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The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

joemorrison.substack.com

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Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#41

Post by campchase »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #39
campchase wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind you saying this - I think my style is very off-putting to some. The same things that disenchant you about the style are what make others love it. I try to be entertaining and informative, rather than just informative, because that's what makes it enjoyable for me. But like all entertainment, it's stylized, so it will put some people off. Hopefully you found the content valuable, at least!

For me, its not so much the presence of animated gifs as much as I wanted to be able to scroll one off of the screen while I focused on the words. For me, the top 30% of the page had something moving no matter where I scrolled. I can appreciate style and levity but for me the busy screen was enough to drive me away. Looks my Reader mode would have blocked all of the images and should have just gone with that ;)

That's great feedback, I will avoid .gifs in my future blog posts. I can see how that would be distracting and an accessibility issue.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#42

Post by newbamboo »

campchase wrote: post #35
waynecochran wrote: post #30

I love this attitude: I am not rooting for people to fail. We’re building an industry together, not playing a zero-sum game Of course this is not the way many folks see industry competition. I think, for example, Intel, AMD, and nVidia can all "win." In fact, when one improves they can all move forward.

The satellite imagery industry is quite small in terms of the people who work in it. I love and respect the people who have built the same products that I am indirectly critiquing in this piece. This is a cool industry, because most of the effort is going toward things like monitoring the effects of climate change, or mapping natural disasters in real time to support crisis response, or illuminating human rights viol…

I predict this changing in 5 years or less, as demand increases and the profit potential attracts new money. Hope I’m wrong about that, because as you say there’s so much untapped potential value for a bunch of disparate, but critically important fields.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#43

Post by campchase »

campchase wrote: post #31
countvonbalzac wrote: post #23

I'm confused what the author is trying to argue? 1. People don't want satellite data they want their problem to be solved So a company like Planet shouldn't (just) get satellite data they should solve problems. 2. Companies can't do 2 things at once well So Planet actually has to choose between solving problems or just getting satellite data 3. Companies like Arturo have good focus and solve the problem of climate ri…

That is, indeed, exactly what I am arguing. Either: * Just sell data or; * Just sell applications powered by your proprietary source of data Do not: * Sell derived/refined data as a half-measure * Sell both applications and wholesale data at the same time If you feel like that doesn't make sense, you are not alone. Almost everyone in the industry disagrees with my views on this topic based on how they run their busin…

Also, full disclosure, I work for a satellite imagery provider (https://umbra.space/) where we're executing on the "just sell data" strategy, so I'm fully corrupted as far as seeing the Truth when my own ego and self interest is inextricably wrapped up in this debate.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#44

Post by bagels »

mikestew wrote: post #13
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #7

> Allow me to put it more succinctly: selling derived data as a subscription product does. not. work. I don’t care what it is. The juice is never worth the squeeze.¹ Count cars. Count airplanes. Count ships. Segment land cover. Track oil inventories. Estimate biofuels. Measure water levels. Etc. Etc. Etc. I see that he outlined a few exceptions at the footnote… I'll also add Plaid. I think this guy is making some hug…

Fed Ex (quite surprising) have decided that freely providing delivery dates to consumers is too value to leave to third parties... ...or to leave to the shipping endpoint customer, either. I can't tell you how many clicks it takes to determine when a particular shipment will arrive at my door. Off the top of my head: 0. Email from vendor: "your package has shipped!" 1. Log in to the Fedex account. 2. One would think…

Just Google search the tracking number. Google will link to the status.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#45

Post by annoyingnoob »

campchase wrote: post #41
annoyingnoob wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, its not so much the presence of animated gifs as much as I wanted to be able to scroll one off of the screen while I focused on the words. For me, the top 30% of the page had something moving no matter where I scrolled. I can appreciate style and levity but for me the busy screen was enough to drive me away. Looks my Reader mode would have blocked all of the images and should have just gone with that ;)

That's great feedback, I will avoid .gifs in my future blog posts. I can see how that would be distracting and an accessibility issue.

Maybe just space them out more.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#46

Post by GlenTheMachine »

Me: 20 years in the defense space business. Stating my own opinion.

This is basically right. The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case, and those few organizations without a niche use case (the US Weather Service, various militaries, etc) generally want imagery that's so specialized to their own problem that they have to spec, buy, and operate their own orbital assets.

Take Ukraine as an example. Leaving aside the moral question of whether a satellite imagery company should be profiting off the Ukrainian war, Ukraine appears to be using commercial orbital imagery providers to figure out Russian troop movements. That use case is not one any commercial provider anywhere is going to build an ML model for. But analysts working on behalf of Ukraine can absolutely either use raw pixels or develop their own ML algorithms that run on top of the raw pixels to find Russian tanks.

And almost every other potential user is similar. They're all looking for something different. Oil companies want to pre-screen drilling locations. NGOs want to look at deforestation in Brazil or methane leaks in Saudi Arabia. You could even go all the way down to individuals -- at the right price, individual farms might want to look at relative growth rates of corn in their fields, or soil moisture levels, etc. Or they might want to count heads of cattle or sheep, or... or... or.

The point being, outside of weather, which we already know how to get to end users without having them subscribe to an orbital imagery provider service, every customer is different, and what they want from the pixels is different. It's basically the long-tail problem. In order to be profitable you have to fill an enormous number of niche use cases.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#47

Post by dylan604 »

mikestew wrote: post #13
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #7

> Allow me to put it more succinctly: selling derived data as a subscription product does. not. work. I don’t care what it is. The juice is never worth the squeeze.¹ Count cars. Count airplanes. Count ships. Segment land cover. Track oil inventories. Estimate biofuels. Measure water levels. Etc. Etc. Etc. I see that he outlined a few exceptions at the footnote… I'll also add Plaid. I think this guy is making some hug…

Fed Ex (quite surprising) have decided that freely providing delivery dates to consumers is too value to leave to third parties... ...or to leave to the shipping endpoint customer, either. I can't tell you how many clicks it takes to determine when a particular shipment will arrive at my door. Off the top of my head: 0. Email from vendor: "your package has shipped!" 1. Log in to the Fedex account. 2. One would think…

How many people receiving FedEx packages from online purchases actually have an account with FedEx to log into? In the words of Steve Jobs, "You're holding it wrong".

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#48

Post by frakkingcylons »

campchase wrote: post #31
countvonbalzac wrote: post #23

I'm confused what the author is trying to argue? 1. People don't want satellite data they want their problem to be solved So a company like Planet shouldn't (just) get satellite data they should solve problems. 2. Companies can't do 2 things at once well So Planet actually has to choose between solving problems or just getting satellite data 3. Companies like Arturo have good focus and solve the problem of climate ri…

That is, indeed, exactly what I am arguing. Either: * Just sell data or; * Just sell applications powered by your proprietary source of data Do not: * Sell derived/refined data as a half-measure * Sell both applications and wholesale data at the same time If you feel like that doesn't make sense, you are not alone. Almost everyone in the industry disagrees with my views on this topic based on how they run their busin…

> Sell both applications and wholesale data at the same time

Bloomberg comes to mind since they offer wholesale access to data in addition to all the terminal functions.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#49

Post by dylan604 »

campchase wrote: post #31
countvonbalzac wrote: post #23

I'm confused what the author is trying to argue? 1. People don't want satellite data they want their problem to be solved So a company like Planet shouldn't (just) get satellite data they should solve problems. 2. Companies can't do 2 things at once well So Planet actually has to choose between solving problems or just getting satellite data 3. Companies like Arturo have good focus and solve the problem of climate ri…

That is, indeed, exactly what I am arguing. Either: * Just sell data or; * Just sell applications powered by your proprietary source of data Do not: * Sell derived/refined data as a half-measure * Sell both applications and wholesale data at the same time If you feel like that doesn't make sense, you are not alone. Almost everyone in the industry disagrees with my views on this topic based on how they run their busin…

Who are you to tell a company what they can sell. If they want to sell the raw data so people can do whatever they want with it, then sound reasonable. If they also want to sell data with some analysis already applied so that other people can buy that data because they don't have in-house for it and just want pretty pictures to put in the deck, then why not sell that too?

You don't always have to order the biggie fries and drink, you can just order the standard meal.

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