After a phone discussion yesterday with a fellow GIS contractor and MapInfo specialist about MapInfo charging ludicrous amounts for SpatialWare, it was funny to come across this article:
http://www.directionsmag.com/press.releases/?duty=Show&id=19586&trv=1
The main topic is about some partnership between Microsoft and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The interesting part for me was halfway down where is says “Microsoft will submit the SQL Server 2008 geometry datatype for compliance to the Open GIS® Simple Features for SQL standard.”
I may be wrong, but to me that sounds like any OGC compliant application should be able to read and write map objects within SQL Server 2008.
At the least, this is the end of the road for SpatialWare. And at the extreme, it’s the end of TAB files, and of MapInfo’s position in the marketplace as the company that had the only set of tools for viewing and manipulating the majority of my clients’ geographic data.
