Enshittification: Warning Signs for the GIS and Geospatial Industry
Part Two: A deeper dive into Enshittification
Have you ever noticed your favorite app or software becoming less useful over time? It starts with small annoyances—more ads, features moving behind a paywall, or a clunky interface that never seems to get fixed. This slow decay isn’t a coincidence. It’s a process known as “enshittification,” and it’s affecting industries everywhere, including Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
The term, coined by writer Cory Doctorow, describes a three-stage cycle where platforms gradually decline in quality as they shift focus from serving users to maximizing profits. Understanding this pattern is crucial for GIS users, business partners, and anyone who relies on these powerful mapping and analysis tools.
This is a deeper dive into Enshittification and GIS that complements a recent Geospatial Innovations Live Linked Event where Tim Nolans and I discuss this critical topic.
What is Enshittification? A Three-Stage Cycle
Doctorow outlines a predictable pattern for how platforms die. It begins with a great user experience but ends with a system that benefits only the platform owners.
Phase 1: Attract Users
In the beginning, a platform is good to its users. It offers a high-quality product, often at a low or free price point, to attract a large and loyal user base. The company focuses on building a strong community, celebrating its users, and delivering exceptional value. This is the honeymoon phase, where the platform feels like a game-changer.
Phase 2: Serve Business Customers
Once a critical mass of users is locked in, the platform’s loyalty shifts. It begins to prioritize its business customers—advertisers, vendors, or developers who want access to the user base. Users might notice their experience start to degrade as the platform introduces changes that benefit business clients. In the GIS world, this could mean that bug fixes, performance improvements, and UI enhancements take a backseat to developing partner-friendly environments and tools for the very big users such as NGA and DOD.
Phase 3: Extract Value for the Platform
In the final stage, the platform turns on its business customers to extract all remaining value for itself and its shareholders. Both users and business partners are now trapped in a system that is actively working against them. The platform has achieved a “two-sided market” where it controls both the buyers and the sellers, leaving little room for anyone else to benefit. Prices soar, partner fees increase, quality plummets, and contracts become more restrictive, making it difficult for anyone to leave. Eventually, the platform becomes a frustrating, low-value shell of its former self (except for those that can pay), and people start to abandon it.
Enshittification in Action: Examples from Other Industries
This cycle isn’t unique to GIS. We have seen it play out across many well-known platforms.
Amazon: Once the go-to for low prices and fast shipping, its search results are now increasingly dominated by sponsored products and lower-quality knockoffs.
Airbnb: What started as a cheap, authentic alternative to hotels is now often burdened with high service fees, cleaning costs, and unpredictable quality.
Uber: Initially, it won over riders with subsidized fares and drivers with good pay. Now, prices have increased for riders while driver compensation has been reduced. Example: Uber charges you more if it detects your battery is low, assuming that you are desperate to get a ride before you phone goes dead.
SaaS: Many software tools have shifted from a one-time purchase model to expensive, recurring subscriptions, locking users into a cycle of perpetual payments for a product that may not be improving.
How Enshittification Manifests in GIS
In the GIS industry, enshittification can be subtle but has a significant impact. The shift from desktop software to cloud-based “platforms” makes it easier for companies to implement these changes. GIS, with its specialized user base and high switching costs, is particularly vulnerable.
For users, this can look like steep price increases for licenses, increasingly complex user types, a reduction in quality customer support, or new fees for features that were once included. Platform companies may start to favor large government and corporate clients over individual users, small businesses, small cities/towns, or non-profits, leaving their original user base behind.
For business partners, the squeeze is just as real. A platform company might control lead sharing, limit access to its customers, or fail to share critical information about upcoming software changes. This creates an environment where partners are completely dependent on the platform owner, with little power to negotiate fair terms.
Warning Signs to Watch For
How can you tell if your GIS platform is heading down this path? Look for these red flags:
Regular Price Hikes: Frequent and significant increases in subscription or licensing costs without a corresponding improvement in product quality.
New Mandatory Fees: Unexpected charges for support, partner programs, or essential features.
Erosion of Product Quality: Key features become buggy or are removed, while customer support becomes less responsive.
Vendor Lock-In: The platform makes it difficult or expensive to migrate your data to another system, reducing your ability to choose a different provider.
Constant Upselling: The product is increasingly filled with ads or promotions trying to sell you more services.
The “Platform” Label: When a product is marketed heavily as a “platform,” it can signal an intent to create a closed ecosystem where the owner controls all interactions.
What Can You Do About It?
While enshittification can feel inevitable, users and business partners have more power than they think. Advocacy and informed decision-making can push back against platform decay.
Actions for GIS Users
Advocate for Transparency: Demand clear communication about pricing changes, product roadmaps, and data ownership.
Organize Feedback: Don’t just complain individually. Organize with other users in forums and professional groups to provide collective feedback and demand accountability.
Support Open Platforms: Whether you’re a user, developer, or business owner, consider adopting and supporting open-source GIS tools whenever possible. Doing so not only fosters healthy competition within the market but also gives you greater control over your tools and data.
Ensure Data Portability: Before committing to a platform, make sure your data is not locked into a proprietary format. You should always have a clear path to export and migrate your data.
Questions for Business Partners (and Users) to Ask Vendors
If you are a business partner, it’s essential to proactively question your GIS vendor to protect your interests.
Is product quality improving at the same rate as the price is increasing?
Are recent licensing changes designed to benefit me and my customers, or are they solely for maximizing the vendor’s profit?
What is the long-term roadmap for delivering value and improving the user experience for everyone, not just a select few?
Shaping a Fairer GIS Future
The evolution of GIS is not your fault, but being knowledgeable about new business models is your responsibility. As GIS technology continues to move toward the cloud, the temptation for platform owners to enshittify will only grow.
By recognizing the warning signs and taking proactive steps, the GIS community can collectively push for better industry standards. We can champion fairness, transparency, and true innovation, ensuring that the platforms we rely on continue to serve the users and partners who helped build them in the first place. The future of GIS depends on a healthy, competitive ecosystem, not a collection of decaying, closed-off platforms.
A copy of my slides are here.
As a GIS and geospatial market expert, I specialize in helping organizations design, market, and scale innovative spatiotemporal solutions to address complex challenges. Schedule a free consultation to discuss your particular needs.
I work in municipal government. We are deep into Esri, the unmentioned gorilla in the room. For the last 15 years or so our software costs have been consistently around $13,000. Their new licensing strategy will gradually ramp that up to over $32K in the next five years unless we drop some users. I make it a point not to store our data in their cloud or we'd be paying a lot more, with less data autonomy. Meantime while there are great things about ArcGIS Pro, basic functions such as geocoding and other tools run slower and with increasingly bad results. Also, the program is much more frequently losing connection to my network data, as if they're driving me to the cloud. I'm not accusing them of intentionally doing this but getting the basic functionality right is clearly not important to them.