User friendliness. There are "meat and potatoes" spatial questions which arise often, but for one reason or another take a lot of work to get an answer, and they really shouldn't.

For example, until Arcmap 9.3 answering "where is that? [stabs finger at screen]" with a set of coordinates snapped to the object required creating a VBA expression and attaching it to a button. Ditto for putting the XY coordinates into an attribute field. The GIS software I cut my teeth on, Pamap, now defunct, could do this out of the box in 1992. I don't bring this up to say Arcmap is so bad and Pamap was so much better, but rather to point out that there are problems which are too small for the big boys to solve, but will make a real difference to end users. Hard to make money from this though, which is why in the more than a decade for ESRI to notice and fix this problem nobody else did either. Who would pay $ for a 3rd party addon that did something so trivial?

Anyway, whatever the reason, the need is there and unmet for many small yet significant tasks.

This a build up to Personalised Workflows, where there is more potential for making a living. I think there is a lot to be gained by streamlining workflow, improving efficiency. Taking existing processes and removing as many of the friction points and hindrances as possible. There are so many places where it takes 30 clicks, or 30 points of decision, to get a bit of data from point A to point B when in reality only half a dozen are needed.

Watch people do their work, and make note of the points where a dialog box pops up and they slap a button without even reading it. That's a useless decision point. Once you start counting, you see them everywhere. Software which is designed for everybody, or as many people as possible, necessarily has to provide more of these pauses. I think there's room for a service industry which examines how people in an organisation actually do things, removes impediments specific to their environment, and adds things to push them along.

User friendliness. There are "meat and potatoes" spatial questions which arise often, but for one reason or another take a lot of work to get an answer, and they really shouldn't.

For example, until Arcmap 9.3 answering "where is that? [stabs finger at screen]" with a set of coordinates snapped to the object required creating a VBA expression and attaching it to a button. Ditto for putting the XY coordinates into an attribute field. The GIS software I cut my teeth on, Pamap, now defunct, could do this out of the box in 1992. I don't bring this up to say Arcmap is so bad and Pamap was so much better, but rather to point out that there are problems which are too small for the big boys to solve, but will make a real difference to end users. Hard to make money from this though, which is why in the more than a decade for ESRI to notice and fix this problem nobody else did either. Who would pay $ for a 3rd party addon that did something so trivial?

Anyway, whatever the reason, the need is there and unmet for many small yet significant tasks.

This is a build up to Personalised Workflows, where there is more potential for making a living. I think there is a lot to be gained by streamlining workflow and improving efficiency. Take existing processes and remove as many of the friction points and hindrances as possible. There are so many places where it takes 30 clicks, or 30 points of decision, to get a bit of data from point A to point B when in reality only half a dozen are necessary.

Watch people do their work, and make note of the points where a dialog box pops up and they slap a button without even reading it. That's a useless decision point. Once you start counting, you see them everywhere. Software which is designed for everybody, or as many people as possible, necessarily has to provide more of these pauses. I think there's room for a service industry which examines how people in an organisation actually do things, removes impediments specific to their environment, and adds (or takes away!) things to push them along.