[UPDATE August 15, 2008] In his ESRI-sponsored column, Jeff Thurston writes today (August 15, 2008) that "GIS was born to exist in the cloud."  Hmmm.  Are we at (or past) a GeoCloud tipping point? Is there a sudden rush on the cloud? How else can one explain this avalanche of cloud coming-outs? Oh, and did our July 31 post trigger the avalanche?

---

[UPDATE August 14, 2008] c|net just posted (August 14, 2008 4:05 AM PDT) "How to decide if the Cloud is right for your enterprise." It's a good read.

---

Disruptive technology is a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen to describe a new technology that unexpectedly displaces an established technology.  Directions Magazine wrote about disruptive technologies in 2005.  The GeoCloud is one such disruptive technology, in my opinion.  It will further widen the fissure in the GIS market along a line that is not often recognized for its importance, but which can be critical.

Let me explain.  The GIS market has been categorized or subdivided in many different ways, depending on how one slices with the intellectual scalpel (to borrow Pirsig’s term).  The division can be government or commercial GIS; environmental or industrial; professional or consumer; desktop or server GIS.  And so on.

I submit that there is at least one more way to slice the GIS “world” – mission-critical and non-mission-critical GIS.  I also submit that the mission-critical GIS will avoid the GeoCloud for the time being, for obvious reasons.  I further submit that the non-mission-critical GIS, which has to be the vast majority of current GIS implementations, will soon begin migrating to the GeoCloud on a mass scale.  Thus, the GeoCloud will manifest itself as a disruptive technology through non-mission-critical GIS implementations.