Geospatial technology, markets, and practice
I am an inveterate infrastructure geek due to work I did earlier in my career in critical infrastructure protection. One of my projects was to build a system to model the behavior of commercial freight rail. Of course, I am also a programmer. Between railroads and writing software to model them, it was impossible to … Continue reading The Geography Everyone Loves to Hate
In the late 1990s and early 2000s I worked in critical infrastructure protection, building geospatial applications and data sets to model how infrastructure networks behave. I worked on systems like switched telecommunications, commercial rail, and refined petroleum products, along with the ways those systems depend on one another. Working on those teams, I learned a … Continue reading Mission Assurance and Human Geography
In 1951, Paul Fitts edited a report on human engineering for air-navigation and traffic-control systems. One of its lasting artifacts was a deceptively simple allocation device that came to be known as the Fitts list: what humans are better at and what machines are better at (Fitts, 1951). In shorthand, it became HABA-MABA: Humans Are … Continue reading Interpretation and Ownership
My recent essay on the SaaS market argued that AI pressure is unlikely to apply evenly. The exposed segment was products in the middle of the market that are expensive enough to prompt examination, bounded enough to cleanly emulate, and shallow enough in terms of integrations that rebuilding them would not be outrageous. They were … Continue reading GeoAI and the Soft Middle of the Geospatial Market
In early February 2026, a sharp software-sector selloff, widely described in market commentary as the "SaaSpocalypse," erased hundreds of billions of dollars in SaaS and software-services market value. Anthropic's release of Claude Cowork plugins gave investors a concrete example around which to reprice a concern that had been building for more than a year: AI-assisted … Continue reading Vibe Coding, AI Disruption, and the Restructuring of the SaaS Market