Manifold GIS – a year on
About one year ago, I posted a crude analysis of the forum participation numbers here, along with a brief analysis of what this might mean in terms of Manifold’s future business development. I argued that Manifold as a company was stuck in a limbo with stagnating growth while supposed release dates for the new Version 9 were coming and going.
One year on, I reran the analysis on forum participation, and to my regret, not much has changed with a continued fall in user form posts. Forum contribution numbers have now in March 2011 reached the level of mid-2006. 2006 of course marked the release of Manifold 7.0, which first introduced significant entreprise level features into the product, and which the graph reflected in an impressive spike in forum participation numbers.
Apart from the near stasis in which Manifold 8.0 now is, with some intermittent bug fix updates still provided, other developments have also impacted community participation. Significantly, after a period in January 2011 of intense discussion on the forum, Manifold introduced a new set of forum posting rules that effectively now limit the discussion on technical issues, precluding any discussion of Manifold’s business practices and company developments. Also, copyright infringement claims were logged against various individuals that set up independent Manifold community hubs on sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn (disclosure: I am the administrator of the LinkedIn Manifold user group), resulting in the closure of the Facebook page.
These tightening of business practices interestingly coincided with the apparent transferral of Manifold’s business address from CDA International, based in Carson City, Nevada, to a new company, Manifold Software Limited, with headquarters in Hong-Kong.
What can be a conclusion from all this? As it stands, not much has changed, and although Manifold 8.0 is still as good a product as four years ago, one can only wonder if there will ever be another significant update? Manifold’s competitors are also catching up, and significantly offering new developments in web-based services, an area which Manifold has left to third-party developers to further develop so far. Also some of the key technical advantages of Manifold are eroding, for example true 64bit operation in ESRI’s ArcGIS 10.1, weakening Manifold’s claims of technical superiority.
10 Comments to “Manifold GIS – a year on”
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Patrick I am pretty sure you remember what they showed us in London a while ago. It would still be a great toolset if it was released unchanged now. I believe they are close to releasing v9 and playing with it will be a good fun for some of us.
Patrick, what you can do is to look at view count of every thread now and after N months and see how many new views old posts get. That would be interesting. hopefully Manifold users tend to be wise enough to search the forum for problems already solved.
‘for example true 64bit operation in ESRI’s ArcGIS 10.1′
That’s only for ArcGIS Server, not for any Desktop editions, they are still 32-bit only at present.
@Brian – it will be at 10.1 for everything – even the “new” runtimes.
Patrick,
Sorry to hear about the stats and static nature of the user group. My introduction to Manifold was throught its power using a graphics card, NVIDIA Fermi GPU, versus say ArcMap which continues to use a CPU computing platform only. I am still on ArcGIS 9.3 and some in my dept have migrated to 10 but there are some problems in 10 like loosing VBA support for older scripts, etc. that 10 won’t be able to run. If Manifold could provide a demo or allow a limited runtime for the software, I bet there would be more users trying out the geoprocessing on Manifold versus ESRI products. Manifold licenses are competitive against ESRI which is like a Microsoft for GIS concerned about licensing and separating licenses to increase revenue. I hope Manifold will continue to evolve and develop more products that run on NVIDIA or AMD GPUs.
Sincerely yours, andy
Patrick,
In your analysis you omitted to mention the ongoing patent infringement litigation by UniLoc Inc. against Manifold.net for the latter’s supposed use of algorithms in its software licensing technology, that are patented by Uniloc.
The move of Manifold.net to the jurisdiction of Hong Kong and its change of name to Manifold Software Limited is explainable in the context of this litigation as a damage limitation exercise It may also be to prevent disclosure in public court information about the owners of the business, its financial backers and organisation.
It is speculation, but a cease and desist order taken out by Uniloc to prevent sale of next- generation software by Manifold Software Ltd/ Manifold.net would go a long way to explaining why no new version of Manifold System has yet been released. However, there are probably also a host of other alternative and additional possible reasons for this.
Sadly, a lot of the current situation was predictable and some was predicted.
V.
I trialled Manifold 8 Universal for it’s DEM processing potential, and found it cannot even load the DEMs that ArcGIS 10 happily works with.
Manifold crashes after over three hours when opening an ERDAS .img file that takes under a minute in ArcGIS. The CUDA technology seemed like a winner but you can’t process what you can’t load. I am not impressed, especially as there is no refund option for the universal edition. Having downloaded the software I do not even have a $625 ‘coaster’ to show for the effort.
It seems that litigation is not the only problem for Manifold.
I started using Manifold when it was version 4.5 as a cheap alternative to ArcView. It’s been cheering to see its rise in popularity and now saddening to see its decline over recent years. The rise in capability and robustness of FOSS products like QGIS has clearly undermined its market for users and combined with the legal problems it faces, its future as a desktop product looks very uncertain. It’ll be interesting to see what 2012 brings.
Would be interesting to hear you do another ‘a year on’ post now that this was from March 2011.
How about an update on 2012?
Hi,
I am just testing Manifold to use in my consultancy business. This blog is informative but worrying.
Q-GIS is good but not quite there yet and Manifold seemed to fit the bill. But it does have allot of irritations, seemingly deliberatly non-standard methods that steepen the learning curve for GIS professionals supposedly to ease the curve for new adopters.. and the help manual is pretty poor. So should I invest the time in Manifold or the money directly in e.g. IDRISI?
The really attractive aspect of Manifold is its cheap run time licence. But that seems to be subject to a legal challenge?