Geospatial technology, markets, and practice
I spent 25 years as a federal contractor, much of it delivering software acquired through the Department of Defense acquisition process. At no point did I feel that the way the government acquired software was particularly well aligned with how we actually built it. Over time, I began to suspect that our customers felt the … Continue reading AI and the Economics of Government Software Procurement
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
I mentioned in my previous post that, at a previous career stop, I built open-source support into our IT lifecycle. Specifically, we used QGIS. The primary reason we made that choice is that we were a Mac shop. It's true we could have run ArcGIS Pro inside Parallels, but I didn't see the need to … Continue reading Supporting Open Source: A Case Study
I started the year with a sense of renewal. By that, I mean that I had cataract surgery the first week of the year and I literally have a new vision for the future. This time last year, I was already down with bronchitis - the result of an unnamed respiratory illness that knocked me … Continue reading Onward to 2025