Hello Gary,

> 
> I'm not sure what the significance of these figures is, if there is any.  Certainly, it's an unscientific survey.  Does the response reflect a bias towards those who are really active in GIS, or towards those with easy access to the Internet?  Are the two>  closely related?  My gut feeling is that there are a lot of 
> private firms, consultants, that use GIS, but on a small, rather superficial 
> scale, i.e. mostly for producing nice maps.  These firms are most likely to have
> PC applications, and are far less likely to be on-line.  
> 


There are several reasons why you have so few responses. You are may be
right but I also think that
the most people are overloaded by lots of work (and mails) and they do not have
enough time to respond your questionaire. 
Your survey reflects that the most of people on the list
are from these institutions or people from govermental and educational
institutions have more time than those in private firms. (?)

> So in the end, these findings reinforce my own prejudice, that big GIS is 
> something that happens mostly in universities and goverment agencies.  Kind of
> makes sense, given that that is where long range planning tends to go on.

Well, here I am not sure about your conclusions. Do you think
that the trend is towards a big GIS? I hope not because the trend
is clearly towards modular desktop GIS'. We must take into account
all segments of the GIS market (users) not only academic or govermental
part.

> and I did not want to be an academic.  My search of the private sector found
> relatively few firms that do GIS in a big way.  
> ... 
> Very different from project oriented research, or specialized database building.I'm an engineer, so I could have gone to work for a firm that does municipal 
> infrastructure GIS, but it didn't appeal to me. Obviously not to most of the 
> respondents to this survey either.
> 

The only problem is
that those small private firms do not do a lot of sophisticated jobs but
rather something simple. My opinion is that they
need more sophisticated GIS modules (in fairly prices) and 
knowledge to do a project oriented research (i.e. hire clever people).
Here in Slovakia many clever people left govermental or educational
institutions and went to a private sector (often as owners).
Currently they do many projects for these institutions (which
often are not able to do that).

Regards,

Jaro

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Jaro Hofierka
Dept. of Cartography, Geoinformatics & Rem. Sensing
Comenius University
842 15 Bratislava
Slovakia			E-mail: hofierka@devin.fns.uniba.sk
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