Here’s a thread of 10 strongly held opinions I have formed about the “geospatial industry”:

1. The most successful and ambitious mapping project of all time, Google Maps, is an advertising platform. There is no “geospatial industry,” only industries with spatial problems.

2. It follows, then, that the most valuable geospatial applications are always custom-built in service of a particular domain that doesn’t self-identify as “geospatial.” The closest you can get to a “geospatial app” is a UI on top of a dev tool.

3. In geo, you either die a hero or live long enough to make the majority of your revenue from defense and intelligence.

4. There is more earth imagery, more IoT time series data, more 3D point cloud data, etc. than we’ll ever be able to catch up to. Seriously—ever. It’s a seductive tragedy of unrealized value that will continue to vaporize VC dollars for decades to come.

5. The future of geospatial visualization used to be the web. Now, ironically, it’s the desktop again (although probably still delivered through a browser that is opaquely dependent on the local machine’s GPU).

6. ESRI is a petty, anti-competitive bully whose muscle for innovation atrophied 20 years ago. The people that work there are overwhelmingly smart, kind, and competent. Much of the world runs on their products and their commitment to bettering the world is genuine.

7. There are only two indispensable jobs in the field: build software or build relationships. If you want optionality, get good at both.

8. The modern discipline runs on open source code maintained by prolofic, intermittently impoverished, unreasonable software engineers. Every single Fortune 500 company uses a handful of such libraries in critical infrastructure and almost none ever donate or contribute back.

9. Google Earth Engine is the most important advancement in the field of remote sensing and climate science in 50 years. It will probably be unceremoniously killed by Google at some point without explanation and an entire era of research will suddenly be impossible to reproduce.

10. Geospatial’s time hasn’t yet come. The effects of climate change, and the coming effort to mitigate those effects globally, will require geospatial literacy at an unprecedented scale. You’re not too late to start something or get into the field. Now is the moment.