A Recent Newsgroup Thread about Manifold System

These postings about Manifold System Release 4.50 GIS occurred in comp.infosystems.gis, kicked off by a user who liked Manifold but wondered what he was missing that explained the low price. Alternate colors are different postings in the thread....

I needed a GIS but couldn't afford any of the standard products. I finally reluctantly decided to get Manifold 4.5, not expecting much at a tenth the price of the standard systems, but hoping I could make it serve my needs. What I found was a program about as stable as any large Windows application, with a clear, Windows-friendly interface and an enormous but well organized and well explained set of functions. It reads almost all of the data I have in native formats, and outputs in forms I can readily use. While it won't do absolutely everything I might desire, it seems at least as powerful (in all the respects that matter to me, at least) as the GISs that cost ten or more times as much.

What's missing from this picture? I have never seen a case where there was anything like this great a disparity in price between the big-sellers in a software market and a product which seems not only functionally competitive but also well packaged. Can anybody offer an explanation?

As far as I can tell Manifold doesn't spend a bunch of money on glitzy
advertising and other commercial promotions. Its not meant to be anything real
fancy but it does the task at hand very well. I can't really figure out myself
why there aren't thousands of others using this product, especially since it
costs less than $200 (I'm not sure of the exact price) and comes with lots of
data.

Maybe if they raised the price to $995 sales would increase!

Must be the price, people must think it is cheap. OK 995$ with a instant
rebate of 840$ ;-)

I think the word is spreading around about Manifold...

Patrick

p.s. I'm thinking about it. Not every user can afford ArcView or MapInfo.
Especially here in Canada, Data isn't free so we need to take that into
consideration for every project...

I think Manifolds are using new programming tools (VB) and built in Window
function (API) too built easy-to-use programs with a low overhead cost of
supporting many platforms. But also, they don't design 6000 functions that
people won’t use anyway. By using MDB file format, all standard SQL function
of Access can be built in Manifold. This should save programming time.

Also, if you look at version 5.0, something I heard people ask for, has
raster support. But the price is going up a bit. But still, the price is
right! Still buying version 4.5 and upgrading to version 5 is cheaper than
waiting for version 5!!!
The next step would be to have different plugin for more specialized needs
according to the demand.

ps: Did you buy the 3-D tool, if so, can it do more than Wiremesh! Something
like Vertical Mapper?

ps2: It would seem a Manifold are listening to their customer, just mention
what you would like it to do, they might do it for you / us ?

I bought manifold 4.5 and tried to load it with a big dataset (½ mio
polylines) with 20 fields. It looked to me like the program loaded all data
(both graphic and attributes) into memory (128 Mb RAM), which there weren't
enough room for. So the result was heavy swapping on the harddisk and lousy
performance.

So maybe the problem is working with real big datasets, where MapInfo and
ArcView normally doesn't have any problems.

Go Manifold Go. I wasn't aware that the price was so low. Reasons....does it
matter? It seems from your comments that Manifold is a good product for a
reasonable price. I have always found it difficult to understand why ArcView
and some of its add-on's were so expensive? Perhaps this will give ESRI
something to think about?

I appreciate the thoughtful inputs everyone has offered in response to
my question.

One writer referred me to a page on the Manifold Web site, but I'm not
sure what lesson I'm supposed to take from it. It's not an application
which is very relevant to my needs or experience and so I may not be
looking with a very discerning eye.

Another suggested that Manifold may have more difficulty with
especially large datasets than do MapInfo and ArcView. I haven't seen
problems in this, which may simply mean that I haven't had need for
datasets large enough to encounter it.

Yet another person, offline, pointed out to me that for someone whose
business is built around GIS, the fact that MapInfo and ArcView are
known quantities is important, and the price is not a major factor.

I feel more satisfied now that I'm not overlooking anything very
important to me. While I have some important needs for GIS, it's not
really the center of my business. Manifold seems to provide a lot --
much more than I had ever expected -- and if that ever turns out not be
enough to meet my needs, time enough then to look into more costly
products.

It seems to me that Manifold can only benefit GIS users everywhere. I
expect that its quality and aggressive pricing will stimulate other GIS
software producers to introduce lower-priced lines as well as working
to enhance the features of their top-line offerings. If my business did
revolve around GIS, I think I'd buy at least one copy of Manifold for
evaluation -- and make sure my regular supplier knew I was doing so.

I'm the product manager for Manifold, so I suppose I should comment.
The why and how of Manifold's pricing are pretty straightforward: it's
exactly the same strategy "Wintel" PC clones like Gateway and Dell
used to displace old-style minicomputers and pseudo-PC compatibles.

Look, it's obvious that a lot more people can buy GIS at under $200 a
seat than can afford several thousand dollars a seat. Some people say
GIS is a small, niche market. Well, if word processors cost the same
as ArcInfo or ArcView, I guarantee you that word processors also would
be considered a small, niche market as well.

The demand for GIS extends well beyond the existing elite GIS user
base. There's nothing more complex about GIS than "programming" an
Excel spread sheet or tinkering around with Access. In a world where
secretaries are expected to be able to write Word macros, there's no
reason why any ordinary Windows power user cannot use GIS to make
killer presentations, explore data and solve problems.

It's true that if your standard for ease of use is ArcInfo it's easy
to think that GIS is too difficult for ordinary mortals. However, no
modern GIS would use such a living fossil user interface. It would be
created, as was Manifold, using modern Windows interfaces. To use the
analogy to word processing once again, there's no way word processing
would have become a mass market application if everyone still had to
use troff/nroff. [For you younger folks, troff is an ancient UNIX
type setting application .... troff/nroff are to Microsoft Word as
ArcInfo is to Manifold.]

Consider the obvious: there are hundreds of millions of Windows users
in the world, including over 100 million users working at the "Office
2000 Premium" level who could use a cool GIS. Most of these won't use
all the features in their GIS, but then very few people use more than
about 10% of the features in Microsoft Word, either. By selling a
full-power, professional GIS for less than ten times the price of ESRI
or MapInfo, we end up selling many more than ten times the number of
units. 

Not only do we earn a bit more than we would selling high-priced GIS,
we get the benefit of a far larger user community that is by
definition very activist and highly concerned about modern features,
price/performance, ease of use and other critical factors. It's those
people who give us suggestions for new releases. In contrast, ESRI
benefits from the advice of people who are willing to buy the outdated
GIS equivalent of a $500 hammer or $2000 toilet seat. If you wanted
to rapidly evolve a modern GIS, whose advice would you rather have?

You can see this effect in ESRI's transition to ArcInfo 8... it's
taken them five years to do what in competitive Windows markets
vendors are pushed to do every year. Simply put, in a competitive
market it would be unthinkable (and impossible) for a vendor to be so
slow and so uncaring about modern progress to fail to offer a true
Windows application for over five years after the introduction of
Windows '95. 

I think everyone would agree that GIS is highly price-elastic at the
volume levels we are discussing. However, the low price / high volume
equation is not possible if one cannot produce the product at PC
desktop levels. Can one create a GIS for under $200? 

Sure! It's easy if you can use modern technology, avoid inefficient
marketing expenses and control costs. Rather than repeat the
formula here, let me cite our white paper on pricing that discusses
this issue in detail. It's at
http://www.manifold.net/home/price_talk.html ... this was the opening
manifesto written some 18 months ago when Manifold first came out as a
GIS. 

Manifold, by the way, has few limits on data size. We use the
Microsoft "Jet" database engine inside Manifold. Jet is great because
it assures instant compatibility with all things Microsoft. It's well
debugged and evolves under the stimulus of large Microsoft
investments. It does have a few limits which we feel are not
significant in the GIS market.

For example, Jet is limited to file sizes of about 2 GB and is
unsuited for databases much larger than about 500MB on PCs of average
performance. However, these are *huge* maps that are much larger than
those used by 98% of GIS users. When importing from other formats
(such as .dbf used in .shp files), Jet-based applications will use a
lot of temp space. This is in part caused by retaining the ability to
abandon edits, etc.

On memory: Manifold itself will simply use the memory available and
will page through the host Windows release in the normal Windows way
if RAM does not suffice. If there's trouble paging, this is likely a
Win95 or 98 phenomenon when loading large maps... these O/S releases
are not well suited for any "big" application due to the limits of
memory management they use. NT 4.0 or 2000 are better choices in such
cases. Manifold is *much* faster than, say, ArcView in such cases,
especially if projected maps are involved. My own personal view is
that PC memory is much, much cheaper than personnel time so it is
missing a big opportunity not to load up your desktop with lots of
cheap RAM. It's the single most important performance boost one can
do with any Windows application, even more important than increasing
processor clock speed.

Thanks for your positive comments about Manifold. If you like R 4.50,
you'll get a real kick out of R5 when we release it later this
quarter. R5 includes hundreds of wishlist items suggested by users.
We provide a special upgrade deal ($50) to all existing customers to
thank our users for their roles in helping create the next release,
both by way of financing it as well as through suggestions for
improvements. 

(This posting contributed by a manifold.net product manager)

There's no question that Manifold is software for grownups, with great
potential uses that I'm only beginning to explore. I look forward to
R5, and will certainly be glad to pay my $50.

[End Thread]

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