All language subtitles for 05_jack-dangermond.en

From time to time, I like to mention some of the pioneers or key players,

key figures that have shaped the evolution of GIS over time;

and one of those key figures is Jack Dangermond,

the founder, with his wife Laura of ESRI,

one of the biggest most dominant players in GIS software in the world.

So, around the same time that Roger Tomlinson was

developing the Canadian Geographic Information System,

there was a lot of activity at Harvard in

the new Harvard laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis.

It included a lot of geographers and landscape architects,

and much of the early Jaya software development started there.

One grad student that worked there,

was studying there, was named Jack Dangermond.

He'd been studying urban planning and landscape architecture,

and when he graduated,

he moved back to his hometown of Redlands,

California and started his own company called

Environmental Systems Research Institute in 1969.

From the ESRI website,

"Jack and Laura Dangermond founded ESRI in

1969 as a small research group focused on land use planning.

The company's early mission was to organize and analyze geographic information to help

land planners and land resource managers make well-informed environmental decisions."

In spite of the academic sounding name and early intentions,

it evolved into a software company and he

hired some of the people that he knew from Harvard and they created this first product,

what was originally called ArcInfo.

So, Jack Dangermond and ESRI were instrumental in commercializing GIS.

The importance of this was that it took GIS out of university labs and

government agencies and made it accessible

to anyone to use: governments, businesses, individuals.

So, in other words, you could now buy software instead of having to create it yourself.

ESRI has the largest GIS market share in the world,

and from the Forbes website,

there's some quotes from there, it says,

"Jack Dangermond is the unrivaled king of GIS technology,

the specialized software used for creating digital maps.

He founded this company, ESRI,

in 1969 with $1,100 in personal savings.

Today, ESRI dominates the industry with over 40% of

GIS market share and more than $1 billion in annual revenue.

His 350,000 customers use ESRI products to make 150 million new maps each day.

Dangermond started the company with his wife Laura after

studying landscape architecture at Harvard,

and has since become known as a prolific philanthropist.

He has gifted up to $1 billion of free GIS software to all American K-12 schools,

and was honored as the United Nations champion of the Earth in 2013.

The son of the maiden gardener,

Dangermond continues to attend work alongside his wife every morning."

That's the bit of information from the Forbes website.

So, I think you get the idea is that,

I think he's somebody that's useful to know who he is.

If you're new to GIS and new to the industry

is that he's someone you'll probably hear about.

I think he's somebody that,

I always think of him as the Bill Gates of GIS perhaps,

and I think anytime there's a major player,

a dominant player in industries such as GIS and with ESRI,

there's some people who want to take shots at them and say,

they roll their eyes at them or whatever.

But I have to say that they're a very good company.

Jack Dangermond, I've never met him but I've seen him speak at conferences

and he's an incredibly genuine sincere person who really wants to help

people learn how to better understand the world

and contribute to a better environment

and better understanding of everything that's going on.

So, he's definitely somebody that I think has had a huge impact on GIS as an industry,

but also just in terms of the way people think

about GIS and the way that people work with it.