Dan,
Sounds like you are using v 3. V 4 is a big step forward, and there is soon
to be a v 4.5. I know an ArcInfo shop that bought Maptitude just for the
conversion capacity. What's $400 compared to a week of staff time? (you
think I am kidding) Some of the staff now uses Maptitude secretly to make
quick maps and have legends the way they want them.
I know this is a MapInfo Listserve so not a place to talk about Maptitude
(reflects my wishing there was a Maptitude listserve) , but the general
question of arrogance , the lack of capacity of MapInfo and ESRI to listen
to users, practically swearing up and down that their bugs are features,
missing potential markets staring them right in the pocketbook, the
outrageous cost of training, same for tech support - most very mediocre,
more than perplexes me. I am in public health, there are over 3000 counties,
50 state health departments, countless city ones, thousands more out of the
US, but try to make a deal to get a decent price for the product or get the
vendors interested in public health. No way. No way that a county health
department can spend $1400 for a GIS package, but they might be able to
afford $400. Also one copy is never enough to enable a site with GIS
capacity. Caliper has a deal that will bring the price way below $400 if you
buy 10 or 20 copies. ESRI and MapInfo might knock off $200. Then there is
the training, no way county health departments can afford $500/day for
training that has nothing to do with their need of GIS. (of course I do that
here in WA for nothing)
I wish vendors would:
1. throw in their programming language (and standardize on VB). If users
thought they were getting the programming language for "free" that would be
a good marketing tool. 98% of them would never use it.
2. have some tight integration with a stat package. S-PLUS is now connected
to ArcView ($$$$$$)**2
but one had better take full body armor before using the connection.
3. at least provide some real statistical capacity in their tables or
dataviews - there is plenty of public domain C code that does everything
from multiple regression to simple stats, of course spatial stats would be
what I really need, variograoms, K functions, map smoothing, etc.
4. Improve their layout features, and image production for Internet
publishing.
5. Put a real training manual on line for users (like www.manifold.net) and
making their web sites happy places for current users to go rather than
trying to sell you something. In the long run this would have a big payoff.
You folks have hundreds more. Oh well ....
I guess I am trying to put off Saturday chores, the lawn and garage are
waiting.
Richard Hoskins
----- Original Message -----
From: Dan Ryan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, May 07, 1999 9:56 PM
Subject: Re: Maptitude vs MI comparison
> I would echo most of what RH said. I still use Maptitude to convert
> data (it reads in more formats that MI -- sucks up DEMs, for example,
> and spits 'em back out as MIF with no problem). I found it faster that
> Mapinfo for most tasks. I didn't like some features of the interface
> (cursors never changed style for different tools, for example) but I
> think some have improved with version four, and Maptitude's "better"
> data table maintenance (it behaves a little more like a RDBMS than MI
> does) for the general user didn't feel flexible enough for my purposes.
> I was also turned off by the fact that so many things were "automatic"
> but this mainly reflected the fact that I'd grown accustomed to doing
> things "by hand" in MI. Maptitude's "features" sometimes make it hard
> to tweek a map to perfection for publication. They also didn't have an
> academic discount so I could undercut them with Mapinfo for a teaching
> lab. List price-wise, though, definitely not $1000 difference.
>
> The US Department of Housing and Urban Development have a contract with
> Caliper to supply Maptitude with a whole lot of US housing and
> population data to municipalities and community groups around the
> country. The canned maps that come with that product give a good sense
> of the kinds of applications you can build with Maptitude.
>
> Big factor: ton o' data comes with Maptitude including entire US streets
> and zip polygons (default address matching is by address and zip).
>
> I was also impressed by the folks at Caliper who seemed to be quite
> smart and responsive, and, unlike MI, I've never gotten the impression
> that they were more interested in impression management that product
> development.
>
> Richard also mentioned Manifold which as far as I can tell is an awesome
> product at an awesome price. It stores data in MS Access format so
> offers lots of data integration possibilities and has network analysis
> built right in. It's a way more powerful tool than AV, MI, Mapt, or
> others but it's also far less than straightforward for those of who
> think in GIS terms. On Richard's "which day do they get it" scale it
> might be more like the second weekend. Still, they give it to you for
> $100 for a site license so it's worth checking out. Full TIGER97 for
> another hundred or so.
>
> Dan Ryan
> Mills College
> Oakland, CA
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