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.

First a disclaimer, my motivation for this post is not to discredit Manifold the software package or CDA International Ltd. I hesitated for a long time before finally deciding to post this very brief and probably flawed “analysis” based on many assumptions, with the aim to start an earnest discussion on the commercial development of Manifold GIS in a wider market context, based on more than just this starting point of analysis.

For the past 6 years the web forum Georeference has been the hub of the Manifold GIS user community, providing a virtual gathering place for users, enabling the development of a vibrant online community of expert users, sharing knowledge, discussing wider issues and helping novice users on a level that is very rarely encountered in other support forums. I believe it is fair to think that for many users of Manifold GIS, it is the first port  of call when looking for information, help and advice with the software, before making use of paid support from Manifold directly. So as more licenses of Manifold are being sold and used , the number of forum users, posts and threads should increase in parallel. Given this premise, forum activity levels then act as a very imperfect proxy for the market penetration rate of the Manifold GIS software package. There are of course several caveats* to this theory.

The forum thankfully records and shares usage statistics (number of posts/threads per month). I assembled and visualised the growth in terms of forum threads and posts over the past 6 years in the graph attached below. In order to give some context, I also included the release dates of significant versions of Manifold on the graph.

One very fundamental observation from this graph is that since  Manifold v8 has been released, there has been a decline of activity on the forum. Whereas in the preceding years, there was almost uninterrupted growth in user forum activity, right now, over two years after the release of v8, the forum contributions have returned to the level of mid 2006, and trend doesn’t imply a return to growth.Also notable has been the gap between the software release cycle prior to v8, and after. Whereas Manifold used to bring out a major revision each year (2004,2005, 2006,2007), for the past two years, users have been waiting for Manifold v9.

Given the caveats detailed below, what conclusions can the graph give us on the general business development context of Manifold?

I believe it is fair to say that CDA, the company developing Manifold GIS, are a high-tech software company (i hesitate to use the term start up, as they have been on the market for 8-10 years), which have a disruptive product, challenging the established GIS market in terms of pricing structure (and some may argue in terms of software quality/features). The study of disruptive technology innovations has been formalised in a number of theories, one very prominent one being the “Crossing the Chasm” model. This model aims to explain the specifics of marketing of high-tech products, and distinguishes two crucial stages: First, the product is marketed to and adopted by “visionaries”, a small set of users which form a small base of early adopters of the product. In order to gain mass market adoption though, the company crucially needs to gain enough momentum to jump the proverbial “Chasm” towards the pragmatists (early majority). A step at which many high-tech companies ultimately fail!

Manifold certainly has achieved a core basis of highly motivated early adopters which act as voluntary technology evangelists, as evidenced by the very supportive online community, as well as a number of user initiated meetings. From this basis, Manifold has over the past 4 years been working to gain momentum to cross the chasm towards the early majority in the GIS market, rapidly issuing improved software versions, opening a partner centre in Silicon Valley, starting to issue press releases and other media related activities. The success of these measures though lies in the continued rapid pace of updates being sold, given that Manifold do not levy annual maintenance fees from its existing user base.

In my opinion, as of right now, CDA Int. Ltd. are stuck in a limbo between an established early adopters user base, and the early majority user base they are trying to reach in order to significantly advance their market penetration. While they seem to be struggling to finish version 9, their existing user base seems to be eroding, increasingly frustrated by a lack of updates and activation issues, while many of the early majority users, more technically conservative, are holding back from buying in to Manifold, waiting to see what v9 brings to the table.

*Important caveats complicating the estimation of the number of users/licenses from forum activity levels :

1. Not every user of Manifold is an active participant to the forum. Most likely only a very small percentage of Manifold users ever contribute to the forum.
2. Most users will only participate when they have a problem/question they need advice for.
   
3. A given person might be responsible for a varying number of Manifold licenses. This can range from one user with one license, to one administrator who is responsible for hundreds of licenses installed across a company, or embedded as a software component invisible to end users.

A great mention as well for Manifold as one of the GIS packages supporting PostGIS in the video by Paul Ramsey, although he alleges to some FUD that Manifold the company spread regarding PostGIS ( at 13:15 in the video, although I don’t remember what particular Dimitri postings he was referring too :-)

According to Paul’s presentation, PostGreSQL (with PostGIS) certainly seems to be at least equal to other spatially enabled databases in terms of feature completeness, performance and robustness, and its free, making procurement much easier (19:00 min in video). And the new release of PostGIS seems to be all about speed improvements, which is obviously a good thing. A overview of the roadmap ahead for PostGIS promises a lot of things to come…

Now, my interest in PostGIS has only started lately, mostly because I was asked to develop a “Introduction to Spatial Databases” e-learning course. Given the need for students to be able to run the practicals on their home computers, we chose PostGIS and Quantum GIS as the software tools for the tutorials. I must say I have been impressed by the functionality of PostGIS, and it certainly hasn’t been a very steep learning curve for me, thanks mostly to my previous Spatial SQL knowledge learned from Manifold’s Spatial SQL experience. Although the syntax and some of the commands are slightly different between PostGIS SQL and Manifold Spatial SQL, knowledge of either is really helpful when trying to write queries! Wider issues of optimisation such as spatial indexes though present another level of complexity/power in PostGIS,  which Manifold’s internal SQL engine doesn’t expose to the user.

Even so, it is when working with other Manifold users, and specifically teaching Manifold to new users, that one can often find basic usability issues at hand that go unnoticed by more seasoned Manifold users like myself. In this post, I do not want to address larger and more complicated issues, but instead focus on providing a small list of low hanging fruit that could easily be fixed by the Manifold development team:

1) Setting Area of Interest in Layouts

During our training course, almost all new users needed help to understand how to set the area of interestof a layout. The way to change the AOI of a map component in a layout might be powerful, but is complex and well hidden from the user in multiple steps. Most users will upon the creation of a layout from a map, expect the zoom extent of the layout to be the same as what they see in the map component. Confusion sets in when the whole component, or worse a blank page, greets them when they open their newly created layout. “Hey where’s my nice map gone?”

The process then is less than straighforward and involves in total 8 steps and at least as many mouseclicks : right-click on the layout (1) and choose properties (2), set the Scope to Locked Rectangle (3), go back to the map component (4), goto View -> Panes -> Layers (5) (as that pane is hidden by default!), using the Layers Pane, enable the Layout Component extent rectangle (6), resize to the AOI the extent rectangle (7), finally go back to the Layout (8).

Ideally, users would expect after selecting a layout map component that it would behave like a regular map component where users can pan and zoom to set a AOI for the layout.

2) Formatting toolbar

Most new users will stumble over one of the more fundamental idiosyncrasies the Manifold user interface has to offer. The concept of the formatting toolbar relies on the fact that, as opposed to other GIS packages, one drawing can contain different geometry types (points, lines, areas). This is reflected in the formatting toolbar, which always offers the user formatting options for all three geometry types. Because the formatting options look very similar to one another, new users are often deeply confused and unshure which icon they need to click to influence for example the line foreground color.

One straightforward solution would be to blank out formatting options for geometry types not currently present in a specific drawing, thus simplifying the toolbar considerably (for a lines only drawing, this would reduce the number of icons from 17 icons down to 4!).

Another possible solution would be to indicate through a small text box what geometry type a set of formatting icons refers to, instead of relying on users to find the right option by hovering over an icon or trial and error.

3) Label Display Options

When working with labels, users are often at a loss on where to change advanced options such as callouts, label overlap conflicts and line label placement. Users in general will look first in the component specific menu, i.e. the Labels Menu, where they wont find a entry for such advanced display options. Instead, Label display options are “hidden from the user” in the generic View Menu. The same applies to for the display options of surfaces and images.

IMHO it would make much more sense to group all options relating to a specific component type in the specific Menu for that component, i.e. the “Labels” Menu or “Surfaces” Menu.

4) Queries in Layouts

A table dragged into a layout results in the creation of a layout component displaying table records. This makes sense to the user and he is pleased to be able to include tabular data into his layout to generate reports.

Unfortunately, the same doesn’t happen for queries dragged into a layout. From Manifold’s perspective, the software sticks to its principles and generates a layout component containing the SQL Query text. 99% of the time, this isn’t the most useful behaviour, and a user would rather expect the query results table to be generated and placed into the layout.

It would be much better if users were given a choice if they wanted the query text, or the query results to be included in the layout. (The workaround I currently employ in this situation is to run a query which generates a table which in turn is included in a layout, which is fine except you can’t update the table easily without deleting it and rerunning the query, thus loosing the layout position).

5) The Query Toolbar

Finally, this one was already touched upon by Muki on his blog,  but it is worth repeating his comment here, as the change is the most straightforward to implement on this list:

The way the query toolbar works is that you select a field in the left drop-down list, an operator at the central drop-down and a value in the text box on the right and click on select to see the result. For example, if you enter 5 in the toolbar in the picture, it will lead to a selection of the 5 polygons on the map with the smallest area.
The confusing part of the interface is the ‘not’ between the left drop-down and the central one. For a new user, the interface reads ‘find objects on the map where the field Area (I) are not the bottom X’. The ‘not’ in this case is a toggle button that can be activated to negate the operation that was selected in the central drop-down. Clearly, it would be better if, when not activated, it had the word ‘is’ (Area is the bottom 5) and ‘not’ appeared only when it was active. This is one of the cases where usability enhancement could be carried out in less than a minute of a programmer’s time – and surely makes life less confusing to many novice users…

As you might have guessed, these are only some of the usability issues one can find in Manifold, and I would appreciate any comments here if you can think of others. I have already send in suggestions to Manifold for most of these issues, and I would urge you to do the same if you can agree with my analysis.

This is a significant step for map makers, as the OSM tiles offer a level of freedom in terms of usage license. Altough a acknowledgement of the OSM license is needed in any mapping products which contain any OSM data, this is a simple requirement when compared with the grey and murky licensing requirements for Google, Microsoft Virtual Earth and Yahoo tiles.

It remains to be seen with the imminent update to 9.0, if Manifold.net are going to support OSM XML as a Import/Export format. Altough there are existing scripts to enable the import of OSM XML data, these scripts have issues and don’t scale efficiently to bulk downloads. A native solution hopefully would enable bulk imports and the ability to save (or even upload directly to OSM) to OSM XML for update of OSM.

PS: AFAIK planet.osm, representing a database dump in XML form of the whole OSM dataset, is one of the largest publicily available vector datasets out there (over 364 million elements). Import and display of such a huge dataset could be a great benchmark test for upcoming versions of Manifold!