Claus Samuelsen said:

That's not what she said last night!

Sigh.

Remember I said this: "

"
Flight plans, and navigation are a bit different and are not what is
considered part of the "bulk" of the LBS market.

Without getting in to a lot of detail there are only a couple of areas
where having tight positioning accuracy is required.
(Agricutlure, Civil engineering, Large Scale Construction, potential
navigation (flight/shipping) )

But even there, the GPS isn't really geodedic, with the exception of
Large Scale construction.
(In shipping, if I know my position is X, and I know the harbor is
position Y, I don't care if my position is off by 100 meters. Heck the
nominal position Y of the harbor could be off by as much as 1/2 a
click (km) due to where they position it in the harbor.)

In large scale construction, you *do* need to know your position, and
track your position along a geodetic course, (including z), so you can
better estimate you cost of materials.

I'll use Agriculture as an example.
You want to use GPS to help you when you spray your fields. So you set
up a Trimble base station, let it sit for a minimum of 48-72 hours so
that it can get a good fix on its position. You then have a GPS system
that ties in with the satellites and the local base station.  This
will give you your position within 3 cm. This is accurate enough to
allow large farm machinery to not do too much overlap/underlap.  Here
your guidance accuracy is due to your base station. (Do we need to
talk about solar radiation?)

In the next generation aircraft positioning systems, one of the
designs is to have the aircrafts broadcast their own position. Now if
you think about it, the aircraft is large, moving fast, so that it
will not matter if your current position is off by a couple of meters.
The flight computers have already been doing geodedic calculations, so
your flight tracking system doesn't have to be that accurate since all
it is doing is tracking the broadcast position from the plane. Your
airports may provide a "reference" point for planning the flight
information, but the airport itself is much larger than a "point".
(But now we're getting in to too much detail)

And there is one other issue. Your database could be just a geospatial
database with the application itself supporting the geodetic
calculations.
(Which goes back to my original question regarding IBM's positioning
statement of chasing geodetic over geospatial)

Sorry Claus, its not size but distance. And in the GPS world, the
smaller, and greater accuracy the better.

I mean if you can get an atomic clock the size of a playing deck of
cards (and the state of the art is much smaller than that.) You could
build yourself a very reliable and accurate base station. (Ok maybe
you wouldn't. But I think Marty Lurie ?sp? (Sorry Marty) would and if
I didn't have a wife who's spending me in to the poor house, I'd do
it.

But hey! What do I know? I don't wear a brass rat. ;-)

Later.

PS. For the record, I'd prefer geodetic because, well, I'm a nerd and
I want extreme accuracy in my positioning. As Moore's law continues,
you will see smaller and more accurate handhelds with lower costs in
the next 5-10 years if not sooner. Unfortunately your maps will only
be so accurate.