lost opportunities

I know what you say when an idea is so obvious that you’re stunned that you didn’t implement it.

“Why didn’t I think of that?”.  

But what do you say when you did have that idea and had to watch it take off without you due to other people’s short-sighted vision?

Let’s go back to the mid to late 90s.  I’m working at a small consultancy that mainly did support work for the big oil companies.  We used satellite images to create geological maps for exploration projects overseas.  But satellite maps have various other applications such as agriculture, forestry, and city planning.  My supervisor was interested in the last.  He had contacts up in the city planning department and he had an idea.

We could use satellite images and the power of GIS (geographic information systems) to create online maps that would be used to catalog every feature on every property that the city owned and be able to serve it up over the web.  We decided on a small park just south of downtown as our pilot project.

Emancipation park is a large pretty park with baseball fields, a pool, and plenty of green space.  My supervisor and I spent an entire day with GPS units, a primitive digital camera, and lots of notepads to take measurements and record everything about the park.

Back at the office we took a satellite image and put it into the GIS and laboriously outlined the baseball fields, the pool, the playground, the sidewalks, the buildings, in short everything about the park.  Next we coded every feature we could think of and made large cross referenced databases.

Now came the bit that was exclusively my own.  I was no web designer or guru but I was a good second rater and had hand coded and designed the company website.  I added the satellite image of the map and coded regions inside the image to correspond to various web pages that would display information about various features in the park.  Everything from land use statistics to pictures to contact numbers.  Theoretically, a park superintendent could call up every piece of information he needed online.  My supervisor and I played with the website for hours, trying every feature and adding improvements here and there.  We amazed ourselves at how well it worked.

We loaded it onto a laptop and took it to a meeting with the Houston parks official my supervisor knew.  We explained the idea thoroughly and let him play with the website on the laptop.  He kept on going back to the statistics page and exclaimed “this is exactly what I need”

We thought we had him sold.  But as it turned out he was referring to the statistics.  He said that they were always looking for statistics to turn over to city council.  What he wanted was a nice thick binder of data to present to the council for budget time.  As for the website?  No thanks.  Too fancy and complicated for him.  It would never catch on he said.

So we had a very long and quiet drive back to the office.  The company owner said it had been a waste of time to try this project and we shelved it and went back to serving only oil customers.

But I kept at it.  I would tweak and poke at it in my spare time as best as I could without any formal coding education and without the benefit of the expensive GIS programs.

2002.  The company had folded and I was out on my own, trying to scare up consultancy work here and there.  I had secured a copy of the website we had made and got permission to use it as my own.  I pleaded and begged and got another appointment at the planning department and presented the website.  Again it fell flat.  But for different reasons this time.  The official I met typed in his own website and brought up the planning department’s new internal web-based site.

Time had not only caught up but passed me by.  It was all that we had made and more.

Today you can pull out any smartphone or tablet and bring up detailed maps that will find pizza places near you, calculate routes to get where you need to go, and even call ahead to make reservations.

I don’t claim to be the originator of any of these.  Many companies and individuals were working along parallel lines back in the 90’s.  But I do have to wonder what we could have accomplished if we had persisted a little longer or if we could have made that first sale.

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