Pointy Hair, Without the Boss?

It burns!

Pointy… hair… popping… out… scalp…

I've abandoned my development role (more or less) and am now in marketing. More specifically, I'm in product management.

Yes, I still use emacs every day (and right now (New look and feel to the emacs homepage, btw)).

Yes, I still use lisp to recurse to this or that solution to this or that problem that's plaguing me.

That said, my new job is map problems to requirements -- not to write code.

What might make the move seem all the more mysterious (and perhaps questionable to some) is that the development team is improving by leaps and bounds all the time. I had a great boss (*great* boss) in Wade Hundley (you Leica folks know of what I speak) and we've been adding new folks to the team as we find them

So, why leave (professional) hacking?

The glib answer is: to engage the market.

There will come a day when can be told the "GeoPDF story" -- and trust me -- I'm chomping at the bit to write (and illustrate!) that story. Until then, however, I've got to speak in meta-stories. My part in crafting the foundation of the bridge spanning Adobe's PDF platform (and it's billions of eyes!) and the even larger geospatial world was finished years ago. If I say so myself, GeoPDF is cool.

However, cool is insufficient.

Just because GeoPDF *can* solve your problems doesn't mean it's worth the square micrometer holding the bytes encoding the words you're reading on the commodity hard drive on a blogger server, somewhere, out there, wherever.

If GeoPDF is not validated in the marketplace -- if it doesn't deliver value to you -- all of that stitching will have been for naught.

So: What's the problem? How do I solve it? Does GeoPDF fit in?

I loathe (metaphorical) shoehorns. If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it, don't own it. Give it to your dog to chew with impunity and gusto.

We can rebuild Steve Austin -- we have the technology. The question is, should we? Can GeoPDF be your bionic man?

I want to know.