs, we migrated to desktop software.
As we continue advancing and leveraging GIS and as we keep bringing in new generations of technology as well as new generations of people, my sense is we're going to achieve extraordinary things.
One city can look at other cities relative to their city and learn something. It's a matter of sharing the patterns of what exists in one society based on landscape or cultural values versus other cities.
I think it is widely agreed that Carl Steinitz, over the 50 years he taught at Harvard, has been one of the most important figures in influencing the theory and practice of landscape architecture and the application of computer technology to planning.
We tell stories with maps about global warming, biodiversity; we can design more livable cities, track the spread of epidemics. That makes a difference.
I went on to Harvard and got very interested in computers and studying the earth's landscape.
I can put tweets on a map to show who is saying what where, which could be used for marketing or social research.
Because we're in a small town and somewhat isolated from the fast lane of high tech, we've been able to grow and concentrate on our work instead of being distracted by the competition and getting caught up in the soap opera of Silicon Valley.
During that year at Harvard learning with Carl Steinitz, I had the feeling that I was drinking knowledge out of a fire hose. I learned more in that year than I had learned in the previous ten years of my education.
You have to decide who you are going to serve - stockholders or your customers.
Someone once told me be interested, not interesting - that really clicked for me.
We have been supporting GIS in schools for more than 25 years.
One thing that has made us so successful is that we've never taken outside investment. That means we can concentrate on what our customers want - not what the stockholders or the VCs want.
I want to have all that scientific information that we're building be used in designing the future so that people who make geographic decisions - and here it's not just land-use planners, but it's everyone: foresters, transportation engineers, people who buy a house - can analyze all of these information layers and design a future.
Something like 80 per cent of business decisions have a location element. In fact, it's probably higher than that.
We have a rich and vibrant partner ecosystem with several thousand formal business partners. Some of them are very large companies that we collaborate with in many ways.
My parents owned a plants nursery. We all grew up growing things and planting things and selling things, and I also managed landscape crews.
Landscape architecture is basically geodesign; it's designing geography. And yet geodesign is not only done by landscape architects, it's done by some of the world's largest corporations.
When I got into college, I found what ultimately became my life's work. I couldn't sleep at night, I was so excited about it. So I'm attracted to people who play at that level. They actually want to play in their professional life.
We have millions of users around the globe who do amazing things with our technology every day.
We shifted our philosophy from being a computer mapping group that would support planners to the idea of building actual software that would be well engineered. Because at that time, our software was not well-engineered at all; it was basically built with project funding and for project work, largely by ourselves.
Our world is evolving without consideration, and the result is a loss of biodiversity, energy issues, congestion in cities. But geography, if used correctly, can be used to redesign sustainable and more livable cities.
