I swear if I see one more goddamn "points on a map" chart I'll lose my mind.  What if my data doesn't map to a single point?  What if I need to know how many points are in this particular rhombus?  Or you know, just a rectangle.

I mean, I get it - mixing and matching multiple geometry types on a projected map is difficult.  It requires some custom code that you're probably not going to re-use anywhere else.  But holy shit, can at least someone make an effort?  Well, someone other than this guy - he's doing a great job.  But other than him, all we have to display complex or overlapping geospatial geometry on a visualization is Leaflet- which is great, when…I want to custom code an entire web app just to show a map.  But then, maps in of themselves aren't super useful in an "Analytics" space if you can't filter or modify the data associated to the spatial locations.

See, this problem is kind of unique to industry and government.  In the retail world there really aren't shapes that impact data outside of municipal boundaries; so one dot per boundary condition is usually sufficient (or color the shape).  In industry however, there are individual land parcel ownerships, rights of way, buried utility lines, overhead utility lines, pipelines, water and watershed drainage areas, manufacturing facilities, individual floors of manufacturing facilities (oh shit the Z axis), individual machines on lines on individual floors of manufacturing facilities, weather maps (radar and also precipitation aggregates per season), flood plains, air space restrictions, cellular coverage (actual coverage, not those propaganda maps the providers show in commercials), roads, bonded roads (boy that's a fun one), railways…the list goes on.  Couple the need to connect all those varying shapes to data from multiple different sources and 'slice' that data geospatially, and now we have quite a challenge.

Microsoft and AWS have ignored this challenge, taking a Pontius Pilate approach by saying "well we partner with ESRI".

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Right.

Have you used an ESRI product in the last 20 years?

If you haven't, well you're not missing anything- they look and function exactly like they did before that.  And even if they didn't, the problem persists in that ESRI doesn't really understand the need to do geospatial processing in an automated fashion.  There are ways to do it, if you manage to have a whole bunch of GIS savvy employees who also happen to be Python nerds.  Uh…good luck getting that particular G&A venn diagram to occur.

There are other solutions as well, but they also suck.  Spotfire from TIBCO has long had geospatial processing baked into it, if you can survive the mental damage that the UX inflicts upon your senses.  Alteryx has some as well, if you want to offer preferred notes just to be able to afford the licensing and then it's still a shit implementation server-side.